Stop whingeing and just enjoy yourself this New Year’s Eve

SNEERING at New Year’s Eve doesn’t make you cultured, any more than a Peter Fitzsimons book on your coffee table makes you a historian.

Tonight the globe’s odometer rolls over once more and for most of us this is a nice excuse for some frivolous fun and fireworks.

THERE are some questions which tend to not only divide people, but to define them as well: Carlton Draught or craft beer? Steakhouse or vegetarian Tibetan streetfood-themed pop-up? “Happy New Year!” or “What’s so happy about it?”

Tonight the globe’s odometer rolls over once more and for most of us this is a nice excuse for some frivolous fun and fireworks. For others it is an opportunity to indulge, as H.L. Mencken once put it, their haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy. Every year these puritans’ brief against New Year’s Eve grows longer: It just encourages people to get drunk. What’s worse, they get a public holiday off to recover. The fireworks are a waste of money and emit almost as much carbon as the Australian delegation’s flights to the Paris climate conference.

And the bogus pop-spirituality of whatever theme they’ve grafted on to the Bridge this year is sure to be about as meaningful as the prayer flags strewn across the balcony of a derelict Newtown sharehouse.

To be fair, maybe there is something to that last one. But here’s a memo for those who whinge about the holiday: Sneering at New Year’s Eve doesn’t make you cultured, any more than a Peter Fitzsimons book on your coffee table makes you an historian. Instead, it makes you a killjoy who’d probably have more fun being tucked up in bed by 9pm in Somalia, Tajikistan, or Banda Aceh, three jurisdictions which this year finally fulfilled the critics’ po-faced dreams of banning the celebrations once and for all.

I can say this honestly because I used to count myself in your number. You see, I come from a long line of New Year’s Eve sceptics. Sniffing “amateur hour” at the once-a-year screamers seemed, when I was a youth, to be the height of sophistication (though it also suggested, quite rightly, having no trouble with a good time the other 364 nights of the year). Of course, this was in New York City, where New Year’s Eve is truly an appalling affair. It involves among other things one million people crowding into Times Square and getting enough grog on board that they decide, yes, the prospect of seeing a metal ball sliding down a pole is indeed something worth staying up and getting hypothermia (and possibly vomited on) for.

But we’re in Sydney, people. Without sounding too chauvinistic about it, if ever there was a city purpose-built for New Year’s Eve, it would be ours. For one thing, our geography is perfect, as is our placement close to the International Date Line making Sydney — sorry, New Zealand, we love you, but you know it’s true — the first major city to kick off the new year. Likewise the Harbour, framed by the Bridge, would have to be one of the best fireworks venues on the planet, with scads of shoreline to party along and plenty of coves to tuck a boat in for the night. The balmy southern hemisphere summer means everyone goes home with fingers and toes intact, provided no one has an accident slicing a wedge of lime for the Corona.

There is also something to be said for the grand spectacle of a big night out that everyone can get in on, together. Without the occasional big public celebration, cities — no matter how naturally blessed by sun and beauty and landscape — become nothing more than joyless machines for living whose residents are nothing more than units of production and consumption. And even if they cause some friction around the margins, spectacles (drunks and boors being always with us), festivals and public parties help people get along together in the close quarters of an urban setting.

This is something people have known since at least Roman times. Cynics might say it is all “bread and circuses”, but imagine how dreary life would be without either? It is also telling how so often the same sorts who complain that we are a fractured, atomised society where nobody knows their neighbours and everyone does their own thing, proceed to get their knickers in a twist when the whole city comes together to go out on a spree.

Who knows? Perhaps mandatory six-week stints helping out at harvest time on government-owned sugar beet plantations is more the sort of collective community effort they have in mind.

But never mind. It’s all good. Whether you’re camping out in a foreshore park, going to a party at that one friend’s place who has the best view of the Bridge, or just watching the show on the sofa with someone special and a glass of something sparkling, let this craft-beer enjoying steakhouse aficionado be the first to wish you a Happy New Year and all the best for 2016. This even applies to good-time hating puritanical grumps.

If ever there was a city purpose-built for New Year’s Eve, it would be Sydney.

REPLICAS ARE NICE GESTURE BUT ELIMINATING ISIS IS THE REAL SOLUTION

AS if 2015 were not already enough of a low, dishonest year for civilisation, news comes this week that an outfit called the Institute for Digital Archaeology will be 3-D printing life-size replicas of a 2000-year-old arch from Palmyra, the ancient city that has been otherwise bulldozed and exploded by ISIS.

The replicas will be displayed in New York and London in April for an event called, without a hint of irony, World Heritage Week. Without being too hard on the people behind the project, these replicas should never have had to have been made in the first place. ISIS, or Daesh, or whatever name you care to give these year zero savages who are determined to blow up everything they can’t understand or sell on the black market to the highest bidder, should never have been allowed anywhere near Palmyra to begin with.

Remember, in 2014 Barack Obama called ISIS the “J.V. team” — an Americanism that basically translates to “a bunch of kids who aren’t that great but have a shelf of participation trophies”.

And yet despite the suggested ease with which they could be halted or contained the West, whose moral leadership is for the moment so out of gas that America is happy to run a few air strikes a day while letting Vladimir Putin of all people do the heavy lifting, let ISIS metastasise.

So here we are.

Yes, it is perhaps to the good that something — anything — can be ­restored out of the wreckage of the present debacle. But the danger is that these sorts of gestures will ­instead be mistaken as an effective replacement for action.

Roger Michel, executive director of the organisation behind the project, said of the effort that “we are saying … if you destroy something we can rebuild it again. The symbolic value of these sites is enormous, we are restoring dignity to people.”

But facsimiles aren’t the real thing any more than humanitarian ­gestures are a substitute for winning wars. And it goes without saying that the human lives ruined and destroyed by ISIS can never be rebuilt.

As lovely a gesture as this may seem, when it comes to solving the problem of ISIS, they may as well have just 3-D printed a giant hashtag instead.