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OpEdNews Op Eds    H3'ed 8/17/19

Woodstock Urges Roaming

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From Smirking Chimp


(Image by Laura Flanders)   Details   DMCA

Radical journalist Andrew Kopkind wrote about the Woodstock Peace and Music Fair in August 1969, just days after the event. "When we find out we have to fight for love, all hell will break loose," he wrote.

Fifty years on, after a night spent largely on that big wet, now commercialized field in Bethel, New York, I'm pondering what's happened since. What's taken so long?

It was fun out there last night, at what is now the Bethel Woods Center for the Arts. The 50th-anniversary celebrations have attracted loads of wistful (mostly white) wannabes, as well as faithful '69 veterans back to the original concert site. In our row, an elegant 70-year-old history teacher sporting a straw hat and white linen suit recalled hitchhiking from Baltimore in his twenties, and the mud. He knew every act.

Long after it was a bust, you see, the Woodstock business is still making money. In 24 hours, I've bought a Janis Joplin lunch box which I can't help but love even though it's manufactured by a company that claims to have trademarked her name. I picked up a four-pack of limited-edition Peace & Love Ale from a local brewery at my gas station. It's as contradictory as ever. As Andy wrote: "The Woodstock venture was a test of the ability of avant-garde capitalism at once to profit from and control the insurgencies that its system spawns."

In '69, insurgency won out, sort-of. People looked after each other and were looked after by Hog Farm anarchists and Sullivan County farmers. The fences came down, the tickets were ripped up. Still, concert-goers teeter-tottered from appreciating Army-airlifted PB&J sandwiches to chanting with Country Joe and the Fish against the war in Vietnam:

One-two-three-four/ What are we waiting for?

Today the rocking is gale force. Totalitarianism, tie-dyed and trademarked, crushes us between cash and caring, threat and promise, love and angst. The nausea's real, but so is the heart. The body is no cynic, and then as now, we suck in the freaky feel of home-making of commoning in public, unenclosed, with 10 or 20 or 40 or 400,000. You know you've felt that feeling. Where have you put it? As Kopkind concluded:

"It was an illusion and it wasn't...The system didn't change; it just accommodated the freaks for the weekend.

"What is not illusionary is the reality of a new culture of opposition. It grows out of the disintegration of the old forms and all the inane and destructive values of privatism, competition, commercialism, profitability and elitism. The new culture has yet to produce its own institutions on a mass scale; it controls none of the resources to do so... But something will survive, because there's no drug on earth to dispel the nausea. Mass politics, it's clear, can't yet be organized around [it]... But the urges are roaming, and when the dope freaks and nude swimmers and loveniks and ecological cultists and music groovers find out that they have to fight for love, all f*cking hell will break loose."

Thank you, Andy. We miss you.

My urges are roaming. How about yours?

You can see a mash-up picture of me at Woodstock, and a picture of that Janis Joplin lunch box as well as our rebroadcast of a popular interview with music producer Danny Goldberg about the Hippie Revolution and a performance of Climbing PoeTree here.

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Laura Flanders Social Media Pages: Facebook page url on login Profile not filled in       Twitter page url on login Profile not filled in       Linkedin page url on login Profile not filled in       Instagram page url on login Profile not filled in

Laura Flanders is the host of "GRIT TV" the new, news and culture discussion program aired daily on Free Speech TV (Dish Network ch. 9415) and online at the popular blog site Firedoglake.com. Flanders also hosts RadioNation, on Air America (more...)
 

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