satire
25 Sep 2008
You Want More?
When Ben Pobjie was a boy, he would have killed to live on jam sandwiches. What's up with old people today? Why are they so ungrateful?
It is a widely acknowledged truth that one can tell a lot about a society from the way it treats its elderly citizens. For example, a society that sends its elderly citizens into a secure location in the desert to quietly and unobtrusively die is likely to be a heartless and inhumane society, yet one with an undeniable drive to get things done.
On the other hand, a society that reveres its elderly, makes use of their accumulated wisdom, and devotes sufficient resources to take good care of them and provide them with the dignity and quality of life they deserve, is likely to be a dull and slow-moving society, with a distinct musty odour.
Pensioners have been much in the news lately, egotistical glory-hogs that they are, and much of the recent public debate has centred on whether or not they're getting a "fair go" from the Government. Just this week, the Opposition was defeated in its attempt to pass a bill raising the single aged pension by $30 a week.
The bill was defeated due to its unconstitutionality, something which got the usual people like Bob Brown acting like their usual annoying selves. This turn of events stems from two basic facts about the Australian political landscape:
1. Bob Brown, like all Greens, enjoys spitting on democracy.
2. Old people never shut up.
It's the second point that I'm looking to examine here. Our great country has been assailed in the last few months by an epidemic of whingeing geriatrics on the make, all looking only for what they can scrounge from the Australian taxpayer. This is typical of the average elderly Australian, most of who started out stealing watches from dead Turks in the trenches of Gallipoli.
Today, it would seem, the Government is the dead Turk, and the watches are our hard-earned cash - cash that we could be spending on clean coal and fireworks, but instead we relentlessly fritter away just so we can keep these crumbling antiquities shuffling among us, holding us up at the supermarket with their inability to understand EFTPOS and misguided belief that anyone is interested in having a conversation with them.
So what are the oldies complaining about? Well, the single aged pension comes to $273 a week, which they claim is "not enough" to live on. Let's look a bit more closely at that, shall we? Two hundred and seventy three dollars a week. That's enough to buy a DVD recorder, and I think we can all agree that anyone who can afford to buy a new DVD recorder every week is hardly "doing it tough". In fact, such extravagance is quite obscene, and if pensioners are going to demonstrate that kind of profligate and baffling spending behaviour, I don't think they deserve one iota of sympathy when they start complaining about eating dog food.
Which they always do, of course. Every time the inadequacy of the pension is raised, all the wizened little crooks start bleating about how they have to eat dog food. I don't know why it's always dog food. Nobody ever complains that their pension's so low they have to eat birdseed or fish flakes. It's forever Pal this, Chum that, Purina the other.
Well, you know what pensioners? Nobody asked you to eat dog food. To tell the truth, we'd rather you didn't. It's not as if there aren't alternatives - death by starvation, for example, which a quick study of history will show possesses a quiet dignity completely lacking in dog food.
And if they must eat dog food, why do they have to keep on about it? And why do we feel so sorry for them? Dogs eat dog food all the time, and we don't feel sorry for them. When did we decide that people over 70 were better than dogs? I don't remember getting that memo. At least dogs don't spend 24 hours a day bitching.
Not that dog food is the only thing we're apparently supposed to feel bad about. Before he was bricked up in Malcolm Turnbull's fireplace, former Opposition Leader Brendan Nelson accused Labor of forcing pensioners to live on baked beans and jam sandwiches, which strikes me as an outrageous thing to complain about.
When I was a boy, I would have killed to live on jam sandwiches. I spent long days longing for jam sandwiches while my mother force-fed me steak and vegetables. And now the elderly find themselves in the position of being able to indulge themselves with an all-jam sandwich diet! They are living the dream, and yet they continue to carp and whine. Is there no pleasing these people?
The worst thing is the way we're always told the pensioners "deserve more". "Oh, our old folks deserve a better deal". "Oh, the old dears deserve a fair go". "They deserve our respect". I ask you, why? What makes them so deserving? Oh, sure, they did their bit back in the day, but to be blunt, what have they done for us lately? Hey pensioners, the "Great War" was nearly 100 years ago, how about earning your keep here in the 21st century?
Why do they do this? Do the elderly and feeble simply not understand economics? Do they have no regard for the welfare of others? Do they feel no pang of guilt as they make ever more rapacious demands upon the public purse, while innocent conceptual artists and experimental theatre groups go without grants? Are old people actually as evil as they look and sound?
The problem is only going to get worse, with Australia's ageing population set to bring on more and more waves of grey, liver-spotted warriors, hacking and slashing at our way of life. Yet solutions are at hand.
Some have suggested that the ageing population problem can be solved by having more children, yet this ignores the fact that the world in general has an over-population problem. Moreover, raising a child is an expensive and laborious process when compared to, say, shooting a pensioner, or drowning one in the bath.
When kangaroos reached plague proportions, we started culling. We've long ago reached that point with the elderly, who are far less cute than kangaroos, and far easier to catch.
It's time, Australia. It's time to ease the burden on the taxpayer. It's time to make this country once again young and vital and robust. It's time to end Denis Walter's career once and for all.
Pluck up your courage, grab hold of granny's pillow, and enter the new world.
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Ben, do you do autographs?
not to mention that most old people these days who complain are of the babyboomer generation.
Right on, Ben. I’ve found that there are two sorts of us - the whingers, who as you say go on and on about their pensions and dog food, as if thats’s the end of the bloody world - and then there are others who find ways to mix dog food with those $0.99 loaves on Monday mornings and butcher’s off-cuts, cold pies from the salvos, that sort of thing, and we make do. Some weeks, I spend less than $5 on food. My son lets me sleep out in the car-port for only $ 10 a week, I get free public transport and many other services, so sometimes I have close to $ 50 a week free for casks and sandshoes.
And on a nice day, what’s there to worry about ? You sit on a free bus seat, only a few snotty schoolkids bother you and spit their flavoured milk on you and stick their chewing gum on you, but a few whacks with the old stick and they piss off, the little bastards - so life can still be beautiful ! And the sex is fantastic - absolutely no worries about any of those sheilas - and my God, are they randy !? - getting sprogged, so we are at it most days, after all it’s all free. Still, it gets you in the back most days, but not if the sheilas are on top. I reckon I have about twenty years of totally carefree daily shagging left, so I’m happy. Joe
My story begins in Nineteen dickety two. We had to say "dickety" because the Kaiser had stolen our word for "twenty." I chased him down the road but gave up after dickety-six miles…
or, if you prefer:
We can’t bust heads like we used to, but we have our ways. One trick is to tell ‘em stories that don’t go anywhere - like the time I caught the ferry over to Shelbyville. I needed a new heel for my shoe, so, I decided to go to Morganville, which is what they called Shelbyville in those days. So I tied an onion to my belt, which was the style at the time. Now, to take the ferry cost a nickel, and in those days, nickels had pictures of bumblebees on ‘em. "Give me five bees for a quarter," you’d say.
Now where were we? Oh yeah - the important thing was I had an onion on my belt, which was the style at the time. They didn’t have white onions because of the war. The only thing you could get was those big yellow ones…
Yeah, Joel, I tested my dad out (he’s even older than I am!) and sure enough, while the bloody news was on, we rambled over earthquakes and New Zealand and bad land management practices in the South Island landslides and radio towers and planes and engines and (somehow) Invercargill and radios (his incredibly boring speciality) and airports and airport communications stations and equipment and modern equipment and the design of chips and the relative merits of chips and transistors and - there went the news, twenty minutes of it anyway. All I could think of was the old bloke in Kumars at No. 42, who does that sort of thing so brilliantly, although he is only 18 years old (really).
So hang in there, there’s life in those onions yet. Which reminds me, back to those sheilas …… Joe
"Dickety"! Highly dubious.
Nik, I am one of the new baby boomers and find it quite insulting that you say Baby Boomers are the next lot of whingers as most of us have had to heavily fund our own retirement, having paid millions in taxes from our working lifetimes to the likes of you!!!!
DDT Chumley
I know this is satire, but I just don’t get
In the Senate the Greens voted for the Opposition sponsored Bill, and they don’t have a vote in the lower house. According to Emma Macdonald,
http://www.canberratimes.com.au/news/local/news/general/parliament-gets-…
Really the Greens had little to do with this issue and the article feels like Ben Pobjie takes every opportunity to slag the Greens.
I’m sick of the gatekeepers - aka Australia’s media of all persuasions - treating minority views as unrepresentative swill. When will they learn the difference between empowering extremists such as the former member for Ipswich, and enabling visionary leadership so desperately needed by the world at the moment.
"Bob Brown described the constitutional stoush as a Rudd Government contrivance and an outrageous attempt to stymie debate and avoid responsibility to pay pensioners more. He accused the Government of trying to apply House rules to the Senate."
As I said, tzudd, "the usual people like Bob Brown acting like their usual annoying selves".
Why does Bob Brown hate the Constitution, that’s what I’d like to know. Why doesn’t Bob Brown go back to China where he belongs?
Why indeed. I’m sure our kev would even translate for him, if he promised to stay there.
What I want to know is what sort of person posts comments at 11.33pm on a friday night?
If you were a dinkum aussie, you’d have been pissed and throwing up in the gutter well before then. You’re not chinese, are you? What kind of name is Pobjie? Is that chinese? Probly means I hate aussies (especially old ones) in mandarin.
What kind of country calls their lingo after a piece of bloody fruit?
What sort of jam sangas, anyway? When I was a kid, we only had blackberry, cause the vines grew next to the railway track. We only had a week to get the berries, cause the railway blokes used to poison them, and us. They said it was something to do with the ecology but that was bull; the ecology hadn’t been invented yet.
We reckoned they just wanted to poison us, so we wouldn’t get blood on the trains.
Irony: my parents grew up in the ‘great’ depression, just after the ‘great’ war.
We had to invent a really crap depression, just so they could go out the way they came in.
The war will probably be really crap too.
But there has been progress. They grew up on bread and dripping, not bloody jam like now.
(still) Grim.
www.thecomensalist.com
I just don’t understand this article.
Why shoot them? Just when everyone is having such fun screwing them Ben Pobjie wants to come out and shoot them!
What is wrong with you Ben? Are you a necrophile?
"I just don’t understand this article"
Me either.
Asti
I reckon as I’m both a Green and a pensioner, I’m entitled to object to the lot of you. Why do you lot hate us lot so? I have to be quick, as I’m too poor to own a computer or pay for the other thing you need to send emails, and my son is away for only a short time - he has a ruler next to the computer that he smacks over my knuckles if he catches me on the keyboard…
The Libs are a totally hypocritical lot though. Last year when the federal pollies where voting themselves a pay increase - a substantial one - (the rise would be enough per week for me to live on) - the Greens - that nice Bob Brown (Oh, I did I say I was a Green too?) - moved to disallow the pollies’ pay increase, and instead give a rise to the pensioners. Both Liberals and Labor voted it down.
Now that I can see the contempt that you young lot have for us, I’ll just duck off and do my bit for the pensioners. While my son is still away, thinking I’m looking after the grandkids, I’ll just put something nasty in their milk. There are lots of rusty tins in the garage where I bed down, some of that should do…..
Okay, now I understand the article. Thanks Asti. Thanks Ben.
Grim,
You mean you had your own bread and dripping ??? Christ, we had to go over the road and ask a pensioner if we could borrow her dripping.
But they were good times, we were poor but happy. Joe