When Joneses get wet

It's hard being both wet and a contrarian. It's even harder juggling being a pillar of the establishment, a 'gadfly,' and a fiction writer who relies on vanity publishers for being published and his remaining friends and his agent's wife for endorsements.

Poor old Bob Jones -- poor in the sense of being a sad bar steward -- old in the sense of being irrelevant, senile and losing his hair -- sounds increasingly desperate these days when he tries to find things about which to be contrary. Fat girls in Albany and Social Creditors were two recent if irrelevant targets. The Auckland and Massey University Philosophy Departments were unlikely recent recipients of his largesse.

From time to time he's also taken a pop at local libertarians for being variously cheap, Jehovah's Witnesses and (poor dear) rude to him. He's always been unhappy that Libertarianz have 'pinched' his libertarianism, and now he's having a pop at the "scruffs" Libertarianz have fronting for us in our TV ad. I'll let Bob himself make his current case, ranting in the Herald about how he "watched in amazement, the one-hour free television time party broadcasts as the last 20 minutes were given over to the nutter parties, all allocated a minute each."

Next up, a couple of scruffs took turns chanting how they would wipe out the bureaucracy, taxes et al - these being the Libertarians. No lads, you won't do that, or indeed anything with your lives, unless you toss away your Ayn Rand bibles and get on with actually living.

Poor Bob. He's had a bee in his bonnet for years about liberty, Libertarianz, Ayn Rand and the The Free Radical -- he used to bitch for example and tell FreeRad editor Lindsay Perigo to "stop putting all that Ayn Rand stuff" at the front of each Free Radical -- and bitter because we Libz have taken the freedom part of the New Zealand Party's 'Freedom and Prosperity' line and run with it after he'd forgotten it himself. Not that he was ever over-excited about freedom himself, really.

Sir Robert, as this pillar of the establishment is called these days, was variously an enthusiast for Muldoon's inflationism, and for a State Art Bank to "encourage local painters, sculptors etc." Sir Robert was also of course one of the founding, if not the only, members of the New Zealand-Soviet Union Friendship Society, that bastion of freedom, rectitude, Ladas and good taste. No 'scruffs' allowed in there! Nor sane persons either.

It's a shame Bob's humour & fun desert him when he confronts principle, and that good sense deserts him when he confronts the blandishments of university philosophy departments; it's a shame too that he now gets so anal and conventional over something as wet as wearing a suit. It probably comes with age, irrelevance, and all that hair-dye he used to use when he still had something on which to use it.