The Wall Street Journal Remembers Woodstock
Thomas Frank is a miserably third-rate and supposedly leftist culture-critic who sold his sorry butt to the Wall Street Journal in 2008, and his most recent production for that right-wing rag is a ludicrous editorial about the Woodstock Festival in 1969, on the 40th annversary of that event.
On the way to concluding that everything about the counter-culture was "commercial" from the very beginning, Mr. Frank conveniently forgets one salient aspect of the Sixties which wasn't exclusively commercial...
The war in Vietnam.
As far as the cross-eyed culture-critic Thomas Frank can see, the war in Vietnam had no connection whatsoever with the counter-culture of the Sixties.
According to Mr. Frank, the culture-wars were all about conformity, and conformity is "an easy problem to solve."
"It merely requires that new and more authentic products appear all the time and that old products to be showered with scorn, cultural operations that consumer society performs incredibly well," and the next time a writer for the mainstream media complains about snark on the internet, it would probably be worthwhile to contrast all that internet snark with Mr. Frank's ungrammatical disaster of a sentence, which isn't snark.
"If the problem is a lack of respect for creativity," Thomas Frank continues, "management theorists stand ready to plaster our cubicles with posters hailing entrepreneurship and risk-taking."
And that was what the Woodstock Festival in 1969 and the rest of the counter-culture was all about, for Thomas Frank and the Wall Street Journal.
But the problem wasn't "a lack of respect for creativity," Thomas Frank, you pathetic and freakishly inane whore and scribbler.
The problem was a meaningless war that your goddamned friends in the Pentagon lied us into, and 58,000 American soldiers died in that war, along with 2,000,000 civilians in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos.
Thomas Frank's cheap and oblivious cynicism doesn't really fit Woodstock or the relatively uncommercialized war in Vietnam, but he was only pretending to be a historian for 15 minutes, and instead of describing anything about the Sixties, his natural calling as a shill for the Pentagon and weapons conglomerates irresistibly expressed itself in a nauseating celebration of the almost entirely commercial war we are waging today, where video "soldiers" in Langley, Virginia kill classified numbers of anything that moves in Aghanistan and Pakistan, with bombs loaded onto distant drones by Blackwater's well-paid thugs.
I don't even understand most of the article - really bad writing.
Funny, just the other day I noted that John Mackey's op-ed was probably the most liberal crazy idea to grace the WSJ in years. Someone rebutted with "Thomas Frank writes for them". So I now know that Makey has been out-crazied, but it seems not out-liberaled.
That Woodstock was turned into a non-commercial venture (unlike the several remakes) escapes Frank. The actual effort by numerous people to devote themselves to causes less commercial and more humanitarian escapes Frank. Yes, the Vietnam War escapes Frank, and the idea of protest through peaceful organizing just doesn't even come near Frank's universe. He refers to some commercials, as if that summarizes everything. Did the "Woodstock Generation" let us down, betray itself, he seems to want to know? Well, if you could assume Woodstock meant every Boomer, perhaps you could somehow draw that conclusion. But while music was a unifying passion (with a very diverse set of groups but all rather focused on the quality of their work, from Alvin Lee & his watermelon to Sha-Na-Na to Richie Havens to whomever), music isn't quite the dictatorial force the Communists had hoped. See, Thomas Frank's most brutal stupidity is that he can't imagine how people who supported non-conformity might turn out not to be completely conformed. Well wait, maybe he doesn't say that. He says that an ad agency targeted the boomer generation trying to make a buck, so boomers must be easy. He never quite tries to show whether it worked.
Label Frank an idiot, something like the WSJ's Colmes, and move on.
August 23, 2009 5:56 PM | Reply | Permalink
The depressing downside of Frank's article is... where's the Gen X counter-culture? If you figure a generation at what? 20 years? There should be at least a couple of post-boomer counter-cultures out there somewhere.
I guess punk still counts as a late-boomer convulsion, so what's left?
Disco?
Grunge?
Emo?
"I belong to the emo counter-culture. I'm very sensitive."
"How can you be sensitive? Your drug of choice is crank!"
"More like Vicodin and Ecstasy, you aging post-boomer pre-emo douchebag!"
"So who's the counter-cultural anti-hero of emo counter-culture, Emmet?"
"Barack Obama!"
August 23, 2009 6:52 PM | Reply | Permalink
You made me actually laugh out loud.
August 23, 2009 8:29 PM | Reply | Permalink
I assume that would be a cackle.
August 23, 2009 8:45 PM | Reply | Permalink
Belly-cackle
August 24, 2009 9:18 AM | Reply | Permalink
Obama admires the neatness of military bases, fawns on Ronald Reagan and supports wars which are not stupid.
Why do I think he doesn't have a clue concerning what the counter culture was about?
August 23, 2009 7:36 PM | Reply | Permalink
You're right, but I still don't know.
Why is Obama so clueless? This question is deep!
For example, at Columbia University, which Obama attended, they teach arcane subjects like atomic physics, and although most physics students are not electrons, they still aren't as clueless about electrons as Obama is clueless about culture-wars and counter-cultures.
Is it easier to understand a hippy or an electron?
IMHO, it's easier to understand a hippy, who only wants to smoke pot and eat munchies, but an electron obeys the laws of quantum mechanics, and can pass through two doors at exactly the same time!
What's up with that?
August 23, 2009 8:08 PM | Reply | Permalink
I can clearly see . . .
You don't have one iota of a clue about hippies...
They're just a figment of your imagination.
A ghost from the past passing thru time.
But I'm totally not surprised... dude!
~OGD~
August 23, 2009 8:26 PM | Reply | Permalink
Oh come on!!!
Take a look at his mother and you have counter-culture. His bi-racial presence alone screams counter-cutural non-conformity. But it seems he rebelled a little bit and is extremely mainstream in his behaviors. We can say he is highly aculturated, but it's not where his roots originate.
August 24, 2009 1:43 PM | Reply | Permalink
He was raised in a good part by his white Kansan grandparents and his 1950s roots show. And an absent black African father somehow gives him a mystical connection to left liberal largely white hippies with a yen for black hip culture? I don't think so.
The items cited were from him. One of the fundamental tenets of hippiedom was that ALL wars are stupid. Obama both does not 'get' the counterculture and to a certain extent holds it in contempt.
August 24, 2009 6:23 PM | Reply | Permalink
You talk about his granparents and his father, but it is his mother and her influence and efforts that gave him the counter-culture experience. He "gets" it. He just doesn't believe it is the only answer. His pragmatism has led him to consider how all sides can work together rather then having one side dominant and the other submissive. There is little synergy in that, and in synergy is the greatest potential. Obama knows that, and he got that from the counter culture because the 50s were about dominance, not cooperation.
August 25, 2009 1:43 AM | Reply | Permalink
No, I have to disagree. The 50s were all about cooperation -- called conformity -- pretending we all thought alike and ignoring moral wrongs while the sixties were about making moral judgments and working to enforce them and recognizing differences and celebrating those differences where warranted.
Synergy is not an effective tactic for dealing with Nazis. Nor, to a much lesser degree, is it an effective tactic for dealing with the current crop of Rethugs.
Or am I missing something about the current success of bipartisanship as doing anything other than delaying effective reform?
So far as I know, Obama's mother never so much as smoked pot. She seems to have been more of a driven academic and cause worker than a hippie. Not at all a bad background for a potential President but certainly not a credential for understanding the counterculture.
August 25, 2009 7:30 AM | Reply | Permalink
Tell you what, I'm going to concede that she was not a hippie, because you're right. She wasn't drugged up, tuned out, or participating in any of those other escapist behaviors. From Dream of my Father Obama wrote, "she was a lonely witness for secular humanism, a soldier for New Deal, Peace Corps, position-paper liberalism." {Actually, I'm quoting Wiki quoting DOMF.} It doesn't sound very conformist or mainstream. It's very sixties.
It is also accurate to note synergy does not work well with Nazis or Rethugs, but that is what Obama has been attempting these past several months, and it is an exercise in futility.
What I do object to, however, is the notion that conformity and cooperation are synonymous. Demanding conformity stifles cooperation, not enhances it. Expecting people to waste their energy to create an appearance of sameness is simply window dressing. Abandoning that desire to achieve a common goal, to work together regardless of hair length or the smell of patchouli, that is cooperative and indicative of synergy. I believe that is what Obama hopes to create, but it is not at all likely to happen.
August 25, 2009 12:15 PM | Reply | Permalink
Oh give me a frickin' break . . .
This poor fella doesn't recognize when his 15 minutes are up?
He truly needs a time line to keep his facts straight about that period of time. But it is hard when you didn't live it ...
Some Dockers wearing waering dude from Kansan writes this crap? What was he, all of 4 years old, riding his trike in the yard of his Kansas home when Woodstock went down? I bet his momma warned him to never be like any of them smelly, dirty longhaired hippies...
That's what we get with a guy with a Ph.D in History from the Univ. of Chicago?
Holy shit!
The only redeeming paragraph I noticed was the his very last.
You can bet your Dockers there dude ... Oh ... And by the way ...
We still be jamming.
Two generations removed... Shaken . . . Listen to the words. Jackie knows. Do you?
Now ... Someone tell poor Tom to get his butt back to the mid-west and write about the bumper soybean and corn crop.
~OGD~
August 23, 2009 8:19 PM | Reply | Permalink
I am down with Jackie Greene, but about those lyrics...
Did he run out of munchies, or what?
August 23, 2009 8:53 PM | Reply | Permalink
Funny ... But not hah hah . . .
I could swear that Jackie's referring to someone like you here in those lyrics.
Chew on that munchie ... Dude . . .
~OGD~
August 24, 2009 1:01 PM | Reply | Permalink
The Dead were smart enough to hire lyricists like Robert Hunter to write them great songs like "Dupree," so they didn't get stuck with lame-o lyrics by guitar-heroes who can't write, like Little Jackie Greene
But unfortunately not every stoner is as smart as Jerry Garcia.
August 24, 2009 4:55 PM | Reply | Permalink
And didn't you even notice that my diary is defending Woodstock against trivialization by right-wing weasels?
August 24, 2009 5:08 PM | Reply | Permalink
I don't give a crap . . .
It's not what you're defending that a give big whoop about concerning you.
Oh and ... I've worked with both Hunter and Garcia. Forty plus years on the road. So what's that fucking prove?
You the music fucking critic of all critics? What's that prove?
BTW -- Where were you on Feb. 5, 1966?
Later ... like much later . . .
~OGD~
August 31, 2009 5:33 AM | Reply | Permalink
Oh, phooey, I just wrote about 300 words in comment, went to grab a link, and evaporated my entire piece. Maybe i'll try again tomorrow.
August 23, 2009 11:41 PM | Reply | Permalink
Oh, c'mon!
Woodstock was so yesterday even while it was happening -- everyone knew 1968 was the watershed year and Altamont was already moving its slow thighs toward the abyss.
If it weren't for Thelma Schoonmaker no one would remember that New York State mud bath.
August 24, 2009 10:36 AM | Reply | Permalink
Full of crap as usual?
Nothing of substance to convey?
Must be time you change the batteries . . .
~OGD~
August 24, 2009 12:53 PM | Reply | Permalink