Bernard Salt can’t help himself. Like a moth to the flame he mocked youth anger again on the weekend:
American singer Eydie Gormé had a hit on her hands in 1963 with Blame it on the Bossa Nova. “I was at a dance when he caught my eye / Standin’ all alone lookin’ sad and shy / We began to dance, swayin’ to and fro / And soon I knew I’d never let him go. Blame it on the Bossa Nova…” Eydie died three years ago, so she won’t get to hear my revival of her much-loved Latino classic in Australia – with a bit of a twist. It’s called Blame it on the Baby Boomer.
It’s the song I hear time and again when think-tank crooners and Twitter activists do their thing, and it’s a song that everyone has come to love. Are you sad and all alone on the dance floor? Are you not where you think you deserve to be in life? Can you not afford to buy a house in the suburb or in the city of your heart’s desire? Are you being denied the fame, the fortune, the celebrity that you so richly deserve?
Perhaps you’re concerned about global warming, Brexit, the cause of the global financial crisis or the parlous state of this nation’s finances? No worries. With a bit of fancy footwork on logic’s dance floor you too can blame it on the baby boomer. After all, who isn’t up for a spot of “it’s not my fault, it’s someone else’s fault”?
Personally I think baby boomers should apologise for buying property 30 years ago that they deliberately allowed to appreciate in value. Outrageous! And you do realise that baby boomers caused global warming, don’t you? Oh yes. Although I do recall from my university days that the prevailing environmental threat at the time was a hole in the ozone layer. Apparently baby boomers fixed that problem but they let global warming go straight to the keeper. Typical! The same with the global financial crisis. That was caused by outrageous baby boomer greed on Wall Street – therefore every baby boomer in Australia shares the blame.
He has a point. Youth rage is real but it has no channel. It at least feels like those disenfranchised by the boomer bubble are unable or unwilling to actually force change. One wonders if the Gen Ys and Millennials that are being plundered by their parents have it in them.
My own experience of said generations is that they are a strange combination of personal power and political impotence. This is not just a function of the biased system, it is a psychology, the “all good” mentality that enables youth to see themselves as better than any given situation that fails to meet their needs but, paradoxically, also prevents them from bothering with collective action.
This is very apparent in the political movements of the day, which are able to completely ignore young people without fear of recrimination. Even supposedly youth-based movements like GetUp have 95% baby boomer dominated memberships. Not everyone over the age of thirty-five is happy to eat the nation’s children.
And therein lies the path to change. Many baby boomers themselves are sickened by their plundering brethren. These are the good parents who would rather enhance their children’s futures than fatten upon their demise. They are desperate to be put out of the misery of their own pleasure-seeking generation.
Salt of of the Ponzi may seem indomitable but he is actually deeply afraid. He, like everyone else, knows in his heart of hearts how unfair this system is and, although he does not have the moral fibre to fight it, he is very afraid it will be taken from him. In a second article on the weekend this fear was manifest:
Hello Australia. I feel as though we know each other a little better because of the great avocado incident this week. What happened and how did it happen?
In my column in The Weekend Australian Magazine last weekend I wrote what I considered to be an amusingly satirical piece about ageing baby boomers wandering into hipster cafes.
I used the stage of a cafe to parody boomers’ ageing: they can’t sit on milk crates because of their tight hamstrings; they can’t read the menu because their eyes are failing; they can’t follow conversation because of the music. They are even befuddled by toilet signage. And then they silently think (for they could never say such a thing out loud because all hell would break loose): “How can young people afford to eat here; shouldn’t they be at home saving for a house?”
The column was a satire of the middle-aged. It highlighted their bodily breakdown and the conservatism of their thinking. Last week commenters on social media andThe Australian website seemed to get the parody.
On Monday at 6.50am a news organisation posted in social media the single paragraph from the column where I describe the cafe-sitting boomer musing about young people and the cost of home ownership, and captioned it: “Bernard Salt thinks young people should stop eating out and save for a house. Thoughts?”
It was at that moment Twitter erupted. It was like watching a car crash. Although I was always confident that, upon reading the full column, people would get its intent and humour.
I’ve read the column. It satirises both boomers and hipsters in equal measure. One wonders how a supposed demographer and futurist could so badly misread the social mood. The explanation is in Salt’s history, which speaks for itself with respect to house prices and younger generations:
- Salt of the Ponzi
- Salt of the flip, flop
- Salt of confusion
- Salt of contradiction
- Salt of the full-scale Chinese sell-out
- Salt of the apartment glut begs youth for bailout
- Salt of the “you don’t have a house ’cause you are lazy”
There is also a documented history of Salt attacking what he describes as social “hate media” when it resists the property industry.
Herein lies both the challenge and path to change. Slippery Salt and his cohort will never relinquish their advantage. They will dine out on their kiddies all the way to grave, only pausing if and when their little empires are threatened.
But that cannot stand. It is an enormous pile of kindling, branches, timber and logs, dried in the sun for decades and soaked through with the petrol of unchanneled youth rage.
Someone need only light a match and WHOOSH, Bernard Salt’s world will burn.
The Australian Youth Party’s time has come.
