Once Upon a Time in the West

"Go west, young man"
                           - Horace Greeley

Used in an 1865 editorial by the New York Tribune editor and "self-appointed chief of staff of the New York newspaper generals" (according to Wikipedia, but what would they know?) in perhaps another context, it is the quote that came to mind when I had the idea for this post.

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Over the past few years, I have been lucky enough to savour and taste the full gamut of flavours that are the western suburbs. It is this love affair, then, that, like a bipolar Jack, keeps the stroke betwixt my moues of apathy and my wild, passionate sentiments. Who can blame me? The western suburbs is at once a vivacious organism and a slow, dying red giant. Perhaps it would be best to let me explain.

After a busy day biwinning at school (I am the lucky recipient of both tiger blood and Adonis DNA, naturally), I observe the comings and goings of other Western Melburnians while listening to the back catalogues of Talking Heads and The Clash. It seems to me that people born and bred, or just living, this side of the Yarra are imbued with a special sense of optimism, one forged in the fire of adversity. I first came across this thought, believe it not, on election day last year, when I was forced to take a 40-minute bus trip home after Metro decided to fix up some signal box, or something - I don't remember the vagaries. Some people remember their first kiss, others their first solo drive. Weird, neurotic people like me remember irrelevant thoughts. Anywho, I must press on, as I know the ECLJ IT Department will kill me for spoiling their tea binge-drinking days and making them do a scrap of work.

As I was saying, optimism. Ah yes! Whether it be in the store retailer who knows anyone in their semi-sane mind will not purchase their wares but keeps en garde looking for customers, or in the ex-druggie pleading with the bus driver that he has no change/lost his wallet &c, it is heartwarming to see that the "little Aussie battler" still lives, long after Ernie Siegley passed on. As the days become cooler, as the nights become longer, there is a fire, an intensity in people's eyes that shows their conviction, their desire (perhaps a common trait among all of us) to make a good thing better - from the anonymous man who runs the awesome donut van next to Footscray Station to the various administrators of sport in the West who wake up before the cock crows for a pure love of the game. As a general rule, perhaps, I have found, in my own dealings, that people on this side of the Yarra just seem more genuine in their behaviour - maybe because, in the words of Bob Dylan and probably many others, "if you ain't got nothing, you got nothing to lose". However, the outliers that I know - whose fortune has granted them not only a reputable birthplace but, more importantly, an extremely personable character - preclude me from declaring "quad erat demonstrandum" and making this theorem a law.

What disenheartens me when I think of the West is the fatal flaws in its character, which are often the same that make it so great. One example is a visceral fear of not grandiloquence, but greatness. I feel we are right to shun the excesses of the former but we take it too far when we avoid the latter. I see that we, collectively, are too happy to embrace the status quo, which in part explains the rise of conservatism. Our atypical life experiences should provide a springboard for alternative ideas and practices, but too often we ignore our uniqueness to return to safe, stale ideas. It is the real-life equivalent of slipping on a Snuggie as soon as you get home from school or wake up on the weekend. Imagine a society in which we ridicule conservatism as much as we do the Snuggie. Imagine if one of us were to come up with a set of ideas, a worldview, that shook the West from its slumber of apathy. Perhaps that was the true spirit of Horace Greeley's dictum