Dialogue: It would take more than Samuels' past to shock Gen X

Chatting to a few of my peers early last week, I was struck by the number who thought that when I referred to the name Dover, I meant the place in England where 54 unfortunate stowaways were found dead in a truck.

My peers are not all morons. Most woke up to the fact that I was talking about Dover Samuels, rather than the Dover of ye olde famous white cliffs, of which most of us have only fleeting memories anyway.

The cliffs just sort of sat politely around in the background as you dealt with more immediate concerns at port - namely, trying to decide whether it was worth trying to smuggle a half-smoked, wet little joint through to France.

But anyway, Dover. I mention the fleeting confusion between Dovers among my peers for a reason. I wanted to point out how small an impact a purported sex scandal has in the minds of those of us who are aged under 35. I present as proof the fact that when I mentioned Dover, people thought first of a small, insignificant corner of England that they visited stoned and couldn't wait to leave.

Dover Samuels came to mind second - a close second, but second nonetheless.

So I suspect the preoccupation with the relevance of public figures' love lives to their work is mainly a baby-boomer hang-up (as if the world needed another one).

Boomers are consumed by this issue. I find this aspect of modern existence more compelling than public figures' kinky love lives.

Remember the Clinton thing? An absolute classic. I watched, nauseated but compelled, as boomers like Maureen Dowd chased their own tails for a year as they tried to decide whether oral sex in the Oval Office lowered the tone of an office that boomers purportedly had no respect for anyway.

Let's not forget that the typical high-brow boomer claimed to lose all respect for the state, presidency and so on 30-odd years ago as a result of Kent State, Watergate, yap yap yap.

God knows why boomers are so twisted. Doubtless, they'll take a moment from mourning Brian Edwards to write and tell me. I suspect that their preoccupation with ascertaining the impact a politician's love life has on his day job is the tragic result of coming of age at a time when illusions began to seriously crumble. Imagine finding out that JFK was probably eating grapes with 10 high-class whores when he was supposed to be sorting out the Bay of Pigs. That's got to blow your mind.

Now, Gen X is different. By the time we came to adulthood, in the early 1990s, the train had already left. We knew that everyone's private life was a shambles, whether they held public office or not. Most people's parents were divorced, or sleeping with each other, or coming out, or borrowing your tights to cross-dress.

Meanwhile, the likes of Nixon were thriving on the speaking circuit. But hell, it wasn't so bad. We're all still here.

So I suspect that we expect everyone to have a shonky past. We pass very little judgment therein.

I remember when Wellington journalism's own holy terror, the nuggety Fred Tullett, came to speak to my journalism class in the early 1990s. (I think it was Fred. It might have been Frank Haden. Journalism was littered with lookalike elderly reactionaries in those days. I mean no disrespect when I say that their mothers probably couldn't pick them out in a line-up).

Anyway, Fred began rattling on about the great day when Naomi Lange dialled his number, and sang like the proverbial canary about her husband and Ms Pope. Unfortunately, we simply didn't think infidelity was much of a story. In fact, we rather respected Lange for choosing Mag. At least he didn't run off with an 18-year-old stripper. That was new.

The moral: don't worry that your past might come up and bite you on the behind one day or that future Prime Ministers will sack you on the grounds of questionable image. You're about to see in a generation that truly doesn't give a damn.