Yield not to Temptation
For yielding is Sin.
- Satan-combatting Christian hymn
I can resist everything, except temptation.
- Oscar Wilde
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Refined, cultured readers, do you find that in spite of being refined and cultured you are shamefully fascinated by the Brittany Higgins/Bruce Lehrmann imbroglios?
Are you, yielding to temptation, closely following (perhaps blushing at your appetite for the sordid) the media's feverish and detailed coverage of Lehrmann's defamation case against Network 10?
If you have whispered a self-disgusted "Yes" to those questions, rest assured that your dark secret is safe with me. I am similarly, shamefully, wallowing in the pornographic nastiness of it all.
I got a shocking glimpse of how debauched I've become when on Monday I forsook the performance of Elgar's Cello Concerto I was listening to on ABC Classic to turn to ABC Radio National's 1pm news. I did this (yielding to Satan's temptation) in the certain knowledge that there would be news of that morning's proceedings in the Lehrmann defamation case.
And sure enough there was, for news organisations everywhere are sharing and promoting the public's rapt fascination with the soap-operatic filth of it all.
So here was normally refined, cultured Ian seduced away from high, fine culture by the possibility of some more of the titillating nastiness with which the defamation court case has abounded.
On Tuesday, shuddering at myself, I forsook classical music yet again and, turning to radio news and current affairs was rewarded with discussion of a photograph of a real or imagined bruise on Ms Higgins' upper thigh.
The sickening vulgarity of the defamation case seems to have an irresistible evil appeal. Satan wants us to wallow in it. And so in all this we find our decent, cultured Dr Jekylls being barged aside by our filth-loving, gutter-dwelling Mr and Ms Hydes.
Examining my own shameful absorption in it all, the way it has made a debauchee of me, I sense that as well as all the usual reasons for being a poor, weak thing unable to resist temptation that this case is made especially irresistible by being a drama overwhelmingly acted by and illustrating the world of Liberals.
A socialist and humanist, I have always found the Liberals repulsive. And yet their very repulsiveness brings with it an almost sexy horror-movie allure. In the same way the worst villains of Shakespeare's plays exert a loathsome appeal and have a chilling charisma. One cannot tear oneself away from them.
And so if I compare the Liberals' awful Senator Michaelia Cash (she has come up in the defamation case's evidence, Ms Higgins accusing her of lying) with Shakespeare's vile Lady Macbeth, I am paying her, Senator Cash, a kind of grudging compliment.
Still on the Liberals (where is the exorcist to rid me of my obsession with these monsters?) I remind Canberra readers of the Canberra Liberals' promise to, if elected next October, give every Canberra suburb up to $2 million to spend on itself.
In an attempt to make Canberrans feel embittered enough to vote Liberal, the Canberra Liberals are insisting that our suburbs are "neglected".
In a recent never-to-be-forgotten column, I suggested that far from being neglected, this privileged First World city's suburbs are plush, immaculate, smoothly-paved, amenity-rich paradises where 99.9 per cent of the wretched of the earth would love to live. There is nothing suburban Canberrans really, desperately, essentially need.
But what happy inessentials, then, might a suburb spend its $2 million of Canberra Liberals lucre on?
READ MORE IAN WARDEN:
What if we addressed Canberra suburbia's sterile, uneventfulness and lack of human gaiety, its deathly silences?
In Canberra's suburbia one is always pinching oneself so that the pain of it reassures that, yes, one is still alive. The grave, when it comes, will seem quite raucous and festive to me after living so much of life in Canberra's suburbs where on an average day the loudest sounds one hears are the sighs (of ennui) of the despairing garden gnomes on barbarous bogan rockeries.
What if, instead of a suburb spending its Lee government money on infrastructural "upgrades" and "improvements" it doesn't need, it used those doubloons to equip a brass band of musical locals who can already play a bit?
The suburb's very own brass band could tour the suburb (perhaps on the back of a gaily decorated float truck) playing, in a brass band's inimitable oompah oompah ways, medleys of cheerful tunes, perhaps of the bounciest hits of greats like ABBA and Billy Joel and Carole King (but nothing, please, of The Seekers).
One of beauties of brass bands is that their sounds carry so well and actually become even more beguiling and evocative across distances so that a suburb's one brass band would impart delight across a great swathe of the suburb.
Similarly, the Lee government shekels could equip a suburb's very own band of Scottish bagpipers.
As well as its inimitable sounds, a pipe band is a wonderful spectacle. I see my suburb's pipe band striding, playing, through and along my suburb's deathly quiet suburban streets and glens, the pipers' sturdy calves twinkling below the hems of their gaily-coloured kilts, their instruments' blood-carbonating and pulse-quickening yodellings setting the suburb ringing.
I see the grateful people, their hitherto government-neglected hearts now filled with joy (for music works such magic) rejoicing "Thank you, Ms Elizabeth Lee!" and vowing to vote for the Canberra Liberals for ever and ever.
Ian Warden is a Canberra Times columnist
Ian Warden is a Canberra Times columnist
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