Marriage (albeit same sex marriage) and gambling (poker machines) have both been so newsworthy this week. All this has reminded me of an insight by feminist legend Gloria Steinem.
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Asked why women don't gamble as much as men do she said it was because "women's total instinct for gambling is satisfied by marriage [to men]".
Back to that lustrous pearl of wisdom in a moment. First I remind you that this week has seen news in The Canberra Times of a poll showing the ACT Labor and Liberal parties at odds with plain Canberrans on pokie matters. The politicians approve of pokies and will continue to allow the ravenous contraptions to be fed with the scarce and hard-earned $10 notes of the working classes. But up to 80 per cent of citizens want major gaming reforms. They (we, really) support mandatory pre-commitment and want there to be gentle $1 spins for poker machines.
Also this week, ABC News has reported how Victorian anti-gambling activists are seething against the increasing "misery" that supermarket giant Woolworths inflicts on low-income Victorians. Woolies has an aggressively expanding pokies empire.
Recently, for pokie homework, I dropped in on one of Canberra's pokie-festooned clubs.
The experience reminded me (thankfully gambling is not one of my miscellaneous vices) that poker machines seems more sinister than the chilling, ruthless Daleks of Dr Who. With the plain, straight-talking Daleks, what you see and hear is what you get. But poker machines are two-facedly seductive and treacherous. They deliver misery to those who can least afford to be robbed by them yet do it with so much (fake) gaiety. The pokies' coloured lights gaily flicker. Their artfully calibrated electronic gizzards emit joyful-sounding fairground jingle-jangles and fanfares.
If I am horrified by the notion of putting banknotes into pokies it's not only because I know that the working classes need every $10 note they've got. It's also because I am so old that I can remember simpler, gentle, more Christian pokies.
I grew up in an English seaside resort blessed with amusements arcades in which there were Fruit Machines. The great uncles of today's pokies, they were played with just one penny coin. You put in your penny and pulled on the one arm of this one-armed bandit, whereupon images of fruit (apples, oranges, lemons, cherries and if my memory serves me, pomegranates) whirred around. If they stopped on a winning combination the machines' clockwork innards would give a few rusty clanks and then cough up a very few pennies.
Today's vile, sophisticated, pokie descendants of those playthings exert a hypnotic tyranny. By contrast the fruit machines of those days seemed our jolly playmates. How did so innocent a machine evolve into today's Dalek-hearted miserymonger? What has become of our civilisation?
For those of us who by the grace of God don't do artificial gambling, it can seem that ordinary Life already offers sufficient gambles galore. Ms Steinem's point about marriage being a gamble is well taken. Lots of us, experienced in these things, will nod our heads in rueful agreement with Samuel Rogers' insight that "It doesn't much signify whom one marries, for one is sure to find next morning that it was someone else."
Then, too, we are a nation of migrants and migration involves a suite of enormous fiscal and emotional gambles. Your columnist would never touch a pokie with a bargepole or put so much as a cent on a greyhound cert running at Dapto. And yet I gambled on life on the mysterious planet of Australia being better than the life I knew at home in Merrie England.
Voting, too, is a gamble. It doesn't much signify whom one votes for because as soon as he or she becomes part of a shifty, promise-breaking government, one finds one has voted for someone else (or often something else, for so many politicians turn out to be werewolves).
Speaking of politicians, I have suffered this week the alarming experience of half-agreeing with Liberal senator Zed Seselja on something.
Like him, I watched Monday's ABC TV Australian Story devoted to the appalling (but somehow hypnotically appalling) ALP identity Senator Sam Dastyari.
Senator Seselja is one of several politicians who have demanded to know how and why the ABC made and showed such a soft and smarmy profile of Labor's disgraced Dastyari. Between them the complainers called the program a "puff piece" (Seselja's words), "propaganda" and an "infomercial" for Dastyari's new book.
Yes, Seselja was right but what he doesn't know (or doesn't usually care about) is that awful Australian Story is almost always like this about every Australian's story it tells.
It is the program's deplorable style to gush about its subjects, giving us a sculpture of them carved from a great, pink, wobbly block of blancmange. There is always (this happened again on Monday) a sentimentalising use of music to enhance what this week's wonderful Australian is saying and what it being gushed about him or her.
The Sydney Morning Herald, reporting the Australian Story/Dastyari imbroglio, called Australian Story a "flagship current affairs program". If that's so then it is a soft, sugary flagship that deserves to sink. The ABC that makes it is not my ABC.
