If there is, what is it and what symptoms do Canberraitis- afflicted Canberrans exhibit?

Charlee Dyroff's piece, An Inflammation of Place: On the Symptoms and Spread of Newyorkitis, has just shimmered into the online Lapham's Quarterly.

What if, your columnist muses, not just mighty New York but every town or city of character in the world has its own unique "itis", that all or some of its locals catch and exhibit? Is there perhaps a Cairoitis, a Honoluluitis, even a Wagga-Waggaitis?

We haven't room here to examine exactly what Girdner diagnosed in New York and New Yorkers in his hugely influential 1901 book Newyorkitis.

We only have room to think about (and surely to applaud) his belief, after 25 years of treating patients in the big city and of thinking of what should be done to make New York more conducive to the physical, mental and moral health of its citizens, that of course cities shape and sculpt the people who live in them.

Different cities shape different sorts of citizens, and if there is a 2020 Canberraitis it is unlikely to have anything in common with a 1901 or 2020 Newyorkitis.

That said, though, some of his 1901 New Yorker diagnoses will ring bells for today's Canberrans and Canberra-oglers.

"A very large percentage [of people] lead an artificial life here," Girdner scolded.

"This manner of life has brought about a condition of mind, body, and soul, which I have endeavoured to describe under the title of Newyorkitis."

Dyroff reports that "the egotism of New Yorkers and the pompousness with which they lived was the focus of the longest section of his [Girdner's] book. He argued that these symptoms - self-centeredness, lack of faith, and greed - 'are found in all classes of New York society'."

"And one of the most pronounced symptoms of Newyorkitis," Girdner wrote, "is a circumscribed mental horizon. The patient thinks in a circle bounded by the confines of Manhattan Island."

That's a description of a bubble, and of course Canberra is rightly or wrongly thought of as an enbubbled city within which Federal Parliament and its privileged citizens shelter in a kind of upmarket sub-bubble within the bigger bubble of this strange, aloof, unAustralian city.

For this columnist, an historian of this city and a keen student of its moods, foibles and nuances, my search for what Canberraitis consists of is a work in progress, triggered by Girdner's big idea about cities and citizens and by Dyroff's new play with them.

We shall see what we shall see. But certainly I begin my forensic investigation with the suspicion that there is a Canberraitis.

Complex and multi-symptomed, it features some of the "circumscribed mental horizon" Girdner found in New Yorkers. It may also show up as an extreme bourgeois conservatism and insular fear of changes that manifests in things as diverse as Canberrans' extreme NIMBYism and nervous hostility to vista-changing tall buildings and anything (but especially skyscrapers) that threatens to change Canberra into a real city.

For one of the symptoms of Canberraitis I tentatively diagnose is a fear (mildly phobic) of big cities and of all the things (the scandal and the vice, the teeming excitements, the blizzards of diversity, the bombardments of stimuli) that more swashbuckling, uninhibited people love about big cities.

There is a Wagga-Wagganess about Canberraitis, a psychological preference for living somewhere only town-sized (as long as it is a plush town, rich in amenities).

This Canberraitis I tentatively diagnose owes something to what Canberra, so ruthlessly planned and anally retentively neat and tidy and lacking in visual shocks, surprises and thrills, does to its citizens. It shapes us.

I harp on Canberra's sad skyscraperlessness because it is well known that skyscrapers give a city and its people a swashbuckling buzz, while an absence of skyscrapers (and Canberra regulations keep buildings stunted and bonsaied) keeps citizens subconsciously understimulated.

Understimulation and Canberraitis go together like a horse and carriage, and I use that metaphor advisedly because there may be something a little Amish about Canberraitis.

But my work in progress continues.

In another never-to-be-forgotten column for another publication, I have carolled that 2020 is the momentous 250th anniversary of the birth of Beethoven, that colossus of western civilisation.

In that piece I began to look at ways in which the federal government really should do things to bring Beethoven and his moody/majestic magic to the common people, educating them and culturally enriching their drab, meaningless lives.

Now here is a Canberra-specific idea. Why not, Chief Minister Barr, fund a no-expense-spared Canberra public performance of Beethoven's supernaturally wonderful Symphony No. 9, the Choral Symphony, to be performed the day after the keenly anticipated ACT Legislative Assembly election of October 17?

Of course the symphony ends joyously, with soloists and choir warbling through Beethoven's setting of the Ode to Joy.

How appropriate would that be?! Canberrans, relieved and buoyed by the re-election of a Labor-Greens government (and, of course, overjoyed and relieved at the rejection of the menace of a Liberal government) will be in just the mood to rejoice together.

A song sheet could be distributed to enable the thousands of deliriously happy Canberrans to join in (they will all know the tune, because it is the best-known tune in all the world) singing Schiller's poem's uplifting words - either phonetically in German or in an English version also carolled by the professional choir.

The Chief Minister is a cultured man, and we await with confidence his enthusiastic adoption of this Big Idea.