2006.01.01 Michael Duffy and Fat City
Did anyone find Michael Duffy's paen to MacLiving in MacMansionland, with MacReligion and MacPolitics thrown in for Macfulfillment, as gross and stupid as I did?
Duffy, who has perfected the same sort of punchably smug
facial expression for his column photo as Piers Akerman, Gerard Henderson and Miranda Devine, has taken upon himself the role of Dr Pangloss, to assure us that "All is for the best, in this, the best of all possible worlds", so we can go on turning everything to s**t at an accelerating rate because, well because we have been up to now and he (Duffy) sees no reason to stop.
On his radio show, Counterpoint-ABC RN, and in his SMH column,Duffy has promoted every ultra-right, crypto-fascist, racist and corporatist stooge he could find, from white supremacist Andrew Fraser to flat-earther know-nothings Ray Evans and the Levoisier Group, who meet in a telephone booth to convince each other that global warming, peak oil and resource depletion policy is a Communist Plot against Jesus
Christ and the White Man. Maybe he's the idiot bastard son of Paddy McGuiness.
Anyway, what Duffy doesn't talk about is the destruction of the vegetable gardens, poultry farms and dairies that provide Sydney with 90% of its fresh food - oh sorry, that can all come from China now, we can fly it in, along with the Vanamai prawns and "Pacific Dory" - a
Vietnamese freshwater catfish that lives, like the prawns, on chicken s**t, so we don't need fresh local produce any more. Have you noticed where Streets ice cream comes from these days?
Gloatingly hostile to public transport, Duffy, like his informer on the subject Wendell Cox, the American developer-whore and anti-transit shill, extols the virtues of the M2, M7, M5 tollroad loop, braying about lack of traffic lights and the joys of driving everywhere "on a good day". He also spruiks some book called "Bourgeois Utopias" by an American "academic" called Robert Fishman (Fishbrain?) that prattles on about "technoburbs" where "the fluidity and complexity of modern life" is only negotiable through the internet and road transport, and the "true centre of this new city is not in some downtown business district but in each residential unit.
From that central starting point, the members of the household create their own city from the multitude of destinations that are within suitable driving distance". It's a throwback to the "Futurama" exhibit designed by Norman Bel Geddes for General Motors at the 1939-40 New York World's Fair. With all the pollution generated in the Norwest Mactopia moving south to settle under the atmospheric inversion over Bringelly, soon to have 100,000 residents after previous bans on subdivision because of this pollution were removed, Fishbrain's and Duffy's "Bourgeois Utopia" is necessarily a dystopia for everyone else.
With this crap as the "philosophy" behind whats happening, along with the attitudes of Costa and the other drones in Macquarie St, and their owner-operators in the Greed Combine calling the shots, we may as well all up stakes and move Somewhere Else. Buggered if I know where, but I'm starting to think Sydney should be renamed "Fat City" and left to the greedheads to drown in and gag on their own excrement. Let Them Eat Money.