The time for excess---in Bataille's sense not the self-gratification --- has come around again. All that surplus wealth from the boom needs to be expanded. What better way than for the wealthy to celebrate the wealthy at a national festival.

Matt Golding

I understand that two of the race-course marquees at Flemington,will be tricked out with the splendours of Marie Antoinette's 18th century French court in mind. It is all part of the spectacle.

Sally Gare takes the self-gratification airhead approach in this extract from her book The Triumph of the Airheads – and the Retreat from Commonsense in The Australian:

In this age of the free market, the pursuit and acquisition of money at all costs is now considered more important than knowledge, values and commonsense. This is also the post-postmodern world, which apparently means there are no such things as objective knowledge, values and commonsense. How lucky is that? Short-term thinking has triumphed, so has greed, and the unstoppable driving force of our times is the belief that it's all about me. (Which so very often devolves to: it's all about me and what I can stuff into my pockets and bank accounts.) It's amazing how fast a world can change when enough people learn to approach life like this.