One

I pontificate therefore I am.  Few things cheer me up like being on the radio or the TV, and the other day I was on something called Look North, a BBC TV show in the north of Watford region.  In Halifax, a developer is building an estate for child haters, in which no persons between the ages of four and eighteen may live.  Hows about that then??  Good, said I.  Not good, said Janet Something of the Association of Something-Or-Other.  More choice in the type of neighbourhood you can live in, said I.  Where will it end?, said she.  Other estates may soon be built with children particularly in mind, said I.  What is the world coming to?, said she.

It was an odd experience.  I was welcomed at Broadcasting House by a team of security guards who searched me for bombs, and one of them then conducted me to a self-operating studio and left me to it.  I did my performance and let myself out of the studio, at which point I apparently had the run of Broadcasting House.  I blundered into a brightly lit room full of food and food preparation objects, seeking guidance as to how to get out, but it contained no one, and in general, the building seemed very thin on actual people, aside from security guards.  I suppose they all now live out in the far west of our metropolis, poor things.

I like the BBC.  I know I'm not supposed to, what with it being a nationalised industry.  But I love the adversarial principle in its genetic coding - opinions may only be presented if argued about - because that lets in educatedly argumentative people like me.  Our Editor is such an energetic presence on the Internet that he IS the media, and he likes to sneer and rage at all the other media for being tools of tyranny, as they are of course.  Me, I am content to supply the (other) media with my opinions, politely.  For Our Editor, the world is ruled by institutions and customs.  Mere ideas don't count, except in the heads of idea freaks like me, until someone plants them as traditions and encodes them in ongoing institutions and practices.  For me, ideas are everything.  We're both right.  I infect the world with libertarianism.  He clobbers the world with it.  Good cop, bad cop. Whatever works.

Two

There is an exception to my rule about being polite on the radio and the TV. I try to be rude to politicians.  Not custard-pie-in-the-face rude, just not as respectful as they would like.  An essential part of achieving the triumph of the voluntary way of doing things over the compulsory (political) way of doing things is to knock the stuffing out of politicians, to treat them as superfluous blunderers whose only important impacts on civilisation are now negative.  A year or so ago I was on a BBC Scotland talk show hosted by Colin Bell.  Also present were Colin Ward, a noted leftish anarchist, and a Scottish liberal democrat politician.  We were discussing "community", what a fine thing that is, and how to get more of it.  The politician equated "community" with her and her friends getting bigger budgets to splash around.  The two Colins and I mobbed her, Colin W and me because we did, and Colin B because she kept failing to answer our objection to her, which the BBC doesn't like. So in effect it was three against one.  Colin W and I were saying that the way to make better communities is for people to go ahead and make them.  Madam Politics ignored our challenge not because she was frightened of it or angry about it, but because she literally did not understand it.  She did not get it.  To her making communities, niceness, and so forth, meant doing politics, and politics could only be done the way she and her mates did politics.  You want a nice community, you gather a bunch of politicians into a Nice Communities Committee and give them X hundred thousand quid.  Yet here were these two maniac anarchists trashing her mercilessly.  We did not now and never would want anything from her, or from her political friends, or from her political friends' political friends, and so felt no need to soften our contempt for her and for everything she stood for. And since this was the BBC we were rude without using rude words, which is often the rudest of all.

This kind of thing gets to you.  When you tell yourself that you're tremendously important but when others treat you gently but firmly as pond scum you lose your will to power.  This is what happened to the old Soviet élite.  People stopped fearing them and started to pity them. This is what we must do to our political élite.  If we denounce them as evil geniuses, we actually keep them in power, because we make them feel important.  If, on the other hand, we tell them to their faces that they are fools whose only importance is the scale of the confusion and the waste that they preside over, then we just might see them off.

A friend of mine organises dinners every few weeks, at which I and another libbo plus various media and New Labour types sit around trying to impress each other.  At the last one, the dominant theme emerged as the loss of enthusiasm not for any particular brand of politics, but for politics as such.  The brightest and the best are not doing it any more. Now that the shine is wearing off Blairism, even being a Blairite cabinet minister is revealing itself as deeply unglamorous drudgery. After all, not far beneath the surface of Blairite triumphalism and all-night political partying lies a deep disillusionment with what politics can actually achieve.  If you actually want something, say the New Labourites, go shopping.

Another symptom of the same process is the way that they're drafting comedians onto Question Time.  After all, if politics achieves nothing but foolishness, then the only point of Question Time is if it's fun, which it can't possibly be if the only people on it are politicians. Another symptom of this process is the way that the vox pop TV has dumped "issues" and instead switched to "my boyfriend's having a gay affair - my mother's a stripper" stuff.  The other night I channel hopped into a TV "debate" about the merit or lack of it of the new Star Wars movie.  A couple of years ago it would have been fox hunting or drug legalisation.  This suits me well, because I no longer get asked to be on vox pop TV shows about drug legalisation.  These shows were a huge waste of time.  They'd get you there hours in advance and give you nothing to do except get drunk, which is what they wanted because the real agenda of these shows became proving that people like me, who have opinions about issues, are idiots.

In the short run, we libertarians are probably suffering from this downgrading of politics.  As an Argentinian customs officer once said to a self-proclaimed anti-Communist friend of mine: "I don't care what kind of Communist you are!"  But if they consider all politicians to be idiots, then the public may eventually become bored with their present political indifference and switch instead to whichever ideology rationalises their anti-political prejudices, and go berserk.  In other words, they might become berserk libertarians.  The ideologically torpid 1950s were followed by the ideologically manic 1960s, so things like this can happen.  The best will be filled with passionate intensity and the worst will lack all conviction.

 Lovely.