Woodstock: 40 years of freaks on the loose in America

By GRAHAM OSTEEN
Editor-At-Large
graham@theitem.com

The Woodstock 40th anniversary self-indulgence racket is way out of hand, which isn’t surprising. That’s what Woodstock was all about. Buncha no-good, drug-addled hippies.

I’ve been reading up on it lately because my favorite newspaper other than The Item, The Wall Street Journal, is staffed heavily with people still obsessed by Woodstock. It was such a mystical, magical turning point they won’t let it go, and their ages now – roughly 55 to 70 – make them guilty by association with historic debauchery that has affected mankind’s social progress for decades.

I understand the revolutionary nature of breaking bad and getting dirty, high, drunk and wild, but it seems odd to embrace that as some sort of spiritual awakening for so long. What’s really meaningful about a bad acid hangover, woeful regret, acres of mud and strange venereal diseases?

This got me thinking about how big a part the Woodstock generation’s best and brightest have played in the financial meltdown and America’s current mess. Self-indulgence and greed always lead to pain, and the current situation is just the worst and latest in what we conceive of as human history.

Was Lehman Brothers’ pariah CEO Richard Fuld out there naked and tripping on acid in the mud of Max Yasgur’s farm? How about Bernie Maddoff? Allen Stanford? Angelo Mozilo? These are just a few of the faces of Wall Street excess. Under the radar, I’m sure many vintage original Woodstock posters adorn the walls of wine cellars in mansions owned by Goldman Sachs executives, given that Goldman actually runs the world.

I found clarity in the timeless wisdom of The Wall Street Journal. There’s an Aug. 28, 1969, editorial reprinted in Friday’s paper “on Woodstock and the so-called generation gap” under the byline “Squalor Possessed.”


Now we are aware of all the cant about how these young people are rejecting traditional tastes and values because society has bitterly disappointed them, and we would be the last to deny the faults in contemporary society. It is nonetheless true that their anarchic approach holds no hope at all.

They won’t listen, but if they, and some of the unduly sympathetic adults around, would listen, here are some words worth hearing. They occur in a speech by Professor Lawrence Lee to a social fraternity at the University of Pittsburgh, quoted in National Review:

“You have been told, and you have come to believe, that you are the brightest of generations. You are rather, one of the most self-centered, self-pitying, confused generations. The generation gap is one of the delusions of your generation – and to some men of my generation, the only generation gap is that we have lived longer, we know more than you do from having lived, and we are so far ahead of you that it will take you a lifetime to have the same relative knowledge and wisdom. You had better learn from us while you can ….

“It is not mawkish to love one’s country. The country, with all its agony and all its faults, is still the most generous and most open society on earth. All generations need the help of others. Ours is asking yours to be men rather than children, before some frightened tyrant with the aid of other frightened and ignorant men seeks to make all of us slaves in reaction to your irresponsibility.”

In any event, opting for physical, intellectual and cultural squalor seems an odd way to advance civilization.


Professor Lee, an author who once served as editor of the Virginia Quarterly Review, was not in demand as a fraternity faculty adviser. Too much of a bummer, man.

I’ve been asking some of my slightly older friends if they went to Woodstock, and the answers are always surprising and entertaining.

One drove up from North Carolina in a Winnebago with some college fraternity brothers because they had friends in Flushing Meadows, N.Y. They got to the party area two days early and stayed a week, trading shelter in the Winnebago for food, drugs, alcohol and bacchanal pleasure. He wishes to remain anonymous.

A woman I know was just 13 in 1969, but conspired with her wild older sisters to create a complex conspiracy of “I’m spending the night with her” stories that gave them time to get from Wilmington, N.C., to just outside New York City in a VW bus. They stopped to call their co-conspirators back home and found out they were busted, so they never made it to the actual event. She’s still mad about it. The return to Wilmington didn’t involve a hometown welcome parade from their parents.

“They put up with a lot,” she said.

The real heroes of Woodstock for me are the oldest and greatest of the survivors, including Levon Helm, Neil Young, John Fogerty, Carlos Santana and a few others. Helm in particular, a cancer survivor, is doing some of the best work of his life right now, giving us all hope for the golden years and proving that something good did indeed crawl out of the mud, even if it was just a hearty strain of psychedelic evolution.

Whatever, man.

Graham Osteen is co-president of Osteen Publishing Co. and Editor-At-Large of The Item. Contact him at The Item, 20 North Magnolia St., Sumter, S.C., 29150; graham@theitem.com, or call (803) 774-1352.