The Last Man in Europe

I cannot remember the name of the Italian Prime Minister - I know what he looks like - he had a hair transplant - I know quite a lot about the political issues in Italy to which he is party and I also know that the name will probably come to me before the end of this sentence - which indeed it has - his name is Sylvio Berlusconi. We were trying to work out which UK politician was the wife of the British Lawyer who was accused and found guilty of accepting a bribe from Berlusconi. Our trail of various people who were involved with this has been completed even if the exact details of the issues at stake have not been resolved. It was tessas Jowell if you are at all interested - not Harriet Harman at all.

Now I'm not sure what I wanted to talk about - forgetting the names of European Prime-Ministers or the whole sorry business of what David Mills seems to think of as perfectly acceptable behaviour? It all boils down to the idea from The Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy that those who want and get power are those absolutely not suited to having it. Almost any denouncement of one politician by another can be attacked as hypocritical because a slight amount of digging will find out something controversial about the denouncing party. We have the Fred Goodwin Pension debacle where the Minister involved had a pension of similar magnitude with the same company. We might look back to what could be considered the golden years of politics but I suspect that even the great figures of the past had just as many skeletons in just as many closets as today's bunch.

My personal opinion is that a lot of today's issues in public life are to do with unfinished business. So many high-ups have myriad roles in both public and private sector business with absolutely no chance of their ever being able to complete anything. They would probably argue that they simply make high-level decisions which take up small amounts of time. My counter would be that they cannot possibly have enough information to hand to be able to make those decisions effectively. The fact is that the blur of legislation and political horse-trading which makes up the sensory input of your average politician is not only a mystery to us mortals but very probably to politicians from Gordon downwards. I suppose that this all can be summed up as "emperor's new clothes" but we still sleepwalk into the state that this will ultimately lead to. Maybe my argument means that no one really wants nineteen-eighty-four to be reality; it's just going to happen because no one really understands that it is going to turn out as the result of various half-hearted, ill-considered and technologically-unsound initiatives that stream out of the empty minds of Westminster these days. And suddenly it will just get away from us and we'll all be watching each other and denouncing the misfits to whichever agency we think is fit.

Everything is reduced to that which gives the least offence. Failure is just being "differently successful". No one shouts at anyone any more and yet we have the impression that the state is trying to tell us more and more what to do and what to feel. Sometimes, people just fail at what they do but that is not acceptable to the state. Without failure there is nothing to measure success against and therefore no success at all. Apart from the occasional sporting success or major terrorist incident, the news falls into a fuzzy band of "isn't it all just crap", where we all fit the average and no one sticks their head above the line. Welcome to Airstrip One. We don't actually have a room 101 - rather than a split second of abject terror to force our will on you we have a lifetime of crapness to stop you from bothering about anything.

I was worrying that this blue period was just the result of some chemical imbalance but it seems to be more than just a local issue. There is a general miasma about - a resigned sigh - the sinking of tired limbs into the quicksand that is what makes up our existence in this state of paperwork and numbers, of knowing that your name, address and every number which defines you is deep on some hard-disk somewhere, ready to be ejected into the atmosphere for anyone to find and laugh at. The problem is now that this is for everyone to endure.

I didn't really envisage this post being like this and to be honest I do feel a lot better after having written it out. The whole thing is now on the cusp of catastrophe theory in that I may or may not post. Is the cat alive or dead?