Love And The Ruins
What with baby boomers running our instruments of communication, what were we going to talk about this month but, yes, the 40th anniversary of Woodstock? Lay it on me, man! Peace! Love! All that '60s stuff!
Or some of it. The marginality of Woodstock as a Great American Event will grow more obvious as—I hate to put it this way—people younger than the present writer diminish in number. There wasn't much about the '60s one would want to relive, and somewhere on the list of forgettables would be the muddy mess in Max Yasgur's pasture that August of 1969.
The '60s made more memorable contributions than that to cultural and social fragmentation, the foremost of those being the sabotage of our educational institutions. Demonstrations against the war weren't nice either, but I am minded to speak of education—specifically, of higher education—due to the appearance of an important book, Stanford in Turmoil: Campus Unrest, 1966-1972 by a university president of the era, Richard W. Lyman.
It is not a happy account. Gangs of somewhat educated yahoos (look up, some time, the origin of the term in Gulliver's Travels) raged about, bullying the administration, taking over buildings—actually burning down the ROTC building, plus two wings of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences—destroying 10 offices and one foreign scholar's life work.
Stanford? This went on at Stanford? I'd been there only a few years earlier as a graduate student in history. Indeed, one of my professors was Richard W. Lyman, in his pre-presidential phase. He was a very good professor indeed: a gentleman and a scholar, as people used to say, when those terms mattered to many.
Many a gentleman and scholar failed to credit his eyes in the '60s as placid campuses erupted with hatred, malice and unreason. I wouldn't presume to guess how many believed intuitively in Original Sin—the inborn pride and madness of the human race. I can't imagine that even the most irreligious came away from the '60s without some intuition of human defectiveness.
Woodstock, my eye! Peace and love—mere dumb show; dish towel disguises for the awful passions hiding below, starting with the passion to have it—whatever "it" might be—all one's way, without reference to norms, traditions, dignity, tolerance, free speech, the received wisdom of the species.
"However irrational political processes may be," writes Lyman, "they are not made any more rational by [violent] behavior. Rationality itself was widely scored in the 1960s and suffered setbacks. It has never entirely regained its place in its supposed Temple, the University." No, and probably won't in our lifetimes. The old system was founded on general consent to the idea of rational discourse. We were finding out around the time of Woodstock that rational discourse was the last thing on the minds of the moral vandals. Who—scary thought—still live among us. Bill Ayers and his wife Bernardine Dohrn come to mind, thanks to last year's small flap over their friendship with Barack Obama. How many mob members, from Stanford and a thousand other campuses, how many or members of their cheering sections, live down the street, or, worse, occupy places of prominence, as in the media? Neither they nor the marks they left have gone away.
Writes Lyman: "Without falling into the trap of blaming the 1960s for everything that has gone wrong since, one can argue that American politics has never recovered from the blows it suffered at the hands of the Sixties radicals." He faults the Right for fostering disillusionment with government. "But the New Left got there first. Their contempt for ordinary politics, with its compromises and evasions, has by now become epidemic in the United States, to the point where many people believe that the only way to deal with any really important question of public policy is to take it 'out of politics.' Students of the rise of fascism in Europe may be forgiven for finding this worrisome."
Happy 40th anniversary, folks.
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Not only was it hateful and destructive, and essentially rich kids looking for a good time, but it didn’t challenge the status quo really. The anti-war posturing (selfish really — ‘don’t cramp my style by drafting me, man’) belied the fact that these people supported the Great Society (‘Daddy State will pay my way for ever’).
Woodstock: a lot of sheep in a miserable pasture, having only the grass they brought with them, and began to notice the mud when they reached the bottom of the bag. Meanwhile, the media had made a lot of hay out of the hippie fashion and its vague humanistic theme.
The Band played Americana staples, Country Joe McDonald asks the timeless question, even Hendrix would go on to write a pro-life song, while Reagan was liberalizing abortion and divorce laws...and Garcia was accommodating to the FBI. Guessing things were bit more complicated then some might want to remember it, but what do I know, not my time.
When I watch the movie nowadays, it becomes clear that is more of a propaganda film than a documentary. People were interviewed selectively to create a false sense of excitement, showing only pretty faces, while most of the ugly supporting commoners were perplexed and confounded by the proceedings. In fact the vast majority of the concert goers were rather straight and unhippie like looking. I presume that they were there visiting only because it became a thing to do. The stuff the event was legend for was confined to a very small portion of the attendees, most of the other people just had a lot of beer. And the ratio of boys to girls was something like 6 to 1.
The movie had a great effect on the upcoming culture of the 70s as the mainstream tried to acommodate some of the hippie sensibilities. In the process that somewhat pleasant 60s feel that started with Elvis, Beach Boys, Doo Wop, the Rat Pack and later Gary Lewis or the Association, deteriorated into the morbid world of Scorcese, Coppolla, Michael Jackson, Madonna and Spielberg to where we are now, where the Sopranos and gangster rap and Metallica are deemed to be the pinnacles of the American pop culture.
We were on Search and Destroy missions in the Central Higlands of Vietnam when Woodstock happened. We heard about it over Armed Forces radio and couldn't have cared less. The only issue we had was that we were jealous of a bunch of skanky guys getting all that free love. We could've used a little love at that point, free or otherwise.
"We were on Search and Destroy missions in the Central Higlands of Vietnam."
Ron,
Any lasting immpressions of the Mong people or the Central Highlands that stick in your mind after the passing of
years?
Robert,
The Hmongs seemed to me to be a gentle people but were quick to anger if they perceived even slight injustices that we would deem of no consequence and could be brutal. They lived a rustic, hard life in huts in the hills, fished the rivers and streams, hunted, made clothing, and were very self-sufficient. They marveled at our rations, at processed items (as I did too, but for different reasons.) I imagine their lives in 1969 were not very different than they might've been in 1569. A few of them were with my brigade (73rd Airborne) as scouts and interpreters. I remember that they were brave. Curiously, they didn't seem to hate the NVA regulars as much as they hated the VC. Maybe because they considered the VC to be "homegrown" traitors and not "foreigners." I say these things now at age 60, looking back, but at the time I was twenty, barely out of high school, scared to death, and I knew less than nothing. I did not see the physical beauty of the country until I was back home and could recollect it without fear, think about some of the things I saw that were not part of combat. Thank you for caring enough to ask a question. It seems to me that Vietnam is used these days only as a cautionary tale or term of abuse; no one cares what happened there or what we went through. The friendships I made there and the memories I have will last forever. I'm thinking seriously of taking a trip there.
First, thanks, Mr. Holt, for your eloquent though brief response to Robert II.
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Please, Mr. Murchison, don't confuse Woodstock with student radicals. The kids who attended Woodstock were music fans, mostly, and I'd say most of them also liked recreational drugs, especially marijuana. But I doubt that Woodstock attenders overlapped much with student radicals.
Remember that when Abbie Hoffman tried to grab a mic in the middle of the Who's set, Pete Townshend shoved him offstage. I submit that politics wasn't on the agenda at Woodstock. Further, the reason that it was characterized as being an event characterized by "peace and love" arose from the virtual absence of violence despite bad weather and inadequate services for the crowd that showed up.
That, as Mr. Bailey notes, "the vast majority of the concert goers were rather straight and unhippie like looking" attests to the facts that hippies were a small, small minority of the audience for rock music, and that most young adults had to look "mainstream" to get and hold down jobs. I would, Mr. Bailey, like to know, however, how it is that you know that "most of the ugly supporting commoners were perplexed and confounded by the proceedings." I haven't seen the movie in a while (never again will be too soon), but I don't recall anything in it to support what you say. Were you there?
As for Mr. fogey's comment that Woodstock was attended by
1) "essentially rich kids looking for a good time" and
2) "didn’t challenge the status quo really"--
well,
1) might be true if you equate being an American with being rich; and
2) would be more accurate if worded thus: "didn't challenge the status quo but altered its contents, in that everything most characteristic of Woodstock became normal thereafter: music, drugs, indiscriminate sex, slovenliness, etc."
My thanks to you Mr. Holt for the response. I work daily with a man who did what you did in Vietnam and is about your age. I enjoy his company to that of about any others I work around on a daily basis. We hunt and fish together as well. His memory of the Hmong and the Highlands is almost identical to yours. You fellows from Vietnam are quiet heroes in the same way that wonder workers who perform miracles always caution the recepients to not mention it to anyone else. Or as you said,"The friendships I made there and the memories I have will last forever." You were a soldier once and young. God Bless you.
Ray and Robert,
Thank you so much for your kind words. It's funny, in remembering that time, a hundred words are too many and a million wouldn't be enough. Already the term "Vietnam War" sounds like ancient history, like the Punic Wars or some such thing. I'm still sad about what happened there, about the friends I lost, a couple of whom I was in kindergarten with, but also very proud of what we did as men under often horrific conditions. I can say this: I would not have missed it. Of course, I came back alive, so that's easy for me to say. My friends up on the Wall in DC might have a different take.
#8 I was not there. However a number of years ago I had a chance to see some of the outtakes. There are hundreds if not thousands of hours of film that were not used. My host's favorite anecdote was of Scorcese screaming at one of his helpers to give his some footage of cool looking girls instead of straight looking guys gawking and looking ill at ease. Also, supposedly some of the scenes were staged.
I had a choice that weekend 40 years ago: Go to Woodstock or go surfing in the Hamptons. I went surfing and have never regretted not sitting in gigantic traffic jams on the NYS Thruway, sleeping in the mud, listening to a concert in the rain and having to deal with thousands of pseudo-hippies on all sorts of dope (BTW, a lot of these phonies are running Wall Street investment banks today).
#11 Thanks, Mr. Bailey. And from what I intuit about Scorsese from the few of his films I've seen (and disliked pretty thoroughly), I can just see him chewing out his assistants. A thoroughly unpleasant man, though he has made himself very useful in his efforts to preserve old movies far better than anything he's made.