Bellevue Square is trying to evict FAO Schwarz. But the troubled toyseller isn’t backing down, and is making legal challenges.

It probably won’t end there. Where might it end?

I can see it now. The GI Joes and the Toy Story Bucket O’ Soldiers surround the store, vowing to repel any invasion. Some of the Cabbage Patch Kids start learning triage. Plamobil people start planting small explosives around the 14-foot bear sculpture, ready to turn it into an instant barricade. Some of the Barbies offer themselves as human shields in front of the soldiers. Other Barbies rebel against the whole scene, and go off into a prayer circle somewhere near the educational toys. Bert and Ernie are reprogramming the foot-powered giant keyboard into an early warning alarm. Pokémon villains Team Rocket are attaching incidiary devices to the radio-control model cars, ready to roll right up to the mall manager’s desk upon the receipt of the go-ahead signal (Tickle Me Elmo’s giggle). An expeditionary force of Sailor Moon dolls secretly maps out a counter-attack plan. They will lead a vanguard of Dragon Ball Z and Power Rangers characters in taking more mall territory. They will pelt the mall cops (and any stray shoppers) with Monopoly houses and Jelly Bellys, but only as a diversionary tactic. While mall management is looking the other way, Jay Jay the Jet Plane will fly off toward the Muzak control room, to deploy the toys’ ultimate weapon. The unbearable strains of the “Welcome to Our World of Toys” song will play continuously, at full blast, until an unconditional surrender is attained.

NEWS ITEM #2: Mainstream news media, both national and local, have suddenly discovered young anarchists, some 26 years after the first circle-A teens and three years after WTO. Whether the papers are trying to brand all antiwar protestors as extremists, or whether they really want to shed light on the philosophy of no-government, the issue’s a little more pertinent now than it was pre-George Dubious.

At the time of the WTO protests, many of us perceived a “withering away of the state” underway, giving way to effective rule by a stateless corporate elite. Some WTO opponents vocally wished for a resurgence of governmental paternalism, countering the often inhumane moves of Big Money.

But nowadays, governments and their bosses have reasserted their presence, in unkind ways. The White House occupant has embarked on a macro strategy of sleaze and graft, of taking from the poor and giving to the rich, of imposing or trying to impose a vast spectrum of police-state brutalities. I’m starting to wonder if, should the GOP goon squad win in 2004, whether there will even be a presidential election in 2008.

So: It’s again quite relevant to ask whether the type of megastate that can do this much harm on such a grand scale deserves to exist. The biggest argument in defense of Big Government these days might be that it’s the only thing that could stop terrorism and protect North American residents from hostilities by other governments.

Nine-eleven’s perpetrators were non-governmental but still quite authoritarian. They weren’t after “regime change” here, but did encourage hardline elements within the Muslim world to try and form harsh governments in their own homelands. Our government’s might has so far failed to catch or punish this non-governmental force, and is now instead being massively redeployed against another perceived enemy which had little or nothing to do with the 2001 terror attacks, but which, by being a government with real estate and a real army, is more convenient to deploy forces against.

Back home, the argument against big government could easily be made by invoking Iraq and North Korea as the horrific result of governmental leaders who’ve grasped the kind of extreme strong-arm power our own government now wishes to impose upon us. Even the right wing’s rugged-individualist factions (such as the black-helicopter conspiratists and the “Remember Waco” bunch) are starting to grumble at Bush’s creeping Big Brotherisms. And with most Democrats still shunning their party’s past insistence that governmental power can do good things for people, it’s easier than ever to imagine no (or at least a lot less) government as the only viable alternative to bad government.

But what would replace big government? Sci-fi author Neal Stephenson has fantasied about a future where business takes over everything government used to do, even the police and the roads. Modern anarchists themselves usually invoke collectivist neo-agrarian Utopias where everybody would (supposedly willingly) all be neopagan vegan bicyclists wearing all-hemp wardrobes (a prospect just as monoculturally scary as anything the Evangelicals can propose).

I, as longtime readers can surmise, have other wishes. I happen to like DVD players, rock bands, and cheese-flavored snacks, and want to preserve the technological infrastructure that makes them all possible. But less facetiously, I believe humanity’s too diverse and unpredictable for any preplanned Utopian scheme to ever work. We need a society that’s flexible enough and diffuse enough to allow countless ethnic/religious/gender/subcultural/etc. sub-nations to all pursue their own definitions of happiness. Government can help or hinder this, as can business.

I don’t have the answers, at least not yet. But I’m researching them, for a possible book-length essay/manifesto. Any suggestions on your part would be most welcome.