How wonderful it was!

It was in some ways glittertglitzy and showbizzy and vulgar (like so much in life). Yet, redeemingly, there was so much to marvel at, so much conjurer-aplomb to applaud, so much to be wizard-mystifed by.

Minds were read, people were made to disappear and then to appear out of nothing. Especially bafflingly, a man was divided into two still-animated halves in a mystifying sophistication of the already wondrous old trick of sawing a woman (how regrettably sexist that it really always was a woman, never a man) in half.

Well-performed magic gives such joy that, since the show, I’ve been moved to think how Australian magicians, given a fairer go, might illuminate Australian public life.

For example what if the presently banal and angry House of Representatives had, perhaps replacing its obsolete and underemployed Serjeant-at-Arms, a kind of roving Conjurer-in-Residence doing things that brought awe, wonder and delight into the drab, rancid lives of MPs and into the hitherto appalled hearts of visitors in the public galleries?

The day’s proceedings might start not with the obsolete daily prayer (for we are an agnostic nation now) but with a daily conjuring trick – today the Chinese Interlocking Rings, tomorrow the Indian Rope Trick, the day after making Mr Speaker (and his ceremonial chair) levitate, the day after that magical feats of public service such as making Liberal wastes of space (like Tony Abbott) disappear.

One is so used to The Canberra Times being a family newspaper that it was a terrible shock one morning last week to turn a page and be suddenly morally outraged by a deeply pornographic picture.

The picture illustrated a similarly pornographic story, full of gratuitously explicit detail, James Packer sets sail for luxury in new $200 million superyacht.

For the offending picture was of the superyacht, in all its mind-boggling size and ostentation.

Of course here I am using pornography in its broader, modern sense. You will all have heard of “food porn” (the glamourizing of foods to make them irresistibly desirable) and of “poverty porn” (the objectifying of the poor to entertain the privileged and/or to sell things).

Then there is (and stories and pictures of James Packer’s superyacht fall vaguely into these overlapping categories) “lifestyle porn” and “wealth porn”.

A well-meaning 2017 Guardian piece Filthy rich: our tortured love affair with wealth porn diagnosed that there is a kind of shamed pleasure in only finding a celebrity interesting because he or she is filthy rich; a vicarious thrill in ogling his or her displays of their wealth’s glittering filth.

My own feeling is that the shock the superyacht picture and story gave had to do with their true obscenity. The gasp I gave at the picture was close cousin of the gasp I would have given if the picture had been of humans engaged in unnatural acts.

James Packer might have done such a power of good in the world with this spare $200 million but instead has created for himself an ocean-going stately pleasure dome of vulgar magnificence in which to swagger on the deep.

The discerning Dorothy Parker (1893-1967) timelessly observed, eerily anticipating her nation’s 45th President and perhaps eerily anticipating James Packer too, that “If you want to know what God thinks of money, just look at the people He gives it to.”

But perhaps (and here I go again, doubting myself and examining all of my core beliefs with a microscope) our puritan outrage about the rich and the ostentatious things they do with their money are just working-class expressions of envy.

Perhaps, to be shocked by displays of wealth (and I am even left ashen-faced by the giant mansions of O’Malley, brandished on hilltops, that I must drive past every day as I go to and from my modest home in a Garran frost-pocket) is to be a kind of wealth-wowser. Are we just wowsers, piously offended by the thought that the rich should get pleasure from their riches?

And what if, while on porn, those of us who love to see the way the light rail route is taking sinuous shape between Gungahlin and Civic, are indulging an appetite for “infrastructure porn”?

It turns out that there really is such a thing, explaining so much. Give Google the words “infrastructure porn” and it will for example take you to a reddit gallery of explicit pictures of major works built or being built. Titillating pics there as I write this on Wednesday include the Ivanpah solar power facility in California’s Mojave Desert, a dam being built at Sapa in Vietnam, construction going on in Seattle’s Rainier Square and work busily underway in Germany on the Stuttgart 21 railway and urban development. How sweaty my palms as I look at these beauties.

So Canberrans, if the light rail and other developments (at the moment how festooned our city is with busy tower cranes!) are giving you a hard-to-define but somehow quasi-erotic delight then now you know why. You are (with this columnist) into infrastructure porn.