Tired of creeping crack?

The Currency Lad is one of the more entertaining right wing bloggers around the place, mostly eschewing moronic RWDB thuggery in favour of piercing leftie pretensions by more gentle and effective methods. His take on Mark Latham’s silly “ease the squeeze” line is a neat example:

When John Howard promulgated his ‘Incentivation’ package in 1988, Bob Hawke said it sounded “like something you do to a cat.” Mr Latham’s policy motto sounds like an advertisement for unglamorous men’s undergarments.

“Tired of the tight fit and the creeping crack? Ease your squeeze with Bonds’ new Liverpool Slackers.”

It deserves wider dissemination to induce Latham to ditch this dreadful line before it makes him as big a joke as Howard became back in 1988.

Currency Lad’s review of that tiresomely old-before-its-time ezine NewMatilda is also worth reading. Running the two words of its title together isn’t enough to make it a cutting-edge cyberspace era publication. I certainly don’t agree with all CL’s detailed critiques of individual articles, but his general verdict is spot-on:

What is the raison d’etre of this organ?

Well, remember when political correctness was something often debated and very real? If you attended school and university in the 1980s and 90s you’d be familiar with the academic of a certain age, pushing his Whitlamite views down everyone’s throats; and the feminist grouch still grimacing angrily at the patriarchal world and wanting all males to be appropriately penitent and acceptably feminised.

Largely because of the X and Y generations and their terrific cynicism, PC has more or less become an in-joke to a whole generation. Fairly or not, a lot of the sniggering is directed towards the babyboomers, whether they’re aware of it or not. This is not entirely fair but generational politics have always been about caricatures, not data.

Already outside of the mainstream anyway, the generational shift back towards a more balanced, less doctrinaire view of gender, sexuality, education, relationships and politics pushed the Orwellian PC brigade even further into the cultural shade. It’s hard trying to convince society you’re ‘where it’s at’ when young people regard you as laughable old cranks.

So what happened to all of them?

Amongst other things and amongst other places, they’ve rallied to NewMatilda where – through a cute bit of badge engineering – they’ve become “independent voices changing Australia.”

It’s a fair cop. On the other hand, I would also add that the Howardian sneering-at-PC meme repackaged by CL can too easily become a conveniently trendy-sounding pretext for some people to feel relaxed and comfortable about parading their very old-fashioned and odiously nasty, narrow-minded bigotry and intolerance. But that’s another story.

Well, to be more accurate it’s a different part of the same story. Howard mostly fashioned his anti-PC meme to lure the embittered One Nation-types back into the Coalition fold, and they’re the ones who now feel free and unashamed about parading their repulsive prejudices. But anti-PC also appealed, as CL observes, to a large part of a younger generation who were tired of being preached at and told what to think by a bunch of sanctimonious babyboomer wankers who thought (and still think) they have a mortgage on morality because they voted for Whitlam and once attended a Vietnam Moratorium march. Some of us babyboomers even shared their irritation. If you can read Richard Neville, Margo (although she’s more mad than PC) or Phillip Adams without being seriously tempted to smash your computer screen or throw the newspaper to the ground and stomp on it, then you may well be a PC babyboomer yourself.