Woodstock politics
 

Since Woodstock happened 40 years ago this weekend, I'm wondering what the US would look like if we had 40 years of far left Democrat and Green based politics since 1969?

VOA News - Woodstock Encapsulated an Era of Social, Political Protest

Well, obviously, marijuana would be legal. :) But, I would think that a lot of the wars would have either not be entered into by the US, or they would have been fought differently. People would be focused more on helping others and community service. Environmental concerns and living life with what you can make is more impressive than excessive consumerism and wasteful/polluting lifestyles. And nudity would be considered natural to some extent.

It sounds like a much better police model than we have today at sporting events and concerts. There would be hundreds of police/security trying to control the masses if a concert like that happened today.

I'm sorry but this follows the same self-justifying logic train that feminists try to use when they argue a female leader would lead to more peaceful and stable platforms although there's no evidence of it.

The whole Love movement survives only long enough for the movement to gain traction. At that point the policies of helping each other becomes beyond simply charity and is enforced policies. Therefore the natural evolution of the movement would kill it's original intent.

For example, everyone "should" spend time helping those who are impoverished spreading their knowledge/time/skills to others. However once this "Woodstock Politics" becomes dogma how do you propose dealing with those who do not wish to partake? If you ignore them the movement would quickly devolve as none of us (or very very few) want to spend each weekend cooking for the homeless, and the inherant jealousy of those not there would slow everyone else's desire as well. If you start to punish those not partaking, you become worse than the original system.

Oh, and I haven't seen any intervention as far as drugs are concerned in any Concert I've been to in the last 10 years... so not sure how it equates in this situation.

You have to take that attitude towards drugs to the general population and the laws we currently have.

And the whole thing is to imagine if most people would partake, instead of there being 50% who are against it, there would be .5%.

drugs are bad (not all but most)

I've never done any beside a few prescription stuff and laughing gas at the dentist. I know that they have some downsides, but I don't have a problem with people occasionally using safe drugs. I have more of a problem with the policing of 'natural' drugs than people using and growing them in their own homes.

The whole acid/LSD stuff is a little different, it makes artists better it seems. Crystal meth and heroin are bad.

But it does make people do things that make them not productive little workers, and instead reliant on society to provide for them.

I would suggest people change. It is easier to be far left and green, when you are not, raising a family, paying a mortgage, saving for retirement, helping to care for your parents, and trying to squeeze in a week or two of vacation each year. Responsibilities changes a person.

It we had been ruled by Woodstock politics following 1969, we would be speaking Russian and there would not be a U.S.

No...no...you'd be a giant Canada, and there would not be a financial crisis.

хорошая мысль!

Well, the beer would be better. BTW, did you read the story on the Canadian Medical system which broke this morning? Unsustainable.

It's not broken, it's just in need of adjustments. It's not the same system it was when it was created, which means it won't be the same system tomorrow. The system is still there.

And, yeah, your beer would taste like beer. Which would be awesome.

the memorialization of woodstock is a curious thing, dont you think?
what's up with that?

if youre thinking about the history of outdoor pa systems, though, woodstock is a real watershed moment. it changed how outdoor sound was projected, and generated an interesting process of rethinking the technologies.

but as a festival? seriously, its more the film and the joni mitchell song...so it became this fetish object because watching the film you could "be there" again and again, and "be there" in a way that stripped out much of the overall political context and so reduces it to just another music festival even as it transforms the idea of it into some world-historical Watershed. and that is a kind of indicator of how the history of the vietnam period's been reprocessed as a consumer change: the emergence of a new and pretty self-involved demographic that imagined one could consume one's way into an alternate political world.

of course, the wider political context wasn't like that, but it seems folk forget about that mostly, like there's been some mist of amnesia spraying over us all for a very long time.

fact is that of you see the last 40 years or so as a protracted extension of the political conflicts put into play during the vietnam period, it's hard not to see that the right won. they they fucked it up. but think about how central stuff like "the vietnam syndrome" was for the development of contemporary conservatism into the soporific that accompanied neoliberalism.

in a general way, you could see the end of bushworld as the end of that period, the one dominated by the political configuration put into motion through and in reaction to the vietnam period.

I'm fairly liberal with my politics, but fuck the hippies. It's possible to be liberal without the pie in the sky, unrealistic and unattainable ideology of patchouli smelling fuckwads.

patchouli smelling fuckwads? is that an analytic category in your world? what color's the sky there?

Basically, anyone wearing a tie dyed shirt in 2009 is a patchouli smelling fuckwad.

how droll.

Meh. Whatever.

Regardless of your opinion on clothing I'm not tossing any t-shirts my kid bought me.

But in a sense I get what you're saying.

Or, there came a point when "corporate America" had to deliver some toilet paper and change the Porta Potties. It is funny how some of the weirdest things can change a persons political view.:oogle:

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.

I simply think (broad general view realizing there are exceptions) that the idealism of youth fades with maturity. During that era, I am 49 and was a young observer, people had idealistic attitudes about the exploitative nature of corporate America, yet would be exploited by the very people they entrusted their idealism to. While some sat around smoking joints singing Kum Ba Yah, their drug dealers were making a ton of money using violence, corruption and all sorts of techniques that the people in that culture found so vial. At some point people decided that being exploited by corporate America wasn't so bad - at least they would get clean underwear.

well obviously everybody on earth thinks exactly the way you do, ace, and everybody's had exactly the experience you have across your 49 nears

though i have to say i'm a year older than you and this idea you seem to have that everybody has exactly the same experience as you strikes me as ludicrous.

Jon Savage on song: Canned Heat's Woodstock anthem | Music | guardian.co.uk

this from the morning's guardian, an article that starts off being about canned heat but ends up being about the commodification of woodstock etc...

people decided being exploited by corporate America wasn't so bad?

That's real sweet. As if 'corporate America' had no idea what the advantages of a consumerism-addled American public would be.

No one decided to become functionally blind to the corruption and licentiousness that goes into propping up America's self-interest (aka, I guess, clean underwear).

Kumbayah, my ass. If you really believe that, then you are the one who is naive. The one who has been swindled.