Happy, fortunate, thrice-blessed females of Australia! At last you have a role model of what true Australian womanhood should be (ever decoratively pretty, ever-smiling and bubbly, serially-child-producing, dutifully husband propping-up, never expressing an opinion on anything) in Mary Donaldson, this week proclaimed Queen of Denmark.
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"She has carried herself in a way that I think brings enormous pride to all Australians" our prime minister has gushed this week, expressing the feelings of us all.
Well, almost all of us.
Closely following the intoxicated national mood, your sober columnist found himself wishing, wistfully, that feminism (its heyday from the 1960s to the early 1980s) was not dead after all and that there were still some strong feminists among us to offer an alternative view of these Danish-Australian things.
How they would have bristled, those fine women, perhaps with Germaine Greer their bristler-in-chief, at the very idea (voiced by a male prime minister) that a woman somehow has a duty to carry herself and that when she does this carrying responsibly well (the judges of how well she does it always men) it is a source of pride for a nation.
MORE WARDEN:
Oh dear. What ye olde, sexist balderdash this is! But now that feminism is dead (and how bland the national conversation has become without it) there are no strong, influential warrior-women to call out sexist balderdash when it manifests.
Monday's paper edition of The Canberra Times ran a large, disappointingly factual news-feature story on brimmingly-full-at-the moment Lake George.
One searched the piece in vain for any reference to the lake's folkloric mystique, to the mystical way in which it fills and empties, perhaps synchronistically linked to a filling and emptying lake somewhere else on Earth.
It is an occasional recent theme of this column that Canberra, the ACT and its region are desperately in need of an injection of folklore. It really is time to boost Lake George's mystique, and pieces like Monday's mystique-dispelling Canberra Times essay are unhelpful.
So, my fellow fabulists, what is to be done with Lake George?
What if we found Lake George a sister lake, a lake similarly strange and mysterious? And what if, never letting raw, unattractive truth get in the way of things, we always discussed its mysteries in the same breath in which we dwell on Lake George's eeriness?
But better still, adding the special mystique of outer space to the equation, Lake George's sister could be one of the lakes recently discovered on Saturn's moon Titan by NASA's Cassini probe. The BBC's Sky At Night magazine gasps that Cassini has "spotted" hundreds of lakes, "some of them exhibiting intricate shorelines ..."
Think of it! The moods and mysteries of our dear region's intricately-shorelined Lake George imaginatively linked (again, not allowing anything science-based to interfere) with a sister lake 1.2 billion km away on one of Saturn's 61 moons.
So who you gonna call? Mythmakers! Let's get to it, fabulists, mythifiers and yarn spinners of Canberra and our region. There is work to be done to release our city's tragically over-educated people from the shackles of their levelheadedness.
Last week's never-to-be forgotten column noticed how the real and imagined costs of Canberra's light rail extensions are becoming a kind of bogeyman-poltergeist-scapegoat always to be blamed for every failing and disappointment of Canberra life. The Canberra Liberals are depending on this colourful superstition to get themselves elected in October.
But if, like me, the projected costs of light rail do not in the slightest knot your knickers, why is it so? How is it that this fiscal poltergeist has no power to haunt us in the way it is leaving some other Canberrans haggard with angst?
It may be not only because we approve of light rail and know it can't come cheaply but also because those projected costs are too unimaginable for the average mind to imagine.
Just a few paragraphs ago, above, I cited Titan's 1.2 billion km distance from Earth. Who can comprehend such a distance?
My poor, struggling mind can, just, comprehend the figure of 47,990, the cost in dollars of an EV I dream of affording. It can, almost, grasp the sum of 217,060, the obscene dollar amount former prime minister Scott Morrison is being paid to be a smirking, do-nothing opposition backbencher.
But beyond that, a perfectly understandable human boggling sets in.
And so discussion of the costs of the delivery of light rail stage 2A City to Commonwealth Park (the ACT government says $577 million and the Canberra Liberals accuse it will be more than $800 million), of Alan Joyce's reported $21.4 million Qantas payout, of the $368 billion costs of our nuclear submarines program, of the dimensions of the known Universe, things like that, are all in the same realm of arithmetical amazement.
And so it comes to pass that the reported/argued costs of light rail have a bewildering, cosmological meaninglessness with no poltergeist-power to influence how one thinks and votes.
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