The question was everywhere. Where is John Galt. Nowhere was the question asked more often than in the quietly, well appointed conference room of OE Bank & Trust.
The employees used to laugh that the name stood for Overly Engorged. Now, the running joke was that the initials stood for Over Extended. Few, outside the solemn sanctum of the executive suite knew that the founder, as an homage to his heroine, Ayn Rand christened the use of the initials to stand for Obscenely Erect. It was true that he could not make a woman's pulse quicken with his steely producer like gaze or his granite sculpted posture or even the towering pinnacle of his intellect. But it was such a wonderful image - a few producers - set free from the shackles of the clawing underbelly to stride with giant steps across the landscape and simply by devoting all life and energy to self-worship, self-indulgence, self-enshrinement they would make all the world hum and throb with beauty and success.
But today Orville Ensign could not make the question stop - Where was John Galt?
It was not just John Galt either. No, something had happened. The achievers had gone on strike. But they had done so with a dramatic gesture - one designed to let the rabble know how puny and pathetic was the huddling mass: they quit paying their mortgages.
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Orville looked wistfully at his balance sheet. He remembered fondly when they - a few of the glorious titans of achievement - had let him come to a gathering. Oh how the talk flowed of greatness and the magnficence of redundancy. Orville was always awed by the ability of such Olympians to say the same thing over and over and over - which is not to say repetitively, even bordering on a level of redundancy that made the ever lovely Daphne Haggard begin to look away. Normally one could detect a slight extra heaving of the chest, a quickening of the breath as she gazed at the tall, proud, ramrods of massive men. But goodness, could they repeat themselves. So OE Bank & Trust emptied its reserves and showered massive sums in cleverly designed mortgages.
Now, though, Orville wondered what they would say as he spent his days making applications for bail outs, emergency funding at the discount window, for special dispensation from his buddies at the Reserve. All because these great ones, these giants of individual responsibility had acted like those "po folk" at whom they all used to laugh. It made all of life so simple - blame everything on the sponges, the parasites and heap all praise on the achievers. For surely, in the wildest fantasies of those who escaped the paradise of the Soviet Union - the one with no lawyers, the place that a John Stoessel or Ann Beckerhead would cherish as the ultimate expression of perfect society, the achievers, in the pride they took in their erect and unflinching adherence to self - would never shirk, flaccidly limp away, shrivel at their responsibilities. Yet they had.
So it came to pass. Yet a strange thing was happening. The world did not miss them. It absorbed their abuse and began to move on. Orville began to slowly understand. That achievement is not measured by the size of one's devotion to self - but by understanding that we are all connected and that a creed - the one they called Republilcanism or Objectification - which extolled indolence, sloth, negligence and incompetence - could only sow the seeds of its own demise.