By the time we got to Woodstock it was burning to the ground

I felt my heart fill with a monstrous joy when I heard that they were burning Woodstock in a town called Rome. They will blame the trouble as usual on a few bad apples, on a few greedy vendors, on the heat, on lack of sleep. Hell, I even read someone blame it on nudity. A common cause of fires, no doubt. It scarcely matters what lies spew from the mealy mouths of the promoters and reporters, what self-deceptions bubble out of the the pathetic youth remnants of the terminally attenuated hippie movement and their aged doppelgangers, the former hippies who somehow convince themselves that the moneymaking made for teevee promotional juggernaut of 1999 bears a remote resemblance or "spiritual connection" (groovy, man) to the spontaneous phenomenon of thirty years ago. This is not a last minute glitch after three happy happy days, not an isolated incident perpetrated by a few bad kids. This is Death of Culture time. Woodstock died along with the rest of the doomed movement in 1971 (the year I was born), so I found scarce reason for getting worked up (pro or con) over the grisley spectacle of its clumsily ressurected corpse on display in 1994. But this is something more, something special. Woodstock, burning in Rome, in 1999.

I'm immune to the Woodstock mystique and to the era in general. Everything that was stupid and naive and false about the hippie counterculture can be correlated exactly to the subsequent dissipation, bastardization, and commercialization that followed hard on the heels of the Summer of Love. While there's little question that the original event was a Defining Moment, it was merely a promising rally for an upstart contender in the Culture Wars. In the end it didn't mean anything, because a very small portion of history demonstrated that the hippies were laughably out-gunned, out-classed and unprepared for the hard-core reality of societal politics. Their message did not carry and their center could not hold.

Still, Woodstock was something... and I can only be thankful that some few had the decency to stand up, do the right thing, and make a fine effort to burn the travesty of the modern incarnation to the ground. It's a fitting end to the story of Woodstock in the Twentieth Century, already sanitized, packaged and wrapped in lies, ready to be a two hour television commercial for the third-rate messiahs that the Suit brigade have hired to separate our children from their fast-food dollars. A long strange trip indeed...

klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.