Snob Watch

I should have posted this last Friday, before blogging off for the weekend: by popular acclaim (a whole 3 votes), Friday's Snob of the Week was Christopher Pearson. This involves a little injustice to Imre Saluzinski's piece in Wednesday's Oz which covered similar ground to Pearson's article of Saturday, with equal facility.

Hugh MacKay leads off this week's contenders with his patronising column in Saturday's Age. I notice that Gareth Parker got a laugh out of it. By the time I post this, the ground will probably have been worked over by others too, but there's a rich vein of material here, starting with Hugh's opening:

It's been quite a six months, hasn't it? We've had to get used to the idea of international terrorism on our doorstep (and, thanks to our participation in the invasion of Iraq, likely to cross our threshold sometime soon); we're emerging, we hope, from one of the worst droughts on record; bushfires have ravaged many parts of the country; the sharemarket, and therefore our superannuation, is wobbly; there's persistent talk of an economic downturn; we are officially (if illegally) at war. As if that were not enough, each planeload of passengers arriving from overseas now carries the threat of infection from the SARS virus.

and here's Uncle Hugh's solution to dealing with the worry that these threats inevitably causes:

But threats like terrorism and SARS are by their nature unpredictable and therefore literally beyond our control. The best strategy for coping with them is not to keep confronting them by constant worry; rather, having taken whatever steps the relevant public authorities recommend, we need to focus on those aspects of our lives we can control; to do things that bring comfort and a sense of purpose.

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