REASON’s Glenn Garvin yearns to be a cultural critic, but when he uses his review of the recent Woodstock documentary Woodstock: Three Days That Defined a Generation, his distaste for the Boomer Generation lures him off the beaten track and into a ravine, where I fear the wolves may eat him. Here’s the pivotal moment in his review:
Source: Wikipedia
The most notable thing about the PBS Woodstock is the contortionist specter of a generation blowing smoke up its own ass. The last 15 minutes or so are mostly devoted to people who attended Woodstock declaring it a utopically transformative event that changed everything. Really? Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin would be dead of drug overdoses within a year. The Vietnam War continued for another three. The next president elected was not George McGovern but Richard Nixon, and when Baby Boomers finally did start electing presidents, the result was Afghanistan and Iraq. And raise your hand if you think race relations are any better today than they were in 1969.
You could as easily make the argument that what defined a generation was not Woodstock but Altamont or the Manson Family. Baby Boomers didn’t change the world at Woodstock, or create a New Man. Their only accomplishment was to stand up in public, half a million strong, and chant the word “Fuck!”without getting spanked. It’s sad that, 50 years later, they still can’t tell the difference.
And off Garvin strolls, convinced he’s buried the Boomers. Let’s dissect these self-satisfied paragraphs in the context of his dismissal that it was a transformative event. Note that I’m not backing the claim that it was transformative, I’m simply ripping his reasoning to pieces.
- Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin would be dead of drug overdoses within a year. And this is relevant how? But let’s pretend it is. It’s not a stretch, not even a mild strain, to understand that with transformation comes losses. Pioneering new territory sometimes leads into the lairs of trolls for some pioneers, but the misfortunes of the few do not serve to characterize the event. Or shall we discuss the sad case of many other suicides throughout the ages?
- The Vietnam War continued for another three. To use this to dismiss Woodstock as a transformative event is wrong on several levels. Of course. We can make the comparatively weak point that transformation doesn’t take place immediately on a cultural level, it necessarily takes time to spread, where limitations have to do with information transmission time, resistance to change variables, etc. Or we can charge into the strong argument: The Boomers weren’t in charge. Who was? Nixon was a member of the Greatest Generation, and while I’ve done no further research, it seems reasonable to believe Congress was dominated by members of that Generation as well. In point of objective consideration, the fact that it took only three years for Vietnam to terminate might be considered amazing, if not for the many other factors which undoubtedly affected the process leading to that decision by Nixon. But to suggest that a transformative event for a demographic group that’s not in charge of war-making should have led to the termination of that war is either madness, naive, or imagining a point in order to condemn a group Garvin doesn’t much care for.
- The next president elected was not George McGovern but Richard Nixon. Garvin believes the hand is quicker than the eye, but it’s not. Let’s go back to that sentence and read it again. Who was nominated by the major political party Democrats? George McGovern, a candidate so far to the left that he only won one state while challenging a sitting incumbent. Hell, I recall once my father, a lifelong Democrat, admitting he had voted for Nixon. McGovern was just too radical – and yet he was the Democratic Party candidate. And this is proof that Woodstock was nothing more than a puff of smoke? Really?
- … and when Baby Boomers finally did start electing presidents, the result was [the wars in] Afghanistan and Iraq. Is it wise to attribute to the ghosts of “generations” the dubious and mendacious actions of a Republican Administration? Here we assume a “generation” even exists and then heap sins on it, when the reality is that a major political party charged into a moral and pragmatic abyss, having been rattled by disaster and challenged by outside forces and alien tactics. It might be valid to suggest the Boomers’ attention to security is, or was, deficient, as the Clinton Administration witnessed the Oklahoma City bombing, a failed bombing in New York City by forces allied to the later 9/11 bombers, and a successful attack on a Navy ship, but when we see the prudent reaction to those attacks, contrasted with the immoral response of the Bush Administration, it suggests that Garvin’s entire line of reasoning is damn well silly.
- And raise your hand if you think race relations are any better today than they were in 1969. It’s always handy to suggest we measure the immeasurable when defending the indefensible, and I fear there’s no handy yardstick for the health of race relations. So, how do we answer the question? I can state I think race relations are far better, just on my say so, or I can note that Woodstock took place in 1969, only 9 years after the segregated lunch counter sit-ins, and 5 years after the Civil Rights Act, and the official segregated lunch counter is a rare bird indeed. We can discuss the election of President Obama and the generally positive emotions he elicits, a decade later, for his performance in office. We can even talk about the protests, violent or not, over police shootings of blacks. Why are they proof of my point? Because they happen, and they are multi-racial. Race relations may not be where we want them, especially when it comes to certain police departments. But, again, this is all hand-waving – and if Garvin agrees, then it invalidates his point.
- Baby Boomers didn’t change the world at Woodstock, or create a New Man. Their only accomplishment was to stand up in public, half a million strong, and chant the word “Fuck!”without getting spanked. It’s sad that, 50 years later, they still can’t tell the difference. No, they looked at the disaster called the Vietnam War, at its societal antecedents that appeared to lead up to it, and said, “No!” in a mildly repugnant and incoherent manner. To take it any further than that, though, is to make his review nothing more than a political hit piece, while ignoring the fact that the conservative predilection for war since Vietnam – which was started by the Democrats, it can be argued – has been generally condemned, and only defended by those who started them and thus have a vested ideological interest in having them seen as justified. As libertarians – or Libertarians – are generally seen as allied with conservatives these days, and rock music and general libertineism in line with the left side of the spectrum, we’re left with the spectacle of a conservative, or libertarian, attempting to defrock the naked masses of Woodstock for sins committed by the conservatives, and the nebulous guilt of Woodstock only being its inability to convince the conservatives of their own sins.
