stoush.net

Thu, 26/10/2006 - 9:44am — Liam

Generally I find generational analyses of society to be worthless, and I sigh at the well-presented and pretty-coloured stacks of books with titles featuring the letters X and Y, and find my cynicism rising to world-weary despair when I find those books contain nothing pertaining either to chromosomes or Sesame Street. More than one bookshop employee has had to escort me quietly to the street, sobbing and asking ‘where’s Big Bird’?

Every now and then, though, I get a glimpse of the true nature of power as it’s manifested across the years, by a statum class of superannuated Baby Boomer crypto-fascists, informally exchanging information to ignore and consign to non-decisions any issue not affecting their concerns or worldview. It’s a true Death Star of rolled-up nylon cardigans, resin handmade brooches, sandalwood perfume and T2 shares.

How is it possible that Rodney Cavalier, Chairman (sic) of the SCG Trust and all-round unashamed élitist, can be made to look like a down-to-earth friend of the workers, free-thinker and pro-feminist? I don’t know how, but at the Fabian Society meeting held at Gleebooks on “Will John Howard win a fifth election? Or can Kim Beazley secure an ALP win?”, Paul Kelly, Hugh Mackay and Phillip Adams managed the feat with aplomb.

It was a quality event, in which the three speakers who I imagine ordinarily share no more politically in common than their various employers, all, united as one in a middle-class squeal, demanded that Labor acquiesce to the values and expectations of the professional, higher-educated and middle-aged upper bourgeoisie.

The Party doesn’t belong to you any more, and it never did. Political parties shouldn’t exist as vehicles for the delivery of beneficial feelings for the male dominated self-assured intelligentsia. Here’s a big loud wakeup call to the semi-elderly punditry: assertions of Labor’s insufficience may be fair, well earned or even empirically true, but reality will never be reflected in your demands of the Party. Sure, the ALP’s performance leaves a lot to be desired. Requirements, however, (I’m looking at you, Adams) for Labor to cave to the wishes of those who claim to have been betrayed by it are unlikely to be fulfilled.

Political action and change requires you to abandon your self-centred worldview, it’s as simple as that. You have to come to the Party rather than demanding the Party remake itself in your own greying image. So you wish that Keating was still PM? So you’d like Labor to make stands on the issues you care about? So you felt that Labor let you down over Tampa? My heart bleeds piss for you. The ALP is a lot more than you, chicko. To quote another bunch of self-important demanding middle-class white boys whose values and traditions were lifted thorougly and unacknowledged from the disenfranchised black people of their era, and who still won’t fuck off and retire to villas outside Chiang Mai despite their manifest past-it-ness:

You can’t always get what you want
But if you try sometimes…
You get what you need

And what you need, I don’t hesitate to assert in your faces, is a Labor Party and a universe that doesn’t cater to your whim, or even care particularly that you exist as a collective.

It’s a specific class and generational sense of entitlement designed to inhibit and prevent the participation or visibility of anybody else. Its practitioners par excellence are Phillip Adams himself, Malcolm Fraser and the part of the Liberal Party so breast-beatingly disenfranchised, the entire Australian literary and art scene despite the bollocking they took in Ganglands, and worst of all, Robert Walls, who can’t conceive of an Australian Football universe without him standing god-like at its centre, surrounded by fawning semi-naked acolytes reminiscing about his great Grand Final appearances. I piss on you all.

We’re coming to get you, baby boomers. As soon as your backs are turned or your hearing aid battery runs out, you’re getting packed off to the nursing home, to gerrymandered old-people electorates with caravan parks and ground-floor Centrelink offices, and to the grey ghettoes of Radio National, midday television and 2UE. Simultaneously.

And then, if you’re lucky, the rest of us will vote to fund the health services and social welfare which your overcatered and overindulged generation has run down through fixations on tax relief and individual accountability. Maybe. Better get to like the taste of catfood, just in case.