Woodstock 40th anniversary; New York Times coverage; Ayn Rand; Nightmare in the Catskills

This weekend marks the 40th anniversary of "Woodstock." We are supposed to celebrate "peace," "love" and other stuff in honor of this anniversary. Debbie Schlussel has the real story:

I really don’t care that the “greatest names in rock of the day” performed there. So what? And who cares if Jimi Hendrix played there? Look what happened to him just over a year later. Dead of a drug overdose and too much alcohol. Typical of the Woodstock idiots. They, the rockers, and the hippies, yippies, and other numbskulls making up the boomer generation at this infest-o-fest brought us free love . . . and STDs and AIDs, single mothers and baby mamas, and a whole new hipness to out-of-wedlock births that has brought us crime waves, sensitive men a/k/a wimps, and a whole lot of other problems. Their sexual mores brought us sky-high divorce rates and a rate of out of wedlock mothers–40%–that rivals many Western democracies.

They are the liberals who voted for Barack Obama and not too long before him, Bill Clinton, and Jimmy Carter. They are the ones who made today’s consideration of socialized medicine possible.

Apparently Debbie didn't get the MSM/DNC memo (or she got it but was able to ignore it like the rest of us should).

In 2007 [in the immediate aftermath of the Virginia Tech shooting], I wrote in detail about the changing way we view news stories after the initial event. I chronicled how the MSM/DNC line develops, after which all of the MSM/DNC outlets learn to stick to their story:

Years from now, we will forget that we were in the dark for so many days or hours in the immediate aftermath of the killings at Virginia Tech. MSM/DNC becomes more polished the more time passes in the wake of any news item. As various parts of the MSM/DNC "get their story straight," the MSM/DNC line becomes standard and can be reduced to a few soundbites. That is why immediate coverage of any major story is interesting. We have the chance the catch the MSM/DNC off guard.

The same is true of Woodstock. On August 18, 1969, the New York Times published an editorial highly critical of the gathering entitled "Nightmare in the Catskills." By the next day, the Times had apparently received the MSM/DNC memo and changed their position. Today, the Times' original editorial has disappeared down the memory hole. Other MSM/DNC outlets fell into line quickly also.

The definitive piece on Woodstock was written by Ayn Rand four months later. She not only summarized the social implications of the gathering but she chronicled facts that have been lost to history. Debbie Schlussel has summarized the negative consequences created by the participants, consequences from which we suffer today. Those consequences were easily predictable for anyone who had read Rand's piece - "Apollo and Dionysus."

In particular, Rand chronicled the hardships created for neighboring farmers and small businessmen by the Woodstock event:

Richard C. Joyner, the operator of the local post office and general store on Route 17B "said that the youngsters at the festival had virtually taken over his property - camping on his lawn, making fires on his patio and using the backyard as a latrine

.

Clarence W. Townsend, who runs a 150-acre dairy farm . . . was shaken by the ordeal. "We had thousands of cars all over our fields," he said. "There were kids all over the place. They made a human cesspool of our property and drove through the cornfields. There's not a fence left on the place. They just tore them up and used them for firewood" . . .

"My pond is a swamp [said Royden Gabriele, another farmer]. I've got no fences and they used my field as a latrine. They picked corn and camped all over the place. They just landed wherever they could . . . We pulled 30 of them out of the hay mow smoking pot . . . If they come back next year I don't know what I'll do," Mr. Gabriele said. "If I can't sell, I'll just burn the place down."

The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution, p. 71 [Signet edition] (quoting New York Times, August 20, 1969)

As Rand wrote, "No love - or thought - was given to these victims by the unsanitary apostles of love." Ibid.

The apostles of love have been enabled for decades since that event (much in the way summarized by Eugene Lyons in the Red Decade (referring to the 1930's)). The enabling and coddling has led that generation to give us the unsustainable welfare state of today with no thought of the consequences. As revealed by a New York Times interview with participants the following week, the participants had no thought of consequences for their own basic needs at the festival:

Q: What about food?
A: We brought a bag of carrots. And some soda.
Q: Did you expect to be able to buy more there?
A: We never really thought about it.

[As quoted by Rand, p. 73.]

In the same way, these same people are now supporting Obamacare without thinking about what will happen when they are denied medical treatment under the system of rationing that may soon be enacted.

No living, eating or sanitary facilities were provided; . . . "Festival food supplies were almost immediately exhausted . . . and water coming from wells dug into the area stopped flowing or came up impure. A heavy rain Friday night turned the amphitheater into a quagmire and the concession area into a mudhole. . . Throngs of wet, sick and wounded hippies trekked to impromptu hospital tents suffering from colds, sore throats, broken bones, barbed-wire cuts and nail puncture wounds. Festival doctors called it a 'health emergency,' and 50 additional doctors were flown in from New York City to meet the crisis." [There will be no "50 additional doctors" flying to our rescue under Obamacare - Salt.]
According to the New York Times (August 18), when the rainstorm came "at least 80,000 young people sat or stood in front of the stage and shouted obscenities at the darkened skies [a precursor to the anti-Christianity that pervades today's culture? - Salt] as trash rolled down the muddy hillside with the runoff of the rain. Others took shelter in dripping tents, lean-tos, cars and trucks . . . Many boys and girls wandered through the storm nude, red mud clinging to their bodies."

Rand, pp. 69-70

Has it ever occurred to you that it is not an accident, but the psychological mechanism of projection that has made people of this kind choose to call their opponents "pigs?"

Rand, p. 75

Who will the leftists shout obscenities at when they cannot receive medical treatment under Obamacare? The thought of such a scene makes it tempting to support Obamacare - except for the fact that I will suffer also.

Drugs were used, sold, shared or given away during the entire festival. Eyewitnesses claim that 99 percent of the crowd smoked marijuana; but heroin, hashish, LSD and other stronger drugs were peddled openly. The nightmare convulsions of so-called "bad trips" were a common occurrence. One young man died, apparently from an overdose of heroin.

Rand, p. 70

There is much more to Rand's article, especially the discussion of the attitudes of the participants, and their expectations of happiness without work and life without thought.



These details (especially the destruction of neighboring property) have largely been ignored in today's MSM/DNC memorials to the event. So have the subsequent disputes among the organizers of the event (over money). That the event was organized by wealthy heirs who spent the next few years fighting over money does not fit the MSM/DNC theme of peace, love and utopia that we are all expected passively to accept. Woodstock has become another object of worship among the MSM/DNC. Leftists expect their history books to treat Woodstock much the same way that Christianity treats the "Sermon on the Mount." They fail to realize that as more of the leftist agenda becomes law, civilization will continue to collapse. With the end of civilization comes the end of higher learning, including the faithful recording of history (even propaganda). Propaganda itself depends on the existence of the civilization that the left seeks to destroy.

As the left becomes more politically successful, the gods of leftism will fade into the memory hole along with the rest of our knowledge. By passing Obamacare, cap-and-trade, the stimulus bill, etc., the left relegates itself (and the rest of us) to oblivion. Future generations will know little or nothing of Woodstock, the first African-American President, the first hispanic Supreme Court justice, the Vietnam protests and other landmarks of leftism. They will know only that the greatest civilization ever to exist somehow collapsed, leaving them to struggle on a daily basis for their very survival.
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Visit counter added August 16, 2009

Apollo 11 moon landing anniversary; Ayn Rand - Apollo and Dionysus; William Safire

Today is the 37th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969.



This anniversary reminds me of two things:

1) Ayn Rand wrote an article in late 1969 entitled "Apollo and Dionysus." She compared the Apollo 11 flight to Woodstock and examined the opposing philosophies that brought about the moon landing and the mudfest in New York. This article is the definitive piece in response to the endless MSM/DNC romanticizing of Woodstock (and of the '60's in general). The article later appeared in The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution.



2) In 1999, William Safire published the text of a speech that he had written for President Nixon shortly before the Apollo 11 mission. Safire was given the duty to prepare a speech in the event that the mission failed. I don't have the url anymore, but I saved the article containing the speech when it was first published seven years ago. The article describes the speech and the circumstances under which it was written. I enjoy "what if" scenarios, especially when the historical figures involved developed such detailed scenarios:

Disaster Never Came

"Fate has ordained," a saddened President was prepared to say, "that the men who went to the moon to explore in peace will stay to rest in peace."

That was the opening line of a speech to the nation that I drafted for Richard Nixon 30 years ago this week, as Apollo XI was about to land on the moon.

NASA's liaison with the White House, the astronaut Frank Borman, had called me to say "You want to be thinking of some alternative posture for the President in the event of mishaps." When that failed to register, he laid it out more plainly: "Like what to do for the widows."

The most dangerous part of the trip was not landing the little module on the moon, but in launching it back up to the mother ship. If that failed, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin could not be rescued. Mission Control would have to "close down communications" and, as the world agonized, let the doomed astronauts starve to death or commit suicide.

Nixon aides H. R. Haldeman and Peter Flanigan told me to plan for that tragic contingency. On July 18, 1969, I recommended that "in event of moon disaster . . . the President should telephone each of the widows-to-be" and after NASA cut off contact "a clergyman should adopt the same procedure as a burial at sea, commending their souls to 'the deepest of the deep,' concluding with the Lord's Prayer." A draft Presidential speech was included.

I haven't thought about that macabre planning for three decades. Like most adults, I remembered the exhilarating "MEN WALK ON MOON" headline, the phone call of congratulations to "Tranquillity base" -- and that historic weekend's dark counterpoint at Chappaquiddick, which ended the dynastic potential of the brother of the President who launched the Apollo journey.

Last week, however, Jim Mann of The Los Angeles Times wrote a piece headed "The Story of a Tragedy That Was Not to Be." He was digging through the National Archives last year, researching his book on China policy, "About Face." He found our moon disaster contingency plan, and published it the week before the anniversary along with the never-needed speech draft.

"These brave men, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, know there is no hope for their recovery," the President would have had to say. "But they also know that there is hope for mankind in their sacrifice.

. . .

"In ancient days, men looked at stars and saw their heroes in the constellations. In modern times, we do much the same, but our heroes are epic men of flesh and blood.

"Others will follow, and surely find their way home. Man's search will not be denied. But these were the first, and will remain foremost in our hearts.

"For every human being who looks up at the moon in the nights to come will know that there is some corner of another world that is forever mankind."

For 17 years afterward, we took space triumph for granted. Terrible risks were largely ignored -- until the Challenger spacecraft blew up for all to see in classrooms and living rooms.

No disaster speech was on hand for President Reagan to deliver in the stunned aftermath. His writer, Peggy Noonan, rose to the occasion with a moving address written at white heat, concluding with the words of the sonnet by James Gillespie Magee in farewell to the courageous crew who "slipped the surly bonds of earth to touch the face of God."

Time and chance happeneth to us all. Armstrong and Aldrin are alive and well; the third man to walk the moon, Pete Conrad, was killed last week when, like Lawrence of Arabia, he ran his motorcycle into a ditch. But the point is not the quirkiness of Fate: our charge today is to value the goal of discovery that drives questing humans to take great risks.

A personal note. At historic moments, speechwriters turn to poets. The final line of the undelivered salute evoked the cadence of the patriotic poet Rupert Brooke, who died in the Royal Navy in World War I:

If I should die, think only this of me:
That there's some corner of a foreign field
That is forever England.