Woodstock: 40 Years Down The Road And A Nation Lost

Well, I came upon a child of God
He was walking along the road
And I asked him, Tell me, where are you going?
This he told me

Said, I’m going down to Yasgur’s Farm,
Gonna join in a rock and roll band.
Got to get back to the land and set my soul free.

As you may have heard, we are on the precipice of the 40th anniversary of Woodstock. The famous, and infamous, cultural milestone took place down on Max Yasgur’s dairy farm outside of Bethel New York between August 15 and August 18, 1969. Thirty-two acts performed, during a sometimes rainy weekend, in front of nearly half a million concertgoers. The history and lore of Woodstock began immediately, it was clear to both those who loved it, and those who hated it, that it was a uniquely seminal moment.

Well, then can I roam beside you?
I have come to lose the smog,
And I feel myself a cog in somethin’ turning.
And maybe it’s the time of year,
Yes and maybe it’s the time of man.
And I don’t know who I am,
But life is for learning.

We are stardust, we are golden,
We are billion year old carbon,
And we got to get ourselves back to the garden.

Something had happened. Something big and transformational. But what? The prevailing view seems to be that it was a symbol of the discord and unrest of the 60’s, the antiwar movement and the counterculture generation. It is also viewed as the ultimate example of the peace and love motif of "the hippies". I wonder about all that; in fact, I am more inclined to the view expressed by Jon Pareles in a great article in the New York Times:

Yet for all the benign memories, Woodstock also set in motion other, more crass impulses. While its immediate aftermath was amazement and relief, the festival’s full legacy had as much to do with excess as with idealism. As the decades roll by, the festival seems more than ever like a fluke: a moment of muddy, disheveled, incredulous grace. It was as much an endpoint as a beginning, a holiday of naïveté and dumb luck before the realities of capitalism resumed. Woodstock’s young, left-of-center crowd — nice kids, including students, artists, workers and politicos, as well as full-fledged L.S.D.-popping hippies — was quickly recognized as a potential army of consumers that mainstream merchants would not underestimate again. There was more to sell them than rolling papers and LPs.

With the 40th anniversary of Woodstock looming — so soon? — the commemorative machinery is clanking into place, and the nostalgia is strong.

Woodstock is, like so many larger than life things, what each individual makes of it. As Woodstock performer Sly Stone would say, it has different strokes for different folks. But, mostly, I think Pareles may have this about right. For all the sturm and drang over its impact, Woodstock was not a big antiwar protest; in fact, the promoters, performers and masters of ceremonies made a conscious decision to stay away from that. As an example, when Abbie Hoffman tried to take the stage to gin up mass emotion against war and oppression, Pete Townsend of the Who literally batted him off the stage with his guitar. Peace and love yes; conscious and overt war protest, not.

But if Woodstock itself was not the epitome of social protest and activism, the times surrounding it were. There was an immoral and unjustified US war and occupation a half a world away, there was a culture of government spying on its citizens and invasion of their privacy and there was a growing dichotomy in society. In short, eerily similar to what seems to be the case today. And there were people protesting. Loud and large. Out in the streets, on college campuses, in the public square. There was a lot of juice to the dissent and it was led by the youth, college students and academics.

By the time we got to Woodstock,
We were half a million strong
And everywhere was a song and a celebration.
And I dreamed I saw the bomber death planes
Riding shotgun in the sky,
Turning into butterflies
Above our nation.

Where are they all today? Where has the soul and conscience of our society gone? Where is the dissent; where is the beef? It is curiously and conspicuously absent from our analogous circumstance. There is so much wrong, on so many fronts; and yet there is so much talent and ability. People are sick and tired of the state of the nation; and yet the ability and gumption to mobilize and make a stand seems lost. Why?

Maybe Jon Pareles is right and Woodstock, for all the notoriety, really was "as much an endpoint as a beginning". It wasn’t peace, love and activism on the march so much as automatonic consumerism and self concern setting in for the duration in America’s youth. We need to reverse that and get ourselves back to the garden of moral and legal certainty.

Oh, and by the way, and I know not everybody has the connection speed to do so, but if you can, check out the videos, at a minimum the first and last ones, although all are very good. If you have memories of, or related to, Woodstock, the time period etc. please feel free to relate and discuss them. Let’s have some fun this fine Friday afternoon!

We are stardust, we are golden,
We are caught in the devils bargain,
And we got to get ourselves back to the garden.

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70 replies
    • freepatriot says:

      Neil Young wrote the soundtrack for my childhood

      Woodstock has meaning for a lot of people, but I live closer to Altamont

      and we somehow never managed to get past tin soldiers and nixon’s coming, eh

      so I think the cynicism of my generation wasn’t wasted after all

      (duckin & runnin)

  1. gmoke says:

    Oh, please. I got within a couple of miles of Woodstock with my tickets and turned back. Even that was interesting. The NY Thruway looked like the pictures I’ve seen of people fleeing from Paris before the Nazis.

    Woodstock was a moment of grace and recognition that’s been sold to within an inch of its life. The relative peacefulness of the event stopped the naysayers in their tracks for about a week and then they went into reaction, a reaction that hasn’t stopped since. The Right is still acting in reaction to the 60s™© all rights reserved. The recognition was that there were a whole lot of freaks out there and that there could be such a thing as a Woodstock Nation or a Woodstock Generation. That didn’t last either.

    However, the civil rights movement led to the antiwar movement which led to the women’s movement and the environmental movement. People who protested against the war ended up forming food coops and community gardens and revivifying the farmers’ market system and local agriculture starting in the 1970s. Some of them also helped form the Homebrew Computer Club and the Boston Computer Society which led to the Internet and the blog culture of today. Others went into solar and renewable energy and almost broke through with Carter only to have Reagan slam the door on that possibility (Reagan killed us). A few of those energy freaks have hung on for the last 30 years and have 30 years of practical experience in the field now.

    I’ve been privileged to be part of a number of movements that fell together like magic, like Woodstock. They fall together and then they fall apart. It happened with the local agriculture movement, with energy, with public access computing. I and my compatriots founded farmers’ markets and community gardens and community kitchens, traveled with an energy show throughout the Northeast for two years, educated people off the street on how to access the Internet and gain computer skills for paying jobs. We did this while the magic lasted and it didn’t make the same splash in the papers that Woodstock or those 60s™© all rights reserved antiwar street demos did. Now, even those antiwar street demos wouldn’t get any coverage. Just because it wasn’t in the news doesn’t mean that it didn’t happen.

    Where has the soul and conscience gone? You’ve got it and so do I. I’d venture to say that most of us reading this blog have it too. We just don’t wave it like a freak flag anymore because it tends to piss people off. We work on practical and real alternatives in the daily grind instead.

    And guess what, the magic will come around again, in ways and at times we won’t expect it. It won’t stay the next time either so enjoy it when it comes.

    • bmaz says:

      Well stated. I think you make a great point about the internet and, specifically, blogs. I guess it is especially salient when you consider that Blogstock, i.e. Netroots Nation is ongoing as we speak.

      I think you and Skdadl both (and this was what I tried to get to in the post as well in a roundabout way) hit on the fact that Woodstock was not so much the heart of activism as all the other things going on in the same time frame. It does seem the youth has lost some of the weight in this area though. I have been around, and fairly observant or, college campuses all my life one way or another, and the feel has changed both as to the students and the faculty. They don’t seem to have the edge they used to. I miss that.

      • gmoke says:

        “I have been around, and fairly observant or, college campuses all my life one way or another, and the feel has changed both as to the students and the faculty. They don’t seem to have the edge they used to. I miss that.”

        I live halfway between Harvard and MIT and try to make the most of the opportunities offered. What I’ve seen in the last year, especially at MIT, is very interesting. The students there have forced the administration to step up to the plate environmentally. There is an Energy Club that has about 1200 members and a Sustainability Club that has about 800. They have pushed the Tute to beyond lip service and actually do something with the energy demand of the campus and invest some intellectual capital in renewables and efficiency, something they were loathe to do before, spending most of their time on clean coal and nuclear.

        There is a similar movement at Harvard which I know less about.

        This present college generation has already seen their lives and futures degraded by ecological destruction. They see it as an existential threat and are getting organized. Or so I hope.

        • bmaz says:

          Outstanding, glad to hear that. That is a critical effort; I would like to see it expanded into action on torture, privacy rights, etc. too. But it is a good start.

  2. skdadl says:

    By the time we got to Woodstock, many terrible things had happened, and for a couple of years following, terrible things would go on happening.

    The summer of love was ‘67. After that, especially after the assassinations of 1968 and the election of Nixon, things got confrontational and sometimes just bizarre. Woodstock was an island of sweetness in what had become a fairly frightening political culture, and not just in North America. Woodstock was only a week or so after the Manson killings. Altamont was only months away. Through 1970-71, rock stars were dropping dead; Kent State happened; and the war raged on.

    Good things were happening too: I went to my first women’s lib meeting in 1968, and I’ve never looked back. There was a political movement with legs, eh?

    But the fun and inspiration of the early sixties turned sour by the end of the decade. Woodstock was exceptional, I guess because so many people still wanted peace and love and the whole damn good thing, but you could already feel the world shrinking by then.

    It annoys me now to read people who assume that older people are automatically conservative — over fifty, and your political views are suspect. I don’t get that. My contemporaries never lost their good politics that I noticed, not the ones who’d had good politics in the first place. I haven’t seen smart lefties turning into yuppies, which seems to be the assumption about boomers. We did get older and get jobs and earn money, but I don’t know anyone my age who turned into a raving neo-con — that seemed to be the province of people born in the sixties, not those who lived through the decade in full awareness.

    People did withdraw into themselves, though, by the early seventies. I don’t think that The Big Chill is a great movie, but it is good social observation.

    • alabama says:

      The draft, bmaz, the draft–it made the major difference. I don’t remember the numbers–was it in the millions?–of young Americans who did whatever it took to stiff the military. A political action of sorts? Indeed it was; on the other hand, however, one might make the argument that an entire generation, thanks to the draft and that evil war, disappeared from American public life. In my own family, six members moved to Canada never to return, not even after their draft-dodging charges had been thrown out of court.

      • Loo Hoo. says:

        Wow. Your people moved to Canada. My brothers didn’t register for the draft, but that was the plan had they been drafted.

        • alabama says:

          Smart brothers! My own folks were rather unpolitical, law-abiding and not at all inclined to break things like rules. But when they watched the country do its warlike thing–with no evident motive beyond its arrogant bloodymindedness–then they had to think it over. It wasn’t easy.

          • Loo Hoo. says:

            My brother Jeff was a top football player. He played both offense and defense during every game through his junior year in high school. Gave it up in his senior year (with my dad’s blessing…and he was the principal!) because he refused to cut his hair.

            Jeff’s nickname was Atlas!

      • Mauimom says:

        Sorry I didn’t see your comment before I came down here to write.

        Let me just say that it’s hard, for those of us who lived through it [I graduated from college in 1966] to convey how heavily the draft weighed on every male in society.

        At the time, there was a “student deferment,” so of course you didn’t want to flunk out and be subject to the pool. Folks went to graduate school when they didn’t want to, just stay away from the risk of being drafted.

        Then, somewhere around 1967, “the lottery” was instituted. Men were assigned a lottery number, and that determined their “status” [risk] in the draft. All the talk was about what your “lottery number” was.

        My then-husband was in law school, was opposed to the draft, but while we considered Canada, I didn’t want to go. [Don’t know what we would have done if the risk had actually gotten more real.] When he went down for his physical [prompted by his low draft number], the physician looked at his status as a law student at Harvard and basically said he didn’t want to “waste” his talent, so found some bs physical reason to declare him medically unfit.

        With the relief came a lot of guilt.

  3. alabama says:

    I was living in New York in 1969, and never gave a thought to attending Woodstock, or to taking it seriously thereafter. Why? Because the anti-war movement was the only thing that mattered. The major events of the day were the moratoriums in Manhattan (October) and Washington (November), and when we saw the double line of schoolbuses stationed around the White House on that long November afternoon, we knew that the movement–already five years old–was in for a very long haul, and we could sense that leftist solidarity, dead since 1965, would not return in our lifetime (the music was fine all the same–Flatt and Scruggs played a wonderful set at that rally).

    Things were not better back then, and our efforts didn’t make them any better. It took a financial crisis (accelerating inflation) and the superior fighting skills of the Vietnamese to get us out of Viet Nam. Not a happy moment. And not, in its deeper reaches, a different moment from today. The big surprise? Life’s not as long as it looks.

    • tejanarusa says:

      Good point to be reminded of.
      I was a colleg junior in Bloomington, In at the time – I remember hearing about Woodstock, but knowing (lol – age of majority was 21) that my parents would never give me permission to go.

      And the moratorium was absolutely much higher in our consciousnesses than a music festival several states away. Those demos, and Kent State early in ‘70 were far more important to me. (and being in the midwest, I actually had a few friends at Kent State, so it was pretty immediate).

      Woodstock would’ve been nice to go to, but like most big events, it looms larger in retrospect, as a symbol.
      Dunno how true the new movie may be, but I believe the one scene – where the young guy (apparenlty organizing or promoting) asks the older guy if he thinks anybody would come–the older guy, natch, says “nope.”

  4. behindthefall says:

    The classes one and two years behind us seemed to be a different species. ‘69 was well onto the downslope. The ’70s were ugly — the “Me Generation”. (It got worse from there.) Could the ’70s have sustained a Civil Rights Movement as the early to mid-60s did? Perhaps the straight-arrow ’50s were a necessary precursor to the concern for others exemplified by the best of the ’60s.

    • JohnJ says:

      and @9

      I live with that “generation” dividing line constantly.

      It was the draft.

      I signed up for the draft the year it ended. Those even a year or two older are, as if, from a whole different generation.

      On topic:
      I was a little too young for Woodstock, but to wannabe musicians like my friends and I at the time; Woodstock the movie and the sound track was incredible inspiration.

      I just now reviewed the list of bands that played….unbelievable. Definitely some of the most talented people in the industry at the time (and still) : from Paul Butterfield to John Sebastian to Leslie West and Mountain (ever see the size of that guy’s fingers?) to Sha Na Na to (Ahhh) Ten Years After…

      That was a pretty good cross-section the state of the musical arts.

      I am in mourning for Les Paul. A “tinkerer” that started a sound that is still resonating today

      with no sign of decay.

      Without him, what would Woodstock have sounded like? (Lets have some fun and count the number of Gibson Les Pauls you can see in the Woodstock movie.)

      • skdadl says:

        Les Paul and Mary Ford had a sound so smooth but with such depth, unmistakable reminder of the late forties and the fifties. I was just a little kid when I listened to them on the radio; I also remember a piece of sheet music sitting on the piano with their photos on the cover.

        My boss, pogge, played an unusual video last night of a much older Paul playing “Birth of the Blues,” with a little help from Chet Atkins. Lots of fun.

        • JohnJ says:

          Try the Chester & Lester series of records: Chet Atkins and Les Paul playing around in the studio backed by a dynamite rhythm section. Not my style of music but amazing none the less.

          Does everyone know he invented the multi-track recorder as well as the electric guitar?

  5. Peterr says:

    The event was one thing; the meaning/legacy of the event is something else, and the marketing of the nostalgia around the event is an entirely different thing.

    To me, Woodstock and Kent State are moments of transition. Woodstock was the final act of an era, and Kent State was the opening of a new chapter. The former was a farm field where openness, experimentation, and music (!) flowed; the latter was a college campus where confrontation, conflict, and gunfire (!!!) took over.

  6. DrDave says:

    Although Joni herself performed many versions, and wrote it for JA at Woodstock, I prefer the text of the version she recorded. For example

    By the time we got to Woodstock
    We were half a million strong
    And everywhere there was song and celebration
    And I dreamed I saw the bombers
    Riding shotgun in the sky
    And they were turning into butterflies
    Above our nation

    The first performance that I know of, which predates Woodstock, is from the Festival at Big Sur, and is available on video.

  7. Loo Hoo. says:

    I really supported Hillary in wanting a Woodstock Museum.

    I was between my junior and senior years in high school, and one year from living in a commune for a short time. Spent that summer surfing with my brother with the BIG ‘ol surfboards. Dang, I used to hitchhike and pick up hitchhikers back then. Crazy fun times.

    The music was the best.

  8. Maxcrat says:

    Recently a young college student who is the offspring of friends of mine sent me a fundraising appeal for the SDS chapter at his campus. I sent him a check right away. Later he wrote to thank me and ask whether I wanted to know anything about their group and what they were doing. I replied that I would love to talk with him some time, but the fact that SDS was alive enough to be out there fundraising to support more training and educating and raising hell was enough for me, after wondering for the last decade where the hell the students were these days.

    I was 13 the summer of Woodstock, and the moon landing, and the days of rage in Chicago, and and incredible amount of great music, and a lot of other events too hard to integrate and understand at the time. But the thing that somehow resonated and stuck was the rejection of materialism, the acquisitive culture, conspicuous consumption, and all the rest of it.

  9. TarheelDem says:

    Consider when Woodstock occurred. It was a year after the Chicago Police Riot and seven months after Richard Nixon was inaugurated as president. And as it turns out, it was nine months before Kent State and Jackson State. Demonstrations and mobilizations had hit a dead end. Repression began in earnest at the “Levitate the Pentagon” mobilization in the fall of 1967. Eugene McCarthy appeared as a Democratic alternative to Lyndon Johnson and began mobilizing youth volunteers. Then Johnson announced that he was not running for reelection and Robert Kennedy entered the race. Then came the assassination of Martin Luther King and the ensuing riots in 300 or so towns and cities, the 82nd Airborne brought to DC and Baltimore and other units were sent to other cities to backstop the National Guard. Then Robert Kennedy was assassinated. And then the chaos inside and outside the Democratic National Convention that pitted hawks against doves within the Democratic Party and showed the tyranny that Richard Daley could exercise in Chicago. By the time of the landing on the Moon, folks were looking for a diversion from politics just for a while and the music industry came to the rescue with the first major multi-day, multi-act rock concert, with a venue selected to accommodate 100,000 or so folks. Three hundred thousand showed up. The logisitics were not set up to handle that many people; it rained; no one planned for the traffic coming to the concert. It was chaos. It was mud. It was bad trips. And good trips and open weed and free food and….and the people who went and survived it had a bond very much like that of hurricane survivors. They all went through it together; that was the truth of the Woodstock Nation myth that Abbie Hoffman tried unsuccessfully to parlay into a movement.

    It was commercial from the beginning. But for those who look back, it was a key experience of their lives. Especially if they can find themselves in the movie that came out the following year and which embedded the mythology in the national consciousness.

    What was its lasting significance; it was the gateway experience for the Whole Earth Catalog consumers and the whole idea of freedom of lifestyle choices, in the cultural sense. That in turn created a lot of carpenters and bike mechanics and solar energy inventors and … out of English, history, philosophy, and poli sci majors. And got a lot of edgy high school graduates in those trades reading weird art, religion, and politics stuff. And that in the 1970s transformed the culture in a way that maed the timeless 1950s barely recognizeable.

    The older of that generation had been raised in patriotism and religion and ethical behavior and American exceptionalism. The civil rights movement came as a shock, especially in the South, to that timelessness, and the Vietnam War by 1965 had become visible as a betrayal of those American values. Yes, there was rage; our parents (now called the “Greatest Generation”) had somehow fundamentally lied to us. Politics was a response; dropping out into Timothy Leary’s world was a response; putting your nose down and making sure that you got a good job was a response. All three of those types undoubtably were at Woodstock. Woodstock was the interlude before the end of the 1960s came at the point of a gun in Ohio and Mississippi in May 1970.

    And then we had kids. And the great economy that had allowed that benevolent madness tanked. And we got sucked back into the established order for the most part. But for many, living as if the revolution had already happened became the strategy – spawning co-ops, local agriculture, energy experimentation, the growth of bicycling. And focusing on other things–the environment for some, womens rights for others, gay rights for others, Native American rights,…the whole identity politics panoply.

    Guess what. American culture today is unrecognizeable to folks stuck in the 1950s way of living and it scares them. They aren’t Rip Van Winkle because they’ve not been asleep but a cultural revolution has washed over them.

    What was Woodstock? A hardassed weekend that got mythologized as representing a generation. And in a weird way, maybe now it does.

  10. JimWhite says:

    I was only 10 the summer of Woodstock and then was on the very tail end of being draft eligible; I got a number somewhere around the middle of the pack and then they ended the draft. The time still had a tremendous impact on me. Living in a very conservative family and area, I still was very upset by RFK’s murder and stood in muted amazement as I watched family and neighbors show actual joy at MLK’s assassination.

    The music itself of Woodstock was indeed transformative. I just finished a six hour drive and satellite radio is doing a Woodstock channel all weekend. It’s wonderful to listen to without commercials and with comments from organizers and musicians interspersed with many live recordings. Santana was brand new and Ravi Shankar also was present. Music in the US got a huge infusion of international (besides the UK) flavor from which it has benefited greatly.

  11. Slothrop says:

    Jim White, I enjoy your writings and insights. I always think of my college days in terms of assassination bookends: started in June of 68 (RFK) and graduated in May of 72 (George Wallace shooting).

    No one talks about the spiritual dimension of the Woodstock gathering — it’s an uncomfortable topic for political types, I guess.

    I think it’s likely that centuries from now history will mark Woodstock as some kind of religious event, surpassing assassinations and 3rd rate burglaries on the importance scale.

  12. Jkat says:

    meh .. tough crowd .. hmmm.. in the summer of ‘67 i was serving as an officer of marines .. midway through my second tour in viet nam .. way up in I-corps at Quang Tri .. taking the gub’mints shilling as fascist baby killer and mass murderer .. me and my whirlybird flying machine were hauling young men and supplies into places like khe sahn ..con thien ..and phu bai …all up and down the DMZ along the cua viet river …engaged in an effort to stop the north vietnamese army from over-running the coastal lowlands and killing off the poor folk who failed ..or refused to agree with the political philosophy of their northern neighbors .. and hauling body bags out .. flying medivacs .. working together just trying to stay alive ..and with all our vital parts ..

    during a total of 29 months overall “in country” ..with time out for two side trips to the US naval hospital philia ..i never met a single man over there who was “fighting for his country” .. all we were doing was trying to keep each other alive … or trying to get the wounded and broken back to medical help .. making the best of a bad situation .. but every time i look back on it .. i can’t help but recall the almost three million people who were killed by the viet cong and the north vietnamese after we pulled out .. i’ve always felt keeping those three million people from being massacred by their political enemies was part of what we were actually dong there ..silly me ..eh ??

    i had two older sisters stateside who hated the damn war ..[i hated it too btw ] and they protested against it .. they hated the war .. but not the warriors who were fighting it ..

    we were all abhored by mai lai ..we were also abhored by kent state .. and one of the things we all felt was that what y’all were trying to do back home was actually save our lives by getting us the hell out of hell itself ..[oh the “lifers” thought differently..but they were of a different generation]

    still ..even then ..one of the things we thought we were defending [otherthan those three million long-dead vietnamese] was exactly one of the things y’all were involved in .. exercising the right to peacefully petition one’s gub’mint for redress of grievances ..

    and ..to this day .. the people i know who are most vehemently anti-war .. are the vets who fought in viet nam .. war is truly “harmful to children and other living things” .. we actually had a bumpersticker that said exactly that on the rear ramp of our whirlybird flying machine as it went about it’s mishappen rounds.. in a place no one wanted to be .. doing all manner of things no one really wanted to do .. and praying for the day we’d get on that big freedom bird and wing our way back to “the world” .. and escape the hell of that dirty little war a half-a-world away..

    i wouldn’t do it again for all the world .. not even for immortality itself .. but ..at the same time.. i wouldn’t take for the experience .. the experience of serving with the many and wonderful young men i met and served with .. and the lessons i learned then .. and the crucible we all went through .. formed our lives from that time forward and left us with lessons we have we never forgotten .. the chief of which would be: we should never engage in war unless our national interests are really at stake ..and unless we have a clearly defined goal .. in our collective interest.. which matches the cost in blood and treasure which will be expended to defend those interests .. or obtain those goals ..

    semper fi to you each all .. and please do carry on …

    “sky pilot .. how high can fly ..”

    • bmaz says:

      Wow. Awesome description, and thanks for sharing. Question, if you are up for it. What is it like to reflect back that deeply? Still current and tangible, or kind of removed and detached? No clue why I ask, but it came to my mind reading your account. And thanks for your service from a guy that very thankfully was just short of being old enough to have to.

      • Jkat says:

        it’s kind of like watching an old black and white movie bmaz .. i think every man ..and woman who served there has gone through several stages of different understanding .. and self interpretation .. of exactly what the hell we were doing there ..as both a nation ..and as individuals ..

        in the original scenario .. we had .. to the best of our knowledge at the time ..the gulf of tonkin incidents [many years later proven to be totally bogus] wherein we felt .. as military persons .. that we had been attacked and retribution was both necessary and just .. that’s what i’d call the first genesis ..

        then too .. some of us had seen first hand .. or had had related to us by others we knew and trusted the stories of village elders .. and government officials of south vietnam ..and even catholic monks and priests who had been brutally assassinated by political death squads for one reason or another .. but mostly because they “didn’t agree with the communistic aims of the viet minh/viet cong .. it seemed at the time to be anything but a civil war ..especially since we as marines were way up north and did deal primarily with fully uniformed and equipped soldiers of the north vietnamese army.. who were definitely south of the demarcation parallel .. so we had some right to think there was really an “invasion” afoot .. but ..as we had done civilian protection work in the early days we knew too that the majority of the rice and subsistence farmers/fishermen opted for the status quo .. and in the end .. their lot didn’t change much with the outcome .. they were no better or no worse off regardless of who their overlords ended up being .. i don’t believe they ever cared one way or another which political philosophy won out ..
        but ..at the time .. standing between their proven assassins [or trying to] and the common apolitical man ..woman ..family.. seemed a noble pursuit .. however unappreciated it was by all sides involved ..

        and .. of course .. no one who engages in a war .. up close and personal .. really gets much involved in the philosophical aspects of being there ..[that comes later] and no matter how passive one might think they are .. self preservation becomes a more powerful force in most individuals and carries more weight than adherence to any political theory they might think they hold .. in the end ..when it comes down to kill or be killed .. very few men are noble enough in conviction to just allow themselves to be killed in order to adhere to a particular point of philosophy ..

        as time goes by ..[and a lot of time has gone by] and as more and more facts revealed themselves from the tawdry history of blatant lies and distortions we were then unaware of .. one’s “situational awareness” changes accordingly .. what was once a sacred cow became just more bull we had been fed ..

        but ..regardless of which side of the issue one was on in the old days and current times .. what happened in the aftermath of our withdrawal and near abandonment of south viet nam .. more or less demonstrated .. in hindsight ..what we were really defending at the time .. which was the right of a people to not suffer mass exterminated at the hands of a particular political philosophy .. simply because they chose not to agree with that philosophy ..

        i felt sorely used for a period of time .. but i’ve mellowed somewhat over the intervening years ..

        that’s about as general as i can get .. hope it answers your query ..

        and .. hey .. i really enjoy your posts … keep up the fine work ..

        • HanTran says:

          I think that it should be mentioned that if the US had never intervened there would almost certainly have been FAR fewer Vietnamese killed and of course far fewer Americans killed, wounded, or left to wander our streets homelessly. In that way, at least, it is not unlike Iraq.

          • Jkat says:

            certainly Tran .. and had ho chi minh not engaged the french …had the sons-of-nippon not invaded then french indo-china.. how far would you care to walk it back my friend ??

            i’m certainly not trying to glorify war .. nor am i trying to justify whatever motivation the United States had.. or intended .. with it’s policies in/about viet nam ..

            imo .. every life lost in the whole conflict .. from the tremendous loss of civilians in the south .. to the horrendous losses among the NVA troops .. to the civilians lost in bombing the north .. right down to and including the lingering effects of agent orange decades later .. on both sides of the ocean ..

            it was a terrible waste ..

        • Mauimom says:

          Thanks for your fine work.

          When bmaz writes

          Where are they all today? Where has the soul and conscience of our society gone? Where is the dissent; where is the beef?

          I am in touch again with the fact that I’m an “old fart” – someone old enough to protest that war, to have friends drafted, to have every male living in fear of the draft.

          To me THAT’s one thing that’s different: by ending the draft, the Powers That Be cleverly removed the onus of war from 98% of the country. Once that fear of being sent abroad to kill or be killed was removed, the anxiety and concern abated.

          Despite the occasional requisite mention of “our brave troops and their sacrifice,” now the only “concern” is the massive amounts of money pouring into the two rat holes in Afghanistan & Iraq, and even that is unseen and fairly much unnoticed.

          • Jkat says:

            thanks to all y’all ..btw ..

            and in reply to mauimom who said:

            To me THAT’s one thing that’s different: by ending the draft, the Powers That Be cleverly removed the onus of war from 98% of the country. Once that fear of being sent abroad to kill or be killed was removed, the anxiety and concern abated.

            one of the main reasons the current day structure of the army includes the national guard will be activated ..and deployed.. to combat zones in the event of any hostilities ..is a direct result of the US Army wanting to insure ..as policy..that a broad cross-section of our society will be affected directly by any conflict we enter ..

            • bmaz says:

              Wow, I never thought of it that way, but that strikes me as an excellent point. By the same token though, it strikes me that, even with the National Guard bit in the picture, it isn’t close to the spectrum there was of American society with the draft. To be honest, and this is maybe a bit lame and embarrassing, but it never crossed my mind to join in the National Guard when I was young enough to do so (well, it did after 9/11, but I was too old already). Quite frankly, I doubt I know very few people that did consider it; so there is a whole swath of society (and probably the more affluent ones) that are still unaffected.

    • BayStateLibrul says:

      I loved your story and analysis.
      Nam was painful medicine.
      Thanks for giving us a tour back in time.

    • tejanarusa says:

      Wow – great post. you touched on so many things familiar to me. I was, like your sisters, protesting.
      My then brother-in-law-to-be (eldest son) was a dr. at Khe Sanh – You actually had the “War is not healthy…” bumper sticker on your chopper…(just the phrase conjures the image of the poster before my eyes)
      Yes, all the vets I know now were against going into Iraq – sometimes wonder how my formerly RW ex-bro-in-law feels today. (Our family had one of those classic during-the-war Thanksgiving dinner disrupted-by-arguments-about-the-war moments).

      You summed up that period very well. Thank you.

  13. fatster says:

    O/T, but with interesting implications.

    Release of dying Pan Am Flight 103 bomber sparks coverup charges
    BY MURIEL KANE 

Published: August 14, 2009 
Updated 25 minutes ago

    “British papers reported on Friday that the terminally ill Libyan agent convicted in the 1988 bombing of Pam Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland has reached a deal with the Scottish government to drop his appeal of the conviction in exchange for being allowed to return to Libya to die with his family.

    “The deal has aroused strong opposition from the United States government and from relatives of the American passengers and crew members killed in the bombing who would prefer to see Abdelbaset al-Megrahi die in jail.

    “In Britain, however, negative reaction appears to be centered on a fear that the deal is intended to to promote a coverup. Al-Megrahi, who was convicted in 2001 after an 84-day trial, has always insisted that he was framed. His lawyers claim to have evidence that the bombing was carried out not by Libya but by Palestinians backed by Syria.”

    More.

  14. oldnslow says:

    bmaz,
    Thank you for a wonderfull post and thread.

    Jkat,
    Just….wow. As a VietNam era veteran that spent no time in country please allow me a very humble Thank you.

  15. fatster says:

    O/T: KKKKarl a racist? Interesting little case history.

    Rove tried to shut out Hopi woman as US Attorney
    BY MURIEL KANE 

Published: August 14, 2009 
Updated 12 hours ago

    “After the US Attorney for Arizona was dismissed by the Bush administration in December 2006 as part of a purge of multiple US Attorneys, the two Republican senators from that state quickly recommended that a Hopi attorney, Diane Humetewa, be nominated as his replacement.

    “Assistants to then-Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove, however, were less enthusiastic about Humetewa than Senators John McCain and Jon Kyl. Rove himself agreed that the appointment should be blocked, writing in a recently-revealed email, “Replace Blanquita.”

    . . .

    “Rove responded by saying simply “Replace Blanquita” — a term which, according to the Urban Dictionary, is used by Latinos to refer to a white woman. It is not clear why Rove would have applied it to the Native American Humetewa, but he apparently meant it as a racist epithet.

    . . .

    “There had been speculation prior to Humetewa’s confirmation that she might have been appointed only after promising to drop the corruption investigation of Rep. Rick Renzi (R-AZ), which had been initiated by Charlton and had allegedly provoked his firing. Humetewa, however, continued the investigation and announced just a few months later that Renzi was being charged with 35 counts of political corruption.”

    More.

  16. bmaz says:

    Paul invented first solid body electric guitar; dude named Rickenbacher reportedly invented the electric guitar with the first primitive induction coil pickups.

  17. mafr says:

    Where has the soul and conscience gone? You’ve got it and so do I. I’d venture to say that most of us reading this blog have it too

    As did the people participating WTO demonstrations in Seattle, and the (they say) 15 million people who demonstrated against the invasion of Iraq.

    As far as make Woodstock into something commercial, Joni Mitchell hasn’t done too badly in the money department has she? I think she’s doing all right in that way. Or “The Who”, or Sly etc.

    But Hendrix, a former paratrooper, his band mates were former enlisted men, was strongly anti war, and that message was a big part of his music, and live performances….For me, the devastating tune “machine gun”, and the very famous american anthem.

    And my number one movie, “Apocalypse Now” comes from those days.

    It’s remarkable how many of those musicians died young.

  18. wavpeac says:

    Great post. What I remember so vividly totally shapes my life and my work today. I remember the body count, I remember Walter Kronkite, I remember those scenes from Vietnam. I was born in 61, so I wasn’t very old, but I used to cry at night at the senselessness of war. I could not get past the idea (and it sticks with me today) that war is senseless most of the time. War is often times not the best use of our brains and the ripple effect far more costly than we ever really dare to say out loud.

    Today every single thing I do feeds this cause in my mind and as my purpose. I know without a shadow of a doubt that the little girl who watched the news and cried was right to cry. It makes me sick that we sanitize it today.

    Peace requires courage, discipline, impulse control and problem solving. There is a synthesis to seek between tolerance and using power and control to force an outcome. I pray we are swinging toward a synthesis before it’s too late and the universe decides that “modern man” is just too expensive to keep.

  19. kindGSL says:

    I think of it as the first big pow wow for the breeds

    Read the history of Native America and ask yourself how the Hippie movement wasn’t a home grown expression of Native American values. It was a flower of our culture, blooming with the words and songs of peace, love and brother-ship.

    BlueMeanies don’t care for that stuff. They re-proclaimed their war against us as a group of people. This time they call it the ‘culture war’ and fought it against ‘drugs’, but it is obviously vicious ethnic cleansing pointed at marijuana users.

    Others are correct in mentioning we have had many pow wows since then.

    We are not given respect or attention by big media. They are too afraid of our ideas to give us any credit as human beings.

    • fatster says:

      Looking for work:

      “After leaving government service in January 2009, Addington reportedly had trouble finding work, which some observers surmised was a result of the negative press he received during his tenure in Cheney’s OVP. According to a March 2009 New York Times report, Addington was one of several Bush lawyers who had difficulty landing jobs. As of July 2009, it remained unclear whether Addington was employed.”

      More.

      • skdadl says:

        Thank you, fatster. I’m mulling a little satire on our PM, who is going all unitary executive on us, a definite no-no in a constitutional monarchy.

  20. fatster says:

    O/T Drones over Latin America?

    Deal: United States soldiers will deploy to Colombia
    BY STEPHEN C. WEBSTER 

Published: August 15, 2009 
Updated -2001 second ago
    Chavez: ‘The winds of war [are] beginning to blow’

    “Some American troops will soon find themselves stationed at military bases scattered across the South American nation of Colombia with a mission to use advanced Predator drone technology to aid the fight the drug trade and combat terrorism, according to published reports Saturday.

    “But Colombia’s neighbors certainly do not see it that way.

    . . .

    “Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez led the charge, alongside his Ecuadoran counterpart and ally Correa.

    . . .

    “Other regional leaders, including Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, have asked Colombia to explain its decision.”

    More.

  21. Jeff Kaye says:

    Where are they all today? Where has the soul and conscience of our society gone? Where is the dissent; where is the beef? It is curiously and conspicuously absent from our analogous circumstance.

    We could argue forever about the relative merits of the 1960s. Since it, like all times, was contradictory in nature (”best of times, worst of times”), we can only speak in symbols, like Woodstock, the assassinations, etc.

    But bmaz has definitely hit upon one of the central contradictions of our time, which is the lack of societal response to great evils done by the government, made visible to all, and allowed to slide by with only sputtering bloggers (including me) to testify to the loss of humanity.

    Maybe alabama is right, and the difference all boils down to the existence of the draft. But there was no draft that caused the civil rights movement (although integration of the armed forces in the lat 1940s certainly had something to do with the rise in action around the cause).

    I think it’s something worse, a continuing creeping totalitarianism. One one side it’s state-sponsored, in the sense of violations of civil liberties, the solidification of the surveillance state, further intrusiveness into private lives and behaviors. On this score, one can find common ground with right-wing libertarians. On the other side, it’s a failure by the civil establishment, who have sided with fear: fear to speak out, fear of the truth, fear of loss of comfort, fear of what will happen to our children, fear of isolation, fear that life will end too soon and we will have missed out, fear of living fully and fear of dying.

    No one knows what makes for societal change, only that it happens in two ways: through slow accretion, and sometimes, unexpectedly, through rapid overturn and change. The years 1962 and 1968 were only six years apart, less than half a generation, but the changes were profound. The years 2003 and 2009 have seen no such massive change, and this even with the election of a black president.

    Change is not about symbols. It’s about how millions of feeling and thinking human beings choose to live their lives, and express their beliefs and act on them.

    In America today, me-first-ism has not significantly changed from the days of the Reagan Counter-revolution. We await the next major moment of full-scale societal progress, and believe me, it will feel like, and be, an upheaval.

    • fatster says:

      I didn’t make it to Woodstock, though I did attend the Sky River Rock Festival and Lighter Than Air Fair. It was an amazing three-day event, being one with the universe, the music, the crowd and the mud. So magical was the event that The Grateful Dead showed up unscheduled to be with us. Each morning the sun was coaxed up by a tribal elder who beat his drum and chanted as the light began to spread. On the last day, he related to us how the white man had subjugated them, ended their way of life in harmony with the universe, and even took their children and put them in boarding schools far from home. Then he said, “And now, we are going to take you!” The crowd roared.

      Music was an intrinsic part of The Movement. We were united in opposing the war, the draft, oppression everywhere, and our musicians were right there with us. Our lives consisted of going to school or work, turning out for the latest demonstration or march, going home for food and to watch ourselves on tee vee, then going to a concert and blasting our minds with the music. Always the music, which reflected both our outrage and our hope to somehow achieve a peaceful future.

      I only had one friend actually go to the war. He negotiated a deal to fly MediVac helicopters in ‘Nam and returned an entirely different person (we didn’t know “PTSD” at the time, nor how to help him). He finally died a few years later while flying logs around, alone in his helicopter when it went down. Did he have a flashback? Several other friends ended up missing a big toe–odd how there was such a spate of hunting accidents, including among those petitioning for CO status.

      We could not live our own lives because the gubmint demanded we make every sacrifice to their war. In defiance, we did what we could, as Savio had said just a few years earlier during the FSM:

      “ There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part; you can’t even passively take part, and you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop. And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!”

      War! Goddamned war! We may not have stopped it, but we tried, and we left an indelible mark; and regardless of how small a footnote it eventually becomes, it will still be there.

  22. tejanarusa says:

    bmaz – can’t believe I’ve closed the place down — but had to come back after listening to the videos to say – great choices.

    And now, though I really want to hook up my turntable and haul out the old CSN/Joni/Jimi LP’s, gotta shake it off and head out to actually accomplish something today. Thanks, though, you sparked a great discussion as well as some nostalgia.

    • bmaz says:

      You didn’t close the joint; we’re open all night! Thanks about the videos, I looked at a lot but settled on those. The first and last ones I thought were just killer for the video footage in the first and the photos (mostly from the famed Life Magazine crew) in the last. And of course the music in all was perfect for the mood (well at least to me anyway).

  23. WTFOver says:

    The USA government continues to withhold even the most basic information about prisoners in the Bagram detention facility in Afghanistan, according to the American Civil Liberties Union ( ACLU ), a New York-based legal rights organization.

    http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2009/08/15-2

    DOD Refuses To Turn Over List Of Bagram Detainee Information

    http://www.aclu.org/safefree/d…..90813.html

    http://www.aclu.org/safefree/d…..90813.html

    CHANGE WE CAN BELIEVE IN YESSIRREEBOB

  24. WTFOver says:

    Mercenaries and Murder in Iraq

    As private security firms take on more responsibility in Iraq, no amount of regulation can stop tragedies from happening

    http://www.guardian.co.uk/comm…..rmor-group

    In June, a Pentagon report revealed that there are still 132,610 contractors in Iraq – effectively doubling the size of the occupation – and that the use of armed “private security contractors” in the country actually increased by 23% during the second quarter of 2009.

    http://www.acq.osd.mil/log/PS/hot_topics.html

  25. freepatriot says:

    I was watching a woodstock retrospective, and one woman really made an impression

    she was talking about leaving woodstock, covered with mud, and after three days, the mud had become a badge of honor

    This is MY dirt

    I earned this dirt

    so I kinda figure that woodstock was where the “Honorable Legion of Dirty Fuckin Hippies” was consecrated

    an this place never closes, some of us like to raid the liquor cabinet and hide in the basement all night, thas all

    Detroit 3, Atlanta 7

    that ain’t change we can believe in …

  26. freepatriot says:

    hey, bmaz, you an Ackerman have to do some coordinating or something

    I read this line in Ackerman’s post and got all confused:

    CCR has actual baseball cards of Bush officials who ought to be prosecuted.

    I thought” why is Creedance Clearwater Revival giving out baseball cards of bushista war criminals”

    I didn’t even know they were still touring

    turns out, it’s the Center for Constitutional Rights, not CCR

    I was only confused for a minute or two, but I had to actually read the fookin post to find out what was goin on

    so you can see how dangerous all of this woodstock stuff can be

    I coulda had good thoughts about John Foggerty an stuff

    an we don want that to happen

    so maybe you an Ackerman could work out a deal where he uses more clarity on days when you old guys are reminiscing about how great stuff was when I was too young to have any fun

    or sumtin

    (wink)

    Nostalgia ain’t what it used to be …

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