High-stakes soap opera

Hurricanes hardly happen, Henry Higgins assures us in My Fair Lady, Lerner and Loewe’s great musical adaptation of Bernard Shaw’s play Pygmalion. Obviously, Alan Jay Lerner (the lyricist), never went to Florida, where hurricanes are positively ubiquitous. The coverage in our media is immense, the footage graphic, the consequences dire.

Last months, for days on end, we read about Hurricane Milton, which terrorised the residents of Florida and caused much damage. Hurricanes clearly happen in newsrooms, too, a reliable media trope, like the Boxing Day sales or carnage at the Melbourne Cup, with footage of shoeless ‘fillies’ and inebriated Grammarians.

Natural disasters seem exclusive to the east coast of America. When did we see such breathless coverage of equally disastrous floods in Bangladesh or earthquakes in Türkiye? Much less photogenic perhaps?

Advances was struck by this as the media fixated on another American storm, the US presidential election, whose outcome will be known before this ink is dry. Never before perhaps has there been such a facile assumption that nothing matters more to Australians than the choice between Democrats and Republicans – not world politics, not the far-right parties threatening to assume power across Europe, not consequential elections in our own region, not even our own coming federal election. What consuming fun this presidential election is, a ‘high-stakes soap opera’, as someone dubbed it on ABC Radio National.

We invited nine senior contributors and commentators to reflect on the presidential election with reference to its peculiar fascination, and exceptionalism, in Australia. Their eclectic musings can be read here.

Calibre Essay Prize