There's a vigil today in the city, in Melbourne, to mark the fifth anniversary of Australian man David Hicks being detained without trial in Guantanamo Bay.

I know, I know. Heavy topic to start with, but sometimes I stop and think about stuff, and today this is what stopped me.

The Americans are taking a "hard line", suggesting that the five years Hicks has already spent in Guantanamo won't be taken into account in any sentencing.

Whether or not David Hicks is a dangerous terrorist, there aren't many people I can think of who have been detained without trial in secret conditions for secret reasons by the most powerful democracy in the world, at any point in history. Rapists, mass murderers, dictators such as Pinochet and Saddam... all subject to a legal system (whether we like it or not).

It strikes me as quite bizarre that a country where citizens demand adherance to a constitutionally entrenched right to carry a gun can't recognise that giving someone a "right" or a "freedom" can result in the system imploding (give someone a right to carry a gun, they shoot someone. Give someone a right to a fair trial, that person is freed in twenty years and offends again). But the alternative is that there is no system at all.

Watching the play of 1984 this year at the Arts Festival in Melbourne, I realised that the reason I found it so depressing was that reality doesn't survive the comparison.

Now, consider this: the two Melbourne newspapers have the same story as their homepage online at the moment. Colour photographs, gushing press: Kylie has been voted the second most famous person in Britain after the Queen. Voted. Most famous. Kylie. Queen.

Do we think The Age and The Herald Sun are being satirical? Are they subverting the dominant paradigm? Is this a really hilarious joke about perspective? Or is reality really that much more insane and surreal than art could ever hope to be? I'm going with the former.