Har. I haven’t read something so patently ridiculous since I read that The Other Fellow  was getting a book published. Marian Salzman is a marketing person with a big company. She writes “Intelligent Dialogue.” Oops, she missed both – her post isn’t intelligent and it isn’t a dialogue.
It boggles. Here’s what she wrote…

Who’s to blame for the economy going into serious decline? The short and easy answer is: Greedy Boomers. (emphasis mine)

Short and easy? Is that what Marian Salzman gets paid big bucks to do? Come up with the short and easy answer? I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop. That she was making such a wide-sweeping generalization and then would poo-poo the idea and offer some “intelligent” analysis.

She doesn’t.

Whatever history may decide, today’s commentators and pundits of all ages have decided that Boomers—the dominant cohort in many developed countries—are guilty. And whether or not they’re really to blame, what counts is that they look like they are. (emphasis mine)

Instead she uses this generalization to advance her personal agenda. She needs to get some traction for “her idea” that the younger boomers should be called something different from Boomers.

Cuspers, the age cohort that has been living in the shadow of the Boomers, now have even more reasons to stake out their own separate identity and values.

She looks like she would fit into the younger boomer age range. But more dastardly is the fact that she is laying the horrible, horrible, horrible condition of the United States at the feet of Boomers born between 1946 and 1953.

(Did I mention what horrible, horrible shape the U.S. is in? Do I have to let you know I’m being sarcastic?)

So Marian Salzman decides she will use a “new term” – and hopes it gets buzz. And then cash in her big bonus for her impact on the world of marketing.  Which by the way, having an impact on the world of marketing is like having an impact on the world of Manga.

I wonder if she realizes she is using a word that is two years old? This “old idea” has real value and merit and makes sense.

…cusper has the benefit of more naturally identifying with multiple generations’ values, beliefs, and interests. They have the advantage of being considered “one of us” by each adjacent generation, while having enough distance from each to create perspective.

Marian Salzman says her group wants change.

Me too. I want Chief Marketing Officers to give it up and admit they really don’t earn the huge salaries and bonuses they get paid.

Marketing. C-level executives in charge of marketing. Dump ’em. They create nothing. They are a drain on company assets. They add no wealth to the shareholders. Advertising pays. Marketing sucks.

Salzman also drags out the old (really, really old) “digital divide” agrument.

In fact, embracing digital technology is one of the telling dividers between Boomers and Cupsers. It’s no coincidence that leading-edge Cuspers such as Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Tim-Berners Lee (all born in 1955) helped create the digital universe that Cuspers and younger generations now inhabit as a matter of course.

Yes, Gates and Jobs created computers for the mass market. I’ll bet you a dozen donuts you never heard of Tim-Berners Lee. (hypenated first name? sissy.) People say he invented the internet. To put him with Gates and Jobs is like saying the chemist that discovered  gasoline belongs with Ransom E. Olds and Henry Ford. Gasoline didn’t mean much until cars came along. The internet didn’t need much until mass-market computers came along.  She is just showing off.  I hate show offs.

(Bill Gates is a Prick.)

As with most people her age, she forgets that older boomers were the first to put those computers to work in the mass market. We were buying them for home use, we were the first to use them in the work place.  The digital divide lies with “The Greatest Generation.” Not Boomers.

Then, to prove that her whole diatribe is simply to gain her buzz, she uses a line from John Fitzgerald Kennedy to get the Twitter community a blaze with “

Watch out for Tweets that proclaim “Ich bin ein Cusper.”

Hello? Marian Salzman? adapting a JFK quote and thinking it will catch?

Peroxide causes brain injury. I’ll notify the FDA right away.

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Here’s how she describes herself on her about page…

(Salzman is credited with popularizing “metrosexuality.”) w00t!

update: Here’s a woman, probably the same age as Salzman, that is adding real value to the world.