Wowserism wins with the annual bout of Cup pearl-clutching

Is it Melbourne Cup complaint season already? Fairfax’s Aubrey Perry, The Age, yesterday:

It’s clear why the Melbourne Cup is referred to as the race that stops a nation. Everyone is so hung over they can’t move. It’s the one week a year that formally celebrates the Australian pastime of binge drinking. As with most first times, reality didn’t meet expectations. I left the races disheartened by what I saw. A side of the Australian culture I wished I hadn’t: far too much drinking and normalised alcoholism and not enough integrity and self-respect.

Such fretting over the Cup is something of an Age perennial. Leonie Wood writing in The Age, November 5, 2005:

Drinking, especially excessive drinking, has become a feature of the racing gala, in which the party culture is all about indulgence and exceeding limits … Rob Moodie, chief executive of VicHealth and chairman of the Premier’s Drug Prevention Council, wants all government and sporting authorities, such as the Victoria Racing Club, to take a strong stance against excessive drinking and under-age drinking at the races.

Forget binge drinking, betting, or animal cruelty. The real problem with the Melbourne Cup is too much class. Brigid Delaney, The Guardian Australia, November 4, 2015:

The Melbourne Cup — it unites the nation, right? But out there at Flemington, you’ll find a class system as entrenched and as complicated as anything lifted from an Edith Wharton or Evelyn Waugh novel.

Or too little. Headline, Daily Mail (where else?) website, yesterday:

“When your dress splits up the back and it’s not even 10am!” Sunrise presenter Edwina Bartholemew flashes her Spanx as she suffers ANOTHER unfortunate wardrobe malfunction at Melbourne Cup after THAT “vagina” dress

Speaking of class … Australian writer Lisa Pryor thinks our cities need to be more social. Or is that soc­ialist? The New York Times, October 28:

In every direction the city centre is ringed by desirable neighbourhoods with exorbitant housing prices, where residents can dine, work and shop without ever travelling far from home … We need to let go of some of our resources; we need to learn to share. And if we are going to fight for our perfect little villages, the most honourable fight is the one to retain and expand public housing, to keep what little diversity we have left.

When will they ever learn? Melbourne’s Herald Sun, Tuesday:

The closure of the Hazelwood power station will send Victorians’ power bills soaring. The coal-fired power station, which produces up to 20 per cent of the state’s energy supply, is set to close in March next year with its foreign owners preparing to finalise the decision as early as this Thursday … Frontier Economics managing director Danny Price said he estimated Hazelwood’s closure would result in power prices increasing by between 3 per cent and 25 per cent in Victoria.

Spanish American philosopher George Santayana (1863-1952):

Fanaticism consists of redoubling your efforts when you have forgotten your aim.

In The Spectator Australia magazine’s Flat White blog, Alan RM Jones defends FBI director James Comey, yesterday:

The FBI’s duty to investigate is inarguable. Director Comey’s evident concern of a continuing duty to update his congressional testimony is not really his problem; self-evidently it is Hillary’s.