I wrote this in the summer of 2019, in reaction to the onslaught of blearily nostalgic recollections of the Woodstock Art & Music Fair.
It was also inspired by the insipid sniping between my generation and the millennial horde, with all that patronizing, condescending and willfully ignorant “OK, Boomer” and “Avocado Toast” demographic bullshit being passed back and forth as if it were clever or insightful, as opposed to, yes, bullshit.
Now that the dust begins to settle in what I still fear and believe is only the first battle in a culture war which we will lose to a minority of supernaturalist shitheads who’ll believe anything as long as it supports their own cognitive dissonance—just like, unfortunately, too many of the woke shitheads, too—it’s worth noting how those demographic presumptions came up so wrong.
Both sides continued to operate on the assumption of monolithic voting blocs, definable by age, ethnicity, sex, sexual orientation—the list goes on.
Despite these expectations, both Democrats and Republicans found rejection from what were incorrectly identified as sure things, and acceptance by others presumed lost to the other side in the culture wars.
To put a fine point to it, the polls fucked up even more than they have in the past, and despite what you may believe, they fucked up plenty back then, too.
It would be lovely—I am without much hope, but indulge me—if this were to lead to a rejection of polling, not to mention a different means of identifying allies and adversaries in the ongoing conflict which will persist well after I have flowed into the mystic.
That said, we live in Gore Vidal’s United States of Amnesia, and thus I remain pessimistic in this regard. But, as a skeptic and romantic realist, as opposed to a cynic or nihilist, I’d love to be proven wrong.
And as a skeptic, I certainly don’t expect this proof to show up in my lifetime.
So, as noted a few days back, I watched the Woodstock documentary on AMERICAN EXPERIENCE, with, also as noted, nostalgia and regret. I was eighteen going on nineteen, and the film captured my boots on the ground participation in that signature Age of Aquarius event, along with the attendant experience, all too well.
I should note that despite what my friends with whom I shared the weekend may insist, I didn’t have a particularly good time, enduring rather than enjoying those three days of peace and love. It was, for me at least, a filthy, intimidating and oddly embarrassing experience.
In retrospect, I’m glad I was there, but in the moment, as it was happening, not so much. In that late August of 1969, it was as much about getting through it gracefully as it was good fellowship, and about quality time spent with pals.
My fondest memory, in this regard, is the pancake breakfast at Poppy’s in Liberty on Monday morning. And, as usual, I digress.
There was what I consider a curious editorial choice made in the documentary. The narrative was carried forward by quite a few interviews with those who’d been there, either in the audience or in the crew…and these interviews were exclusively audible, with none of the familiar talking heads that make up so much of the style of television documentaries, influenced so dramatically by the genre defining work of Ken Burns.
Personally, I’d like to have seen the furrowed ravages and sagging destruction inflicted on these people by fifty years of life, this despite the fact that none of them seemed to have anything but unconditionally positive memories of the event.
Intercut and woven in with these old timers recalling what seemed to me to be in retrospect the equivalent of a secular and mass market Rumspringa were news reports, on paper and in the broadcast media, detailing the perception and expectations of the rest of the country, or as we ought to refer to them, our parents.
This muddy crowd of what was estimated at some 400,000 people was seen by those outside sources as a tent city of fools, a ramshackle republic of victims, a drug-soaked instant mob, or any number of the other broad stroke universalities applied to what was ultimately and unfortunately, to my mind at least, deemed a microcosm of a generation.
Now, my cohort wasn’t the first to be isolated and identified as such, by either self-designation or by the accusatory reactions of our elders. Flaming youth, Jitterbugs, Juvenile Delinquents—these all preceded us, and were all rather quickly reabsorbed into civilized society by the time they hit voting age, becoming, to no one’s surprise, the very images of their own parents in short order.
But a number of factors—the massive victory in the Second World War by a nation territorially unscathed by that war; the emergence from that war as a political and frankly more significantly economic superpower; and a mass media devoted to flattering the children of my generation, whose numbers and self-absorbed narcissism were unparalleled in the past—all contributed to the culture that would lead to the evolution of what came to be called The Counterculture.
And like the current so-called Millennial generation, whose numbers come close to equaling that birth bubble of mine, the loudest and most vocal of that sixties crowd got the attention, contributing to the belief that we were a unified and united front, who spoke in one voice, culturally, socially and politically.
That’s where that overweening mass cult narcissism played its big part. The longhairs got the press, with all that talk of free love, recreational drug use and protest. It made great copy, simultaneously terrifying and lubricious—a combination that had served and continues to serve media since its birth.
I was working as an assistant to a renowned and rather personally complex comic book artist at the time. This guy was one of the smartest people I’ve ever known, and remains as well a huge influence in and on my life and career.
That said, despite that depth of his intelligence and awareness, I still had to disabuse him of the notion that people of my age were just endlessly fucking like rabbits…or that we didn’t have to, you know, court and spark just like he and everybody before us in recorded history.
And for the record, he set me straight on his, my parents’ generation. Despite our assumptions, there’d been some serious fucking going on back then, too.
Who knew, right?
Let us face facts. Just as we know most of what media has to say about one’s own cohort of contemporaries is often just unadulterated bullshit, at the same time we all too frequently take as the gospel truth what that selfsame media says about any and all other generations.
If we’re paying attention, for that matter, we also can figure out just how phony and nonsensical much of the frequently arbitrary separation into “generations” can be.
This brings to mind these “War between Baby Boomers & Millennials” clickbaiteries that pop up with boring and increasing regularity on the internet.
“Baby Boomers are self-absorbed narcissistic assholes who ruined the world.”
“These are the people who cynically and nihilistically betrayed their own youth and voted for Trump.”
“Millennials are coddled, narcissistic assholes who think the world owes them a living.”
“These are the people so convinced they’re born with self-knowledge that they don’t bother to vote at all.”
Stop. They’re both right.
But that’s not the point I’m here to make, or even discuss. Rather, it’s the presumption that the music and the appertaining culture of my contemporaries as performed and propagated at the Woodstock Arts & Music Festival were the defining ideas and the resonant ethos of my generation…
…And if that’s the case, what the fuck happened to these people to transform them from the free-loving, pot smoking, consciousness expanding communal freaks and heads(we never referred to ourselves in those days as hippies, except in irony; that was the media’s designation) who populated Woodstock Nation into the craven, racist, sexist, utterly self-serving assholes who voted for the current aspirationally authoritarian administration?
Maybe there is an answer…and maybe part of that answer really does lie in music and culture…just not in Woodstock, New York, but Newark, New Jersey.
For all the talk dismissing Richard Nixon and his Silent Majority, I’ve come to understand that those of us who so noisily showed up at the festival were actually a Loud Minority…ultimately a lot of sound and fury, signifying not all that much in particular…
…Not to mention that it was clear even then we’d been joined by a teeming mass of casual fellow travelers, Weekend Warriors, boys and girls who simply adopted the external devices of the counterculture as costume, the same way they’d be wearing stacked shoes, wide collars and glitter to do the Hustle and the Bump in less than half a decade.
And speaking of hustle…
…I saw JERSEY BOYS twice. First, as part of a theater’s season’s subscription, and a second time with my daughter in law, since she couldn’t convince my son to take her to a musical.
It was fine, but to be sure, nothing special…frankly, just one more in the long string of very average jukebox musicals, of the variety popularized by BEATLEMANIA—“Not the real thing, but an amazing simulation!”
For the record, having never owned a Beatles album, I never saw that particular waste of an evening. Life is too short.
For another record, “Jersey Boys” is the twelfth longest running show in Broadway history, seen by more than thirteen million people…the majority of whom, I’m willing to bet, are of my generational cohort, many if not most pursuing that nostalgic lost mojo…
…And by dint of numbers alone, I don’t think I’m going too far out on a limb if I say that that nostalgia had little or nothing to do with Jim Hendrix performing “Purple Haze” and everything to do with Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons singing “Rag Doll.”
To paraphrase a remark attributed to one of the groups’ members, “Our fans didn’t protest the draft, they went into the army and did what they were told.”
So, for all that “defining moment of my generation” stuff, it’s become pretty clear to me that although the Woodstock festival and the culture it represented meant quite a bit to quite a number of my contemporaries, many if not most of those contemporaries were on the outside of that “defining moment” looking in…
…And that the majority of my contemporaries, despite the louder and more visible counterculturists, had more in common with the adolescents of previous eras, and folded quite effectively into the dominant, socially conservative culture as those earlier adolescents had done.
All this is to say that the combination of media attention to the more outrageous and bizarre aspects of my generation’s behavior, and that media’s skewed presentation of that behavior, coupled with the echo chamber effect of the louder and more flamboyant members of that generation talking to itself, has led to the belief in the pernicious myth of a generation united in counterculture.
Which would indicate that the great majority of men and women born between 1945 and 1964, the parameters of the so called Baby Boom, who seemed to turn their backs on what can only be called the progressive sensibilities and politics of their youth to vote for the perversion of democracy that is currently in the process of putting finish to the Republic, were actually never really aligned with left or even liberal politics at all.
This, of course, leaves those of us who have held on to leftist principles for the fifty years and counting since the so-called defining moment of our generation, all too often being called to account for that vast swathe of our contemporaries who were never us at all.
Note, none of this is to let my generation weasel out of any of the actual nonsense of which we’re actually guilty. But bear in mind, wherever we stood socially, morally and politically, we had the courage of our convictions, as plastic as those convictions might have borne out over the half century since.
Remember that most if not all those mud caked post adolescents regarded themselves as being gifted or blessed with what was referred to as a “raised consciousness” simply by dint of being born in the right time, and in the right place.
And as smug as you might feel right now at those words, made ridiculous by time itself, in truth that “raised consciousness” is neither all that far removed from, nor any less narcissistically arrogant, than the current self-congratulation of “woke.”
So I’d ask you to hesitate for just a moment, next time you or someone you know thinks they know all about those of us born in those lost and forgotten days of a very different United States of America, on the basis of what you’ve been told by all aspects of media from word one.
And in that hesitation, accept the discomfiting reality that “woke” is all too likely to sound just as ridiculous as “raised consciousness” does today, sooner rather than later.
Trust me on this.
To be sure, far too many of my birth cohort have sold out their country in the name of white terror at the loss of their default prestige. That said, it cannot be ignored that it’s the young moderns among the millennials who are filling the ranks of American Nazis, so it just ain’t just a generational thing.
Once again, trust me on this.
As ever, I remain,
Howard Victor Chaykin…you know the rest.