I love Aaron Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man. The music, sure, but also the title. To me there’s something honourable, noble, about the concept of the common man. But moreso the uncommon man. I like to think each of us has a special gift, whatever it is; and that when, and only when, it’s given expression does it makes its owner uncommon. Take Virginia O’Hanlon. In 1897 as an 8-year-old girl she wrote to the New York Sun asking if there was a Santa Claus, prompting Francis Church’s 21 September 1897 editorial which included the immortal: ‘Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus’. Over a century later it remains the most reprinted newspaper editorial ever. Virginia’s letter and Francis’s editorial reply converted them into uncommon people. Moreso because an early form of viral communication cloned ‘there is a Santa Claus’ into ‘there is a God’. I thought of Virginia and Francis this week when I read that the A$100M Southern Star observation wheel in Melbourne, which opened on 20 December 2008, closed 41 days later, on 30 January 2009, after Melbourne’s heat wave buckled and cracked its steel. To me the Southern Star, by aping its competitors on other continents, symbolises the crass, lowest-common-denominator, globalised me-tooism of modern life. So I’m pleased it’s buckled. I hope it’s beyond repair. Yes, Virginia, there is a God.
