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that, ace, depends on what you imagine the politics of the period to have been like. but it's not surprising somehow that you'd take a reductive view, particularly given that trying to wish away exactly the sort of serious political opposition to the american consumer dreamspace was such a big part of the reagan ideological agenda. you know, the sort of stuff that opened space for the snippy people "theory" of this fiction you call "terrorism"--the view that such actions are motivatedd by a bad attitude and nothing else, as if there could not possibly be a serious political critique of the american way of doing things. so you pretend there wasn't.
(btw--i'm not particularly a fan of much of the new left politics in the states, but that's another matter.)
so if you imagine that the new left was really just a bunch of fried hippy types whose politics went only as deep as "fuck the man" then in that alternate reality, quips like yours could plausibly say something. but the fact is that this is an alternate reality, a historical falsification conservative style.
and stuff like the woodstock film (the original one) are complicit in this by the nature of the kind of objects they are--they dont show what's outside the frame the only reproduce the surfaces of objects and not how they come to have meanings, etc. so you can watch the film and make up whatever you want to fill in the blanks. which it seems you like doing, ace.
personally, i don't object to the film---i just think films are peculiar objects and documentary often even more so.
but i thought monterrey pop a way better film.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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