It’s the same old song: Blame it on the Baby Boomer

Climate change, Brexit, the high cost of real estate and the GFC... one generation is blame for all of them!

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”?

I think there should be a national competition to find new, agile and innovative ways to connect dilemmas of the day with the primary cause of all our problems, the baby boomers. Extra points will be awarded to entries that find connections between underfunded policies, home-owning and self-funded-retiree baby boomers. If you can add a Christian filter to this mix, you are going for gold.

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.

I said the aim of this competition was to find a link between a popular problem and the baby boomer generation – I didn’t say the connection had to be correct or even remotely logical. The point is that blaming someone else for a problem means you don’t have to take responsibility for fixing it. I mean, if someone else is at fault, they should be taxed into oblivion in order to fix it, right? I’ll do my bit when those baby boomers do theirs. It’s not that I am baulking at self-sacrifice; it’s just that there are others who should be paying more. “Fairness” is a beautiful thing, don’t you think? I’m sure it is mere coincidence that fairness almost always involves someone else paying more.

First prize in the competition to find new ways of blaming baby boomers for the ills of the world is the inaugural Cultural Kudos Cup. The winner gets the Cup and the right to preen and bask in the glory of “calling out” baby boomers for their selfishness.

I have another song, although I don’t think it’ll get the same traction as my Australian version of Blame it on the Bossa Nova. “Oh, I’m an activist and I’m OK / I sleep all night and I tweet all day.” Catchy, don’t you think?