If Ayn Rand Wrote the Left Behind Novels

In his synopsis and review of the new film Atlas Shrugged: Part II, Anthony Sacramone finds the key to understanding Ayn Rand’s creation:

As things go from bad to worse, people begin vanishing. Not just any people. The Elect. First there was the aforementioned Wyatt. Then a brilliant concert pianist. Then a partner of Rearden’s, Ken Dannager, a coal king. Then the charismatic copper-mine magnate Francisco D’Anconia (played with enormous zest by Esai Morales) but not before his mines are literally blown and rendered useless. Finally, a young scientist who has turned from the dark side, government work, to Dagny’s employ, Quentin Daniels (Dietrich Bader). His task was to see if he could do something with a buried treasure Dagny has unearthed: a gizmo that can theoretically produce limitless energy. Just as a breakthrough is imminent, Daniels, too, says goodbye, and disappears literally into the sky.

And then it dawned on me. This film. What it is. What the book is. It’s the libertarian Left Behind. Get this: select people are simply disappearing, into the ether, as it were. And the rest of the world is left staggering under the burden of their absence. All that they contributed, including their business concerns, vanish with them, deliberately destroyed.

“Who is John Galt?” is not a tired expression of helplessness or despair — it’s a prayer. And John Galt…is Jesus/God. With the sound of a trump, actually a crash, he emerges from the heavens and pulls a weary Dagny from the wreckage of her life—a wreckage that is the direct result of the Head of State, the Antichrist—and beckons her to a new earth.

“We won’t let the world disappear,” Rearden promises Dagny at one point. Of course not. There’s the thousand-year reign coming.