Click Pics To Navigate
All original content (c)
Ben Cremeens
The Ayn Rand School For Tots: A Quick Review
It's been mentioned here and there, but I thought I'd archive for posterity's sake the Ayn Rand "cameo" in The Simpsons.
"A Streetcar Named Marge" is just an all-around great episode, where Marge joins community theatre in a butchery of Tennesee Williams. In need of daycare for Maggie, Marge enrolls her daughter in the "Ayn Rand School For Tots". The proprietor, who is not supposed to look like Rand so much as Jon Lovitz in a dress, does not tolerate the use of pacifiers, and laughs at the idea of using a bottle.
"Do you know what a baby is saying when she reaches for a bottle?"
"Ba-ba?"
"She's saying, 'I am a leech'! Our aim here is to develop the 'bottle within'."
There is a poster on the wall of Rand's favorite Aristotelian turn of phrase, as well as another poster that isn't quite as true to the source.I don't recall Rand writing diet books, either.
(As an aside, Rand wrote some fascinating things on such not-quite-philosophical subjects as Marilyn Monroe and the Apollo missions; it really is a shame we'll never get her take on the Atkins craze.)
Anyway, there it is. The representation of Objectivism is of-course skewed, and as gags go, it's really not as great as having Hitchcock walk by after Homer picks up Maggie from an eerily quiet daycare a la "The Birds". But at least someone who googles it might be able to find a screencap of Jon Lovitz in a dress now.
