Boredom Rules!

Looks like Arnold Schwarzenegger doesn't wanna run for office, reportedly because among other things, he hates committee meetings and all that boring, put-me-to-sleep stuff -- the nuts and bolts of politics.

Arnie is right! I did that (attended committee meetings) and instead of making a political junkie out of me, it damned near turned me into a genuine junkie for life.

How can any reasonable person (or even an unreasonable person for that matter) sit though:

- Many hours of stultifying boredom, and tedious horror;
- endless, pretentious displays of loud egotistical pontificating;
- blatant appeals to the mob by people who know better, and;
- (worst of all) fiendish delight with bureaucratic details and endless discussion thereof;
- all for the purpose of a cheap thrill: that vaguely sexual pleasure of simultaneously gratifying the ego while exhausting the opposition to death.

More fun to be the Terminator than to sit in interminable committee meetings. And the libertarian-minded Terminators of altruistic control-freak bureaucratic bullshit find themselves in an odd position. Those who truly hate "liberal-versus-conservative" mainstream bullshit are naturally disinclined to engage in bullshit in order to defeat it. Thus, the people who love to run for office because they love to hear themselves pontificate at committee meetings are the ones who run and win! Their reward is precisely why they run: they get to sit through endless meetings, each side savoring his endless turn at the mike.

As would be expected of such personality types, they then pass monotonous, commie/fascist laws tyrannizing the rest of us and perpetuating an infinitely expanding bureaucracy. Ultimately, this reduces those paltry few who might want to do something about it to running for local Rent Control Boards with campaign slogans which can only be called acts of political self-emasculation:

"I WILL MAKE RENT CONTROL WORKABLE!"

Great deal, eh?

(Similarly, those principled few who might have opposed the metastasizing national cancer called the "Patriot Act" did not have or take the time to read it.)

However, once again bloggers give me cause for optimism. I have been reading through many blogs late at night, and I have found a good deal of highly articulate whining and kvetching by some excellent writers who nonetheless manage to help me get to sleep with their love of hair-splitting distinctions and ad hominem bitchiness. (I will not dare put a link here because I want them to love me -- and encouraging them to run for office is not an act of love!) They like to quote exalted libertarian authorities almost line and verse, and I suspect many of them like to hear themselves talk. They remind me of what I encountered before rejecting politics, with a key difference: in this case they are the good guys!

They might be perfectly suited to do something about the petty tyrants who want to ruin our lives.

After all, somebody has to do it.

History shows what happens if those who disdain the petty drudgery of politics defer to the (apparently) hard working plodders -- boring guys with names like Dzhugashvili. Guys like him made me nod out too. Better to just let them do what they want.

You can always complain later...

Of course, the ancients had this crazy notion that civic obligation was wholly separable from the concept of altruism -- something laughable by today's moralistic standards.