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Envy
I have been unwell all week, at first I thought it was the flu but having reconsidered the symptoms it could be iPhone envy. The onset of a sore throat, headaches and blocked nose coincided with the arrival of an email from friends, Philip and Julie Cheyne, currently holidaying in rural France. It wasn’t the first such message, but this one was something to the effect of; here we are basking in the sun in the village square, eating citron crepes and drinking coffee, just relaxing after touring a local winery. At the bottom of each such message is the tag-line, “Sent from my iPhone”.
Similarly afflicted, we get messages from another friend, an obscure London publisher, who sends the equivalent of literary grunts, “I’m in Cyprus”, “Just landed in Macau” or “It’s 3.00am in Cannes”. Again, these come with that same footer, “Sent from my iPhone”.
Who wouldn’t be envious and there are a couple of observations to be made; these people are rubbing it in that they own iPhones while the rest of us are consigned to last-generation appliances which are restricted to making calls, text messages and taking grainy photos, and which do not have a zillion questionable Apps (techno jargon for applications) which do important things like telling us the time in Beijing, translating phrases into Arabic and providing the latest news about Paris Hilton.
Secondly, iPhones allow their owners instant bragging rights about the exotic fun they are having, and they do so deliberately while the rest of us are confined to mundane processes of life; cooking and cleaning, working and freezing at the hands of a southern hemisphere winter.
The same goes with Facebook where some postings come “Via Mobile Web”. Down the right hand menu there is often a list of your friends who use their mobile phones to upload postings, and this is also designed to create envy; it means that these people can post to Facebook in an instant and from anywhere in the world while the rest of us have to start up computers, find internet connections and go through a slow and now very uncool process of uploading.
"Sent from my iPhone", is a gratuitous message, calculated for one thing and one thing alone; to remind us have-nots of our inferiority, and every time I get one of these messages I take to my sick bed for another few days.
But it is not just I who suffers. Perth is a city built on envy; a little like that New Zealand thing where South Islanders believe that if it wasn’t for the Cook Strait cable sending power northwards, the entire North Island would collapse and disappear without trace. And many think that would be a good thing. Here it is the minerals; Western Australians believe that they create the continent’s entire wealth and somehow that wealth is sucked to the East with nothing coming back in return. From time to time there are dark muttering of seceding from the rest of Australia and creating an independent state, and probably the Easterners hope they would just get on with it.
But that is not the point here. As the third series of Underbelly, the television drama revealing the dark side of Australia’s organised crime draws a conclusion, Western Australians have only just twigged that they have been overlooked entirely. Melbourne and Sydney have both featured, as has the Kiwi-dominated Mr Asia drug syndicate, Queensland is ear-marked for the next series, but no-one takes the West seriously enough to do anything based on characters here.
Not to be overlooked completely, the local West Australian newspaper has run a ten-part series on organised crime around Perth, the first instalment targeting John Kizon, a self-styled wide boy with plenty of money, a fast lifestyle and, apparently, no visible means of support. The cops have spent tens of millions of dollars trying to catch him red-handed at whatever it is he is supposed to be doing for at least a decade, but in all that time they have been singularly unsuccessful. This suggests either they are completely stupid or Kizon exceptionally clever; and the latest attempt to get him on charges of insider-trading came spectacularly undone.
But what is intriguing about this is that, a few days later after the West Australian exposé, Kizon was featured at length on television’s Channel Seven denying all allegations and putting forward his own version of events. The intriguing thing is that the West Australian and Channel Seven are effectively one and the same; they have the same parent company, which really raises a question about media creating stories out of nothing and then breathing life in to them.
If there is one event which would give rise to the view that the cops here are more Keystone than clever, it would be the events arising from the murder of the owner of the bar across the road from work. The only suspect fled interstate, one step ahead of an arrest warrant; two detectives on the same flight as he while on the run to Adelaide, and who were coincidentally working on the case, recognised him but then failed to tail him once there; when he was eventually arrested in Townsville days later, the WA cops arrived without completed extradition documents and then had to wait a week for the paperwork to be ironed out, it took about three attempts. Once back in WA, these same police realised they had left the crucial charge sheets in Townsville and, at the time of writing, were unable to actually lay the murder charge, the purpose of the original arrest warrant. It is little wonder they’ve never been able to pin anything on Kizon or even stitch him up.
Meanwhile, I think I’ve found a cure for iPhone envy; it’s called Phuket and its less than two weeks away.