Woodstock At 50: What Are We Fightin' For?
11 August 2019 @ 16:56
Fifty years ago starting on this Thursday, 15 August, the biggest [up to that time] Rock festival was held in upper-state New York at Woodstock.
Since the concert ended on 19 August, the myth-makers on the Left have been eulogizing the event as the equivalent of a religious and philosophical experience [maaan].
Over at Powerline, Paul Mirengoff is having none of that [tip of the fedora to Teecee Lynch] in his post Misrepresenting Woodstock.¹
He — rightfully — takes issue specifically with the recent PBS documentary, Woodstock: Three Days That Defined A Generation on The American Experience:
…with the 50th anniversary approaching, it was inevitable that precincts of the mainstream media would make Woodstock out to be more than what it was. The heady combination of nostalgia and leftism would see to that.
…I watched as much of it as I could take (about an hour) last night.
I watched the whole bloody thing [man, I really hate Hippies — especially the old unrepentant ones that have survived until now].
Mr. Mirengoff remarks:
The PBS program tied Woodstock to the radical politics of the era. That's fair. The festival celebrated the "counterculture," of which radical leftism was a key element.
But radical leftism did not define "a generation" — at least not the generation of Woodstock. In the first presidential election after the festival, about half the members of that generation voted for Richard Nixon. As the Woodstock generation came into its own, it elected Ronald Reagan twice by landslides, and Reagan's successor by a comfortable margin.
This was followed by two terms of a center-left president and two terms of a center-right one. Not until 2008, 39 years after Woodstock when that generation was on the wane, did America elect a president as far left as the one who had departed the year of the festival.
Actually, Obama was further to the Left than LBJ. Johnson was Old Left; Obama was part of the New New Left that emerged out of the New Left Movement that was part of 1960's.
More from PM:
So it's ironic, I guess, that Ronald Reagan, not Woodstock, is the political legacy of the Woodstock generation.
Even at the time of the festival, its politics didn't reflect the politics of young Americans. I've already noted Nixon's standing in 1972.
Most likely it didn't, but we're talking Influence on The Culture here, not numbers.
Modern Leftist Thinking has seeped into every aspect of America in the fifty years since. As I've written in The Present Crisis:
The perversion of Reason that is Leftist Thinking has infused each and every one of our Souls. This has not been an overnight process, but has taken over a century to achieve in America.
The Left has always understood and continues to understand that, if you want to achieve lasting Power And Control over a society, you have to influence it's Culture — grab a hold of it and reshape it — and take control of governmental levers of Power at every level, down to Dog Catcher and Meter Maid; also, you have to be the heaviest influence that shapes and molds it's Arts and Sciences in all the areas they touch, from story-telling in all it's forms and meteorological climate theories down through to the types of drawings children are permitted to create and opinions Scientists are allowed to write and speak.
At this effort, the Leftists have been exceedingly successful.
Mr. Mirengoff believes that the Woodstockers ended-up taking Materialism 'to heights far beyond those reached by their parents, who are reviled for this "sin" in the PBS program. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but it destroys any claim that Woodstock "defined a generation."'
First of all: it is a Bad Thing because, in our fevered rush to obtain things, we consign Transcendence to The Ash Heap Of History, thereby removing a Key Restraint on our actions.
And, actually the Woodstock Myth, specifically, and the Counter-Culture Hippie Movement, generally, did define the Baby Boomer Generation and Contaminate the succeeding ones.
As Teacher in Tejas remarks in the Comments section of PM's post:
I've also made the point that the Woodstock Generation was the first generation in US history who said "I AM NEVER GOING TO BE LIKE MY PARENTS!" And then they went ahead and actually DID THAT!. Yep the Woodstock generation then went ahead with "I'm going to be the cool parent….I'm going to smoke weed with my son….I will let my fifteen year old daughter spend the night with her boyfriend" Way to go kids!
The Utopian Fantasy of trying to 'make the world perfect' has been passed-down to the subsequent generations. Young people: Your parents can never be your friend — you don't want them to be; they're there to Civilize you.
Commentator Gary Benson:
…Those counter culture youth were my generation and a large proportion of us did not agree with them nor did we see them as idealists. What they did accomplish was to take over academia, the arts, seminaries, law schools, and journalism. They are still narcissistic and now empowered. They spawned the new iteration of the left.
Titan28 has a theory about who made this documentary:
The PBS Woodstock documentary was fatuous. My sense is it was put together by a group of just out of Columbia or Harvard 20-somethings, a few of whose parents, mostly darling burnouts, were allowed to opine about how sex and drugs changed their lives. The comments needed thumbnail photos up in the corner, so we viewers could see just how hippies age. [BB: Instead of Red Diaper Babies, maybe we should call these kids: Tye-Dye Babies?]
Most of all, watching the show was like listening to a 24 y/o history professor providing, today, his cogent analysis of how it all began to go wrong when America entered Viet Nam. The Woodstock documentary was of a piece with the largely execrable Ken Burns Viet Nam 10 parter that emphasized the input of malcontents and, over and over, gave short shrift to the American fighting man, who was often portrayed as feckless.
Even when the left pretends to love something about America, like Woodstock, peel the veneer away and there it is: that loathing of the American spirit. Lordy, some of those voice overs were darn nigh idiotic. I came away thinking Wavy Gravy was a latter day Marcus Aurelius. [BB: Could somebody, anybody, buy him some dentures?]
Sidebar: can we please please please stop giving taxpayer money to PBS & NPR?
Methinks you should speak to Trumpicus Maximus Pompey about that last one.
Whoever put this fictional documentary together, one thing is clear: they were willfully Ignorant of The Truth.
In the same Comments section, John Moore reminds us of one aspect of The Truth:
Unfortunately, too many influential members of my generation did in fact adopt radical leftist views as a result of the Vietnam War draft. It greatly accelerated the takeover of academia by the left, and the takeover of the left by radicals — a trend which continues to this day.
It is telling that a couple of years later, demonstrations that could bring in 300,000 people had trouble getting 300. The difference: nobody was being sent to Vietnam by the draft.
Exactly. Those young people learned early the practice of High Hypocrisy. But the Leftist Intelligentsia exploited this.
Loran Blood makes an interesting point:
Woodstock was, in essence, a modern revival of the ancient pagan Saturnalia and similar agrarian fertility festivals in which orgiastic sexuality, drug use and removal of normal moral restraints were an important aspect of such social institutions.
It was among the first instantiations of the Dyonisan upsurge and psychology of the sixties that turned towards the shutting off of rational thought and normal moral inhibitions paired with unrestrained immersion in intense feeling states (which also drove the politics, and still does today), worship of the sensate (far from any reaching for the spiritual) and the rapidly growing cult of eroticism that defined the cultural revolution of the sixties and set the stage for what we are now seeing among the "snowflakes" of the Millennial generation,
We are still trying to clean up this mess, but the mess has rapidly outpaced this cultural janitorial project.
Commentator Acidulous reminds us, lest we forget:
Talk about "collusion" with the Russians. They could do a multi-part documentary on the collusion between the Soviets and the leaders and big mouths of the anti-war "resistance". Many of them were Soviet front groups being supported by the Kremlin. And then those engaged in the treachery went on to occupy the heights of the culture. When the left talks about "collusion" they get a pass re the symbiotic relationship between the communists of that era and those in this country who were aiding and abetting on the left[.]
Wherever you see Leftism in action, you can always expect to see Treachery and Treason.
From Johnfembup:
…at the close of the event, the self-anointed children of peace and saviors of the planet went home, leaving mountains of their trash that adults cleaned up after them. That's always seemed to me the best metaphor for the whole Woodstock phenomenon.
Many from that generation (my generation) continue to this day creating metaphorical mountains of trash that adults must clean up after them. And because many of that generation's own children were raised to expect the same sort of privilege accorded to saviors of the planet, the trash pile seems to be growing even as the supply of adults seems to be shrinking.
Now behold the America that radical leftists could only dream of, in 1969[.]
But John: they're still creating actual mounds of trash [at least this time, it appears, without the feces, urine, and bodily fluids]. Recall, if you will, the trash the Anti-TEA Partiers left at the sites of their demonstrations [and how absolutely clean the sites where the TEA Party had been left]. These Anti-this-and-thats always leave messes behind that the Producers have to mop-up — well, in the words of a The Who song: 'We're not gonna take it'.
What are we fighting for?
To save America from these Fools.
Let us end with some encouraging — and hilarious — news…
I was gladdened to hear that Woodstock 50 was cancelled because the organizers could raise enough money [Bwah-ha-ha].
Fox News commentator Tyrus had the absolute best take on this on The Greg Gutfeld Show last night [his comments start at approximately 1:25]:
https://video.foxnews.com/v/6071596600001/?playlist_id=4249245556001#sp=show-clips
[can't seem to embed the damn video]
¹ Typical of Powerline, assumptions are made that are sometimes wrong, but the gang over there are still worth a read — their faulty reasoning is oft times with helpful insights.
from → Apparatchiks, Dupes, Fellow Travellers, Fools & Idiots, Fox News, Greg Gutfeld, Hippies, Intelligentsia, Leftism, Leftism Unmasked, Leftist Bible, Leftist Playbook, Leftist Thinking, PBS, Powerline, Russia, The Culture, The Naked Face Of Leftism, The Present Crisis, The Vietnam War, Yuppies
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