'"Three Days of Peace and Music,"' says Pauline, reading from the press release. 'A rock festival in the Catskills - sound like fun?'
'Sounds like pure hell.'
'Well, you're going.'
Thus begins Patricia Kennealy-Morrison's unorthodox take on the Woodstock Festival of August 1969. She was there, eventually and reluctantly, in her capacity as jazz-and-rock music journalist.
It sounds like hell to me as well. Too much like Waterloo Station at rush hour. I was sixteen when Woodstock took place, and taking a keen interest in all things 'alternative'. A few years down the line and I would be a counterculture hero myself, but in very different vein. I never wished I was at Woodstock.
Much has been made of the event by the mainstream media on this, its fiftieth anniversary. Organisations like the BBC appear to thoroughly approve; and why shouldn't they? 'Three days of music and peace' is the mantra churned out about Woodstock. In truth, I suggest that it posed little real threat to the established order. It is understandable that the 'love and peace and rock music' theme seemed vaguely revolutionary within the context of late '60s USA, with Vietnam, riots about race and war, and the rest; that stereotyped story is well-known. But most people who were really serious about creating a viable alternative were not in attendance. They were away, doing their thing....
The media's enthusiasm for Woodstock should instantly arouse suspicion: what's in it for them? Scratch beneath the surface, and it's not difficult to see. With a little subterfuge, twisting, and distortion, the stereotyped memes of the Woodstock culture elegantly morph into much of what the modern mainstream holds as closest to its deeply-corrupted heart. Put in a different way: Woodstock has become hardcore establishment.
Love, peace; oneness; caring, sharing: who wouldn't want to be part of that? The problem is that it's all too easily taken up by vested interests who have little love for peace, really, and is simply used to further their own ends. Plenty of present-day Woodstock-lookalike dudes will show an uninformed enthusiasm for globalism. Sounds like oneness, doesn't it? Caring for one another. The thing is that globalism is anything but. 'Oneness' properly understood is an individual experience, possibly the result of decades of disciplined spiritual practice, sometimes more serendipitously the consequence of ingesting consciousness-altering substances. It highlights the unity and interconnectness underlying manifold experience. Globalism, in contrast, is a collective political stance, a recipe for the masses. It does not promote enlightened experience of the individual. It promotes uniformity, anonymity, sameness, the human identikit robot. A seething mass of sub-human soup, overseen by a small, unaccountable 'elite'. Not 'love and peace' in the slightest.
And what about national borders? Well, oneness and caring for everyone else; borders must be bad, mustn't they, creating divisions between people. Wrong again. As in the life of the individual, the social human being requires borders, boundaries. It is well-known that a human being without a sense of their boundaries, and/or too open to every influence from the world around them (over-sensitive), will struggle to function healthily, and to define a sense of personal identity. Similarly with groups of people. They need boundaries, they need a sense of social identity; remove them, and their integrity will be destroyed (which is the idea, when it comes to open-borders globalism).
Part Two: Snakes in the Garden
And then there is nature, the environment as it is abstractly called nowadays. "We've got to get ourselves back to the garden" intoned Crosby, Stills, and Nash, in their iconic anthem to the festival.
This 'garden' comes with a hint of ambiguity. Maybe it's the Garden of Eden, the paradise before the fall. The original place of primal innocence. But 'the garden' also suggests countryside, nature, back-to-the-land, all primary themes in the Woodstock sentiment.
I'm all for nature, and dealing with the issues related to it: plastics, pollution, decimation of rainforests and other habitats for personal profit. Trashing of nature for housing, and wind and solar energy. Toxic practices in over-industrialised agriculture. These are all real, tangible problems which demand urgent attention - and against which practical action is perfectly feasible. But environmental politics, the bastard offspring of Woodstock's garden worship, hasn't adopted any of these as its prime focus. Instead, it had decided to whip up mass-hysteria about the one 'environmental' issue which is more nebulous, controversial, uncertain, and which nobody actually understands: human-induced climate change or global warming; or, since this doesn't seem to scare people enough, climate emergency.
The politics surrounding this has become increasingly that of histrionics, departing from both rationality and nature (it is mainly promoted by people living in big cities). There is little honour and integrity involved. Instead, it is a crude but effective manipulation of the Woodstock instinct that alienation from the natural world is a bad thing. Climate change hysteria is a key ingredient in the globalist programme rolled out by not-very-nice people. Greta Thunberg may be the divine love child of the unthinking sector of the Woodstock generation, and an extremely irritating one, but I fear for her future.
Not enough people who consider themselves liberal, intelligent, caring, and generally right-on, have woken up to some harsh realities. That there are people out there who don't care if you are left or right, black or white, up or down, nice or nasty. Some will be outright sociopaths or psychopaths; others will be less extreme, but only too willing to cast aside any sense of morality, of democracy, of freedoms to speak and act for the individual, in the service of their own agendas. 'We need to do this in the name of the greater good': hear this phrase, and immediately go on red alert.
Whatever, you are easy meat for manipulation of your own feelings and attitudes, if you are not awake to what can happen on deeper levels. You don't need a PhD in parapolitics (you won't find one anyway), but you do require a good instinct for the games that take place beneath the surface of things. A bit of basic education in such things. If not, you will likely end up as part of the legacy of Woodstock, the twisted anthem for 'progressives' of today. Your nice feelings mangled and manipulated into service to those who will feign to care, all the while furthering their own programmes and agendas. The elites, the deep state, empire, the control system. They have many names, and we know they are out there...… Don't be a blind pseudo-hippie activist. Look out.
Footnote#1: Patricia
Patricia Kennealy (Morrison)'s account of the Woodstock festival is singularly dispassionate, and compassionate. She was there, and she was not seduced by the hype. She feels uncomfortable as she sits in the comfort of the rain-proof Pavilion provided for her and her fellow journalists, music promoters and rock stars, guzzling Moet and whatever else might be on offer; outside, meanwhile, the unwashed youth, the foot soldiers of the revolution, are cold, wet, and hungry. She feels troubled when she looks at some of the kids there: ".... kids who haven't got faces yet, kids filled up with drugs they don't know how to make proper use of, and only take them because they think it's required of them, because they want to be hip and cool and accepted...."
Some Doors aficionados really don't like Patricia at all. She is the 'pagan priestess' who underwent a pagan marriage, or handfasting ceremony, with Jim Morrison. Some consider her Jim story, 'Strange Days', to be a product of neurotic fantasy. Some details may be off-course, I do not know. But there is an overall ring of authenticity about some of her writing, at least. Incisive and intelligent, her view into the rock music world of the time is a good read. Her story is, above all else, on a theme increasingly rare nowadays, that of undying love.
Footnote#2: Love and Peace
Love and peace never really did it for me. In 1967, when California's Summer of Love sent its gentle ripples across the Atlantic to our fair shores, I saw the cowbells and flowers, but remained unconvinced. Spaced-out smiles on hippies dancing and blowing bubbles was all very well, and some of the music was great. But it all came over as a bit vapid, vacuous. I couldn't put my finger on it, but even to my fourteen-year-old mind something was missing.
Midsummer, and the Beatles released their own anthem to the year's happenings: 'All You Need Is Love'. John Lennon had reputedly been tripping on acid non-stop for the past two years, which sounded interesting. But if this was the best he could come up with after all that time, I wasn't impressed.
Then the Beatles went to India and teamed up with the Maharishi. You knew this was a mistake, just by looking at the photos, and all a bit silly. vapid and vacuous again. It was then that I gave up on the Fab Four. There had been a time when they were truly inspirational to a new teenager, but no more.
My mind drifted off elsewhere, and eventually came upon some kind of solution. The Doors. Jim Morrison, mainly. Nothing vapid here. Unlike the Beatles, and Woodstock a bit later on, he was perceived as a real threat by the powers-that-were, and he paid the ultimate price.
Twenty years after all that, I was finally able to give a name to what had been so patently missing, and what Morrison possessed in abundance: 'Shadow'.
Footnote#3: Greta
As I write this piece, our young saviouress is mid-Atlantic, on her boat en route to some extremely important climate change conference in the USA. This is well-known. What is less well-known - strangely, the mainstream has omitted to mention this part of the story - is the logistics involved in all of this. Greta, of course, is on the boat because she is against air travel, as it is contributing to global warming. We do, however, have the captain of her boat, who will need to get back to Europe from the USA - which he will do by plane. In addition, a team is required to go from Europe to the USA to bring back the boat. They will do so - yep, you got it - by plane. In other words, far more air travel is involved in all this than if Greta had done the reasonable thing, and just got herself a low-profile, economy class flight from Sweden to USA. But no. In other words again, it's a publicity stunt, and a feel-good trip for our pigtailed heroine.
Yes, Greta is very irritating. But maybe we shouldn't be too hard on her. Being famous so young can be tricky: ask Martina Hingis or Jennifer Capriati. And they actually possessed rare talent, unlike Greta.
I haven't followed the Greta story very much. I have other things to do. But it is likely far deeper, darker, and more complex than most people would like to think. I mean, what's it about? Really. There will be people behind the whole weird narrative of elevating her to saintly status. And we have some of mainstream media's obscene fawning over her. What's in it for all these questionable entities? Is it a shaming of older people, that they haven't done enough to save the planet, so we need a schoolgirl to show us all up as the irresponsible good-for-nothings that we are? The more time passes, the more I feel that there is something very sick about using a girl in this way, for whatever purpose. Some comments on a YouTube presentation I watched recently likened the phenomenon to child abuse. I think they have a point.
In the meantime, don't be surprised if things don't end well for Greta. On the other hand, maybe she will be appointed Big Chief at the UN, and single-handedly save us all from the impending flames of hell. It is being suggested that she may receive the Nobel Peace Prize. Should anyone be in doubt as to the real meaning of this accolade, then here is final proof.
The thing is: on climate change we don't know. Nobody knows. Nobody. Don't be conned into thinking otherwise, that's my advice, not that anybody asked for it. Planetary climate can indeed change, rapidly and radically, both heating and cooling in next-to no time. It has happened before, without the aid of humankind, and can happen again. It's simply part of living on this planet: everything's a bit uncertain.
Footnote#4: The Garden
Actually, there has been substantial progress in reclaiming the garden in recent decades. In some areas, at least. Some things are being preserved, some things are being conserved.
I am thinking especially of some of the cities. Far cleaner, less polluted, quieter, less traffic, healthier in general, with the return of wildlife to urban areas. Some animals, in fact, seek refuge in the city from the 'countryside', where industrial farming poisons them and people try to shoot them with guns. In the city, no predators.
I was recently in Newcastle, a good example. 'Grim' and 'grime' are words which would once have been automatically coupled with this city, along with the other urban conglomerations adjacent. No longer. The central areas of Newcastle are a pleasure to stroll around, and to be in generally (this is probably not the case on a Friday evening....). Lots of money has been put into the place, and the riverside and city centre have been impressively transformed.
Inverness centre, in sad contrast, is a bit of a dump. It was a dump when I moved here fourteen years ago and, despite a little tweaking here and there, it remains a dump. The place survives largely because coachloads of tourists are disgorged onto its shabby streets for a few hours, where they spend a fistful of money on Highland souvenirs, before heading off to the Isle of Skye later in the day. Meanwhile, the outskirts of Inverness continue to spread relentlessly outwards in an urban sprawl that could be anywhere in the UK.
Inverness notwithstanding, some of urban Britain gives cause for optimism. Something which appears to pass Extinction Rebellion by.
