The unruly left-wing protesters of yesteryear have become the
authoritarians of today, criticizing and clamping down on
protests far tamer and more sober than the ones they engineered
in the 1960s.
Notice that as liberals fulminate about the sudden lack of
“civility” in the country and the supposedly chilling spread of
nihilism and protest across the land they simultaneously
celebrate this month’s anniversary of the hideously stupid and
destructive Woodstock festival. Somehow the Woodstock protests
were charming and harmless, according to their moral
calculations, while today’s raucous townhall meetings are
perilous to the future of the republic.
Last week the Washington Post, in the midst of its
pooh-poohing of the townhall protests, ran a
piece by Jeanne McManus that extolled the “spirit” of
Woodstock. McManus whimsically recalled a lost opportunity to
attend that glorious event.
“A guy I hardly knew” tendered the “loosely issued” invitation,
but McManus passed, owing to an editing job she had taken ten
days earlier. “As that VW bus rolled north,” she was stuck in a
cubicle, “wearing a skirt, blouse, stockings and shoes.” She adds
importantly, “women couldn’t wear pants in that office. I might
as well have been bound with rope.”
“I had driven myself smack dab into a brick wall of obligation
and responsibility,” she sighs. But in a searing self-assessment
she acknowledges that she “probably” wasn’t ready for a “long
weekend of camping, chaos, wet sleeping bags, partying, sex,
drugs and rock and roll.”
Fortunately, she says, Woodstock’s lunacies touched her anyways:
“Was Woodstock a haven for the overindulged, self-important youth
of 1969? Some of my friends think so. But I think that, to its
credit, pieces of Woodstock’s own crazy world broke off and spun
their way into a larger world, especially the one in which I
dutifully participated; for about 10 years after Woodstock, its
atmospherics were infectious.”
Woodstock made life more carefree, she claims: “After Woodstock,
we knew we could abandon the car on the way to a concert, then
hitch a ride back afterward and find the car still waiting for
us. We could show up without tickets to see The Who and somehow
find ourselves at the front of the crowd, near the stage. And the
car that we had left back in the ditch? How did that happen? Who
knows, who cares? When we got back to it, people helped us tow it
out, as we knew they would.”
The world of Woodstock, she continues, was a world without
identity theft, noting that after it: “I would sometimes leave
the house without a plan, a destination or even a map. I’d book a
one-way fare and worry later about the return. One night I left
my fringed suede purse on a coat hook in a bar. I got home before
I realized it was gone. But the house was unlocked, so I didn’t
need a key; my wallet was almost empty of cash and I had no major
credit cards — no one did. There was no such thing as identity
theft. I never even went back for that purse. I had lost
nothing.”
Never mind that against her paradisal vision stand the ruins of
four decades of Woodstock-style pathologies. Ask a drug addict
how liberating it was.
Today, thanks to its ethos, a girl who accepts a “loosely
tendered” invitation from a stranger is more likely to end up as
an ongoing segment on Greta Van Susteren than a carefree attendee
at a concert. And that car “still waiting” for McManus? Would it
still be waiting in a scenario like that today? No, she would
probably find it keyed by drug-addled drifters. Her “suede purse”
would probably be gone, her unlocked door ajar and her identity
thieved in the night.
The self-delusion of liberalism is bottomless. It blithely
celebrates the inane though no less destructive nihilism of
Woodstock while treating as nihilistic traitors serious,
property-holding, taxpaying citizens who protest a statist
takeover of one-sixth of the United States economy.
Beneath the well-pressed suits of those establishment liberals
who are now touting the virtues of “civility” lies the sordid
attire of Woodstock, illustrating once again that no one is more
authoritarian than a successful left-wing protester. And as the
agents of previous liberal revolutions understood acutely, the
Woodstock authoritarians know that they must cow vigilant
citizens into docility, for the most sweeping revolutions are not
carried out against state power but with it.
