Forty years ago today, the Woodstock music festival began. Woodstock has been so romanticized by the current ruling elites (media and political) that the reality no longer bears much resemblance to the myth.

A reverent and fawning documentary last night only reminded me of all that was ugly and idiotic about the thing and I couldn’t help but see many parallels to our current situation. You see, the people who attended this thing are now pretty much running our country.

Woodstock Encapsulated

Billed as “Three Days of Peace & Music, Woodstock was envisioned as a ticketed, three-day concert in which about 200,000 people would pay $18 in advance and $24 at the gate. About 186,000 people actually paid good money for a ticket but then about twice that many more crashed the gates and expected to be entertained, fed, and medically treated for drug related mishaps at no cost to themselves.

Based on all the misty, water-color remembering that ex-hippies were doing in that documentary I watched, we’re all supposed to marvel and admire Woodstock for the miracle that 500,000 stoners got together in a pasture for three days without violence breaking out.

They seem to be under the impression that if a half million insurance agents and bankers had been put in that situation it would have devolved into Lord of the Flies within 24 hours.

Of course, squares with jobs and responsibilities and bourgeois hangups about walking in without paying would  have never been in that situation. As the documentary pointed out, neighboring farmers and shopkeepers quickly came to the rescue of the in-way-over-their-heads organizers and brought food, drinking water and equipment in.

The U.S. Army — uniformly despised and reviled by the musicians and their assembled fans — rushed in to offer medical support. Most of the medical needs arose from drug overdoses and “bad trips.” (“We have a report that there’s a problem with the brown acid!”)

40 Years Later

Four decades later, the generation that filled farmer Max Yasgur’s field with peace, love, trash and vomit is largely running our country. Most of them weren’t actually at the event, but they imbibed deeply of the spirit of the times.

You could define the Woodstock generation as those born between 1943 and 1953 (Americans who were age 16 through 26) and who rejected the traditional cultural values of Christianity, capitalism, self-reliance and self-restraint.

Among our current leaders and policy shapers who came out of this brown acid trip are:

Nancy Pelosi; Hillary Clinton; Joe Biden; Charles Schumer; John Kerry; Robert Reich; Al Gore; Maureen Dowd; Paul Krugman; Al Franken; Chris Matthews; etc. etc.

Our New Woodstock

Reduced to it’s purest essence, Woodstock was an invasion by a bunch people operating with an inflated sense of entitlement and moral superiority; indulging their every whim and impulse, becoming a burden to responsible people who had to come to their rescue;and who left a gigantic mess for others to clean up.

And here we are again, only the farm that’s being trashed is the entire country.