Boomer Bastards Like Me

Leunig - a famous, iconic and loved Australian cartoonist - was just fired by The Age in Melbourne as part of the COVID-19 culture wars. The Age aspires to be Australia’s NYT – its action may seem to be the kind of timid reaction that boomers like my Self underline as a world gone crazy.

But I don’t think that.

Luckily, I’ve got two genzener daughters (Gen Z generation) who help me comprehend cancel culture, wokeism, being cisgender and gender fluidity in general.

While I have felt my “hippy-ish” culture rage reemerge, I am coming to see how outdated that thinking is concerning today’s cultural wars. The sacking of Leunig is an opportunity to reassess all that I once held sacred, including the kind of “individualism” that seeps through Alexander’s writings.

Alexander advocated individualism and open-mindedness - albeit from his privileged, racist POV - so let’s try. FM held individualism sacred, as do many of us in the Alexander community – myself being one of its noisiest advocates. Yet…

In an essay in Australia Quarterly MEANJIN, Robbie Moore situates Leunig in a compelling perspective. He shows how “individualism” can be a convenient cultural cover for the privilege.

If this vaguely interests you, read the except…

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“This is how a counter-cultural boomer politics founded on lonely men fleeing faceless corporate oppressors has been rewired, over just a few years, into a reactionary politics of male victimhood.

For Leunig and for those in the wellness mindset, suffering is intimate and private. It’s a burden that the individual bears and that the individual must solve through positive lifestyle change. It’s not a structural phenomenon that groups of oppressed or exploited people can solve together through political action. Leunig, along with those that decry so-called wokeness and cancel culture, also asserts that individuals are constantly menaced by the madness of collectives, online and in real life. Leunig’s opinion columns on this topic lump together collectives of all kinds: armies and empires, street protests and social media. It doesn’t matter if they’re fighting or upholding the status quo—all collectives wield repressive power. ‘Whatever the aim or cause a group may have,’ he writes, ‘be it about social justice, environmental protection, marriage equality or women’s rights, there is always the possibility of an aggressive darkness developing in the chemistry of togetherness.’

Leunig’s embattled individualism relies on a sleight of hand: that he doesn’t belong to any party or identity group. Male privilege doesn’t exist, he argues in a 2017 essay: aren’t we all just humans? And there, in that argument, he betrays his privilege. As a white man, he’s never needed collective action to fight for his own status as human, to fight for basic rights and dignities. He’s had the luxury of getting by on his own—to be the kind of rambling loner he draws again and again for his new followers on Instagram.”

Essay by Robbie Moore in MEANJIN

Wow.

White, rich & male boomers like me need to wake up and – before pointing fingers at cancel-culture and gender fluidity – first try to grasp the deeper meanings flowing through our culture wars. 

What a time to live in!