Classic Miranda, 2004: Yet to listen to ABC Radio on Friday, you’d think McDonald’s was a terrorist outfit. Sylvania Heights Public School had extracted $500 apiece from local businesses in return for a plaque out the front of the school. Along with a local realtor and computer shop was poor old McDonald’s, pariah of the West. Even federal Education Minister Brendan Nelson blasted the sponsorship. Local P&F fundraising isn’t for the basics, as ABC announcers would have you believe, but for extras such as “smart” whiteboards or additional playground equipment, as NSW Primary Principals’ Association vice-president Kerryanne Knox pointed out on Friday. If we want businesses to be good community citizens, abuse is not the way to reward their largesse.

Classic Miranda, 2003: And yet without introspection we lose much of what makes us human, because we need to know ourselves in order to develop a conscience, a moral compass, a sense of right and wrong. Without the humility that comes from knowledge of yourself and your own failings, everyone else’s behaviour will seem intolerable. You will be consumed with blind self-righteousness. Hence the rise of the busybody, the dobber and the petty tyrant in Sydney and hair-trigger rage from strangers about trifles. Lack of introspection leads people to take on hatreds and dimly understood positions without thinking through what they mean, only that perhaps: “War is bad”, “Bush is stupid” and “Howard is Hitler”. It leads to the ascendance of meaningless street politics in which hordes of what Lenin called “useful idiots” protest against McDonald’s or globalisation or war.