To the editors:
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Beneath these two seemingly contrary positions lies a very solid consensus, all the more remarkable for its inscrutability. Perhaps you’ve noticed, as I have, that the bashers and revelers tend to agree that Woodstock was the culmination of something–a poorly defined something, wrongly thought to be synonymous with the “spirit” of the ’60s, and having virtually died with the death of that decade a few months later, certainly buried no later than the date of the final U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam in 1975.
Thus whether Woodstock gets bashed or fondly recollected from twenty years down the road of American history, it is by identifying the really significant achievements of the ’60s with this one particular music festival–as if the mass dissidence of those times could somehow reach its fulfillment at a three day, open air Rock concert!–that the bashers and the revelers perpetuate a sort of swerve from the main political lesson of the ’60s–namely, the democracy of the streets, the organizing to achieve a real voice in society, and populism in general–and thereby spawn that entire industry of false lessons we see typified in the recent “We Remember Woodschlock” stuff.
