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Woodstock
St. James Encyclopedia of Pop Culture by Douglas Cooke
However, many commentators have since claimed that peace and good will arose not in spite of disaster but because of it. The hunger, rain, mud, and unserviced toilets conspired to create an adversity against which people could unite and bond. In "The Woodstock Wars," Hal Aspen observed that the communal spirit of Woodstock was typical of the group psychology of disasters: "What takes hold at the time is a humbling sense of togetherness ...
with those who shared the experience. What takes hold later is a privileged sense of apartness ... from those who didn't." Aspen explained that the memory of Woodstock led a generation to arrogate "an epic and heroic youth culture" that subsequent generations could not match. Those who were once simply called baby boomers now dubbed themselves "Woodstock Nation," an independent and enlightened subculture. Abbie Hoffman wrote a book of editorials called Woodstock Nation immediately after the event, contrasting the newly united masses with the "Pig Nation" of mainstream America. He even contrasted Woodstock with the moon landing of July 20, less than a month before the festival, calling Woodstock "the first attempt to land a man on the earth." The closeness of the two milestone events in one summer invited such ironic comparisons. Ayn Rand used Nietzsche's dichotomy of Apollo and Dionysus to contrast the two events. She observed that the moon landing represented the culmination of the Apollonian, or civilized, aspect of man, which is governed by reason, while Woodstock expressed the Dionysian, or primeval, aspect of man, which is ruled by hedonism. The name of the moonlanding mission, Apollo, made this interpretation all the more compelling. But such was the sheer physical magnitude of the Woodstock Festival that it afforded enough complexity to accommodate many interpretations. The moonwalk analogies tended to view Woodstock as a moment of separation from the establishment, but it was also possible to view it as reconciliation. It wasn't just the audience of hippies who bonded together in the face of disaster. Community and nation also rushed to their aid. The Red Cross, Girl Scouts, and Boy Scouts all donated food and supplies to the starving hoards. Even local townspeople pardoned the havoc wrought upon their town and made sandwiches for the infiltrators. The youths who had fled from their parents in pursuit of utopian visions ended up welcoming assistance from the very establishment that Woodstock symbolically rejected. They were led to appreciate that these groups had maintained efficiency to get them out of their jam. Someone, they realized, had to stay sober. Many Bethel residents, for their part, commented with surprise on the hippies' politeness and peaceful behavior. Mainstream America saw Max Yasgur's observation born out, that rock and violence were not inseparable, and that perhaps the peace the hippies advocated wasn't such a pipedream after all. In 1972 Woodstock Nation repaid the compliment by nominating Yasgur for president.
When the initial euphoria wore off it became common to view Woodstock not as the beginning of a new era but as an ending, the high-water mark of the 1960s, when hippie freakdom reached critical mass and dissipated into mainstream, and the establishment coopted the diluted attitudes and fashions into a commodity. Much of the pride and idealism of Woodstock Nation crumbled as the following years brought devastating casualties to their culture. Someone was stabbed at the Rolling Stones' free concert at Altamont in December of 1969; 1970 brought the student massacres at Kent Sate University, the breakup of the Beatles, and the deaths of Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin later that year. The following year brought the death of Jim Morrison, the closing of the Fillmore Concert Halls, and the reelection of Nixon. Such defeats hastened the trend toward escapism, exemplified by rock's detour into country music and apolitical singer/songwriters, sinking into the quagmire of narcissistic spiritual odysseys in the "Me Decade."
