Honest, clear-eyed, capitalist youth

A few years ago I took my youngest and a few of her friends to one of those big outdoor rock concerts, my first such event for many a long year. I was utterly shocked by what I saw. Rock concerts have become so commercialised, so mainstream. Coke was there, Pepsi was there, Girlfriend magazine was there searching for a supermodel, and Hyundai were giving away a Getz. Everywhere we turned, commercial samples, stickers and other advertising paraphernalia were thrust into our hands. Back in the 1970s - at the old Hordern Pavilion, when I went to rock concerts - the only thing being sold apart from illegal substances was Spartacus, the socialist newspaper.

As a generation, we thought we were changing things. Boys grew their hair long and shocked their parents - particularly their fathers - to the core. Girls wore their skirts short and took off their bras (we never burnt them, just left them moldering in drawers) and demanded the right to be taken seriously - shocking our parents, particularly our fathers, to the core. You could tell the difference between the old and the young at a glance in those days, even if, sometimes, it was hard to tell the difference between the boys and the girls.

We took drugs, swore and turned our music up loud. We slept around, took the pill and lived in sin. We demonstrated for peace and our rights, and against apartheid. We wanted to be thought of as radical and some of us really were. We wore Che Guevara T-shirts and read the Little Red School Book. We thought the establishment was on its last legs. But we overestimated ourselves and underestimated our enemy.

We hadn’t reckoned with the chameleon that is capitalism. Like the AIDs virus, capitalism fooled us. It changed its shape - fitting our new aspirations just as well as it had fit our old ones. It embraced rock culture, drug culture (capitalism doesn’t have to be legal), women’s lib, multi-culturalism and the sexual revolution.

In fact, perhaps we shouldn’t judge our kids harshly for being in thrall to capitalism. Perhaps they’re just more honest and clear-eyed than we were. There was always a fair dollop of hypocrisy in hippie culture.

Most of my generation wanted to change the world only because it was fashionable  (most of us didn’t even know who Che Guevara was). And fashions, as we all know, change. But there is one thing that never changes. Kids have always seemed determined to be contrary, at least to their parents.