Posted on 03/10/2014 1:02:24 PM PDT by Academiadotorg
Academics, the very people who claim they want “progress” “going forward,” frequently want to turn back the clock a half century or so. “Without hope—the fervent, animating kind—the 60s would have had no fuel to feed the engines of change,” Paul Kane wrote in The Chronicle Review on March 7, 2014. “To have seen our causes as hopeless would have drained them of force.”
“No civil-rights movement, no antiwar protests, no feminism, no gay and lesbian rights, no counterculture and commune movement, no Woodstock, no environmentalism. Whatever we might think of that period now, we believed then in what we were doing, and that our actions could make a difference.” Kane is a professor of English and environmental studies at Vassar.
He is also the poet laureate of Orange County. Woodstock remains the Camelot of the far Left but, as reporters from the Daily Mail pointed out:
• “Two people died at Woodstock - one man from a heroin overdose and a teenager in a sleeping bag who was killed when a tractor ran over him. The driver was never traced;” • “Eight women suffered miscarriages, while there are varying reports of babies born;” • “Though the festival mood was anti-war, ironically the festival would most likely have turned to tragedy without the U.S. Army, who airlifted in food, medical teams and performers. The hippy crowd was told: ‘They are with us man, they are not against us. Forty five doctors or more are here without pay because they dig what this is into;’” • “For the weekend of the festival it had become the third largest city in New York State. But due to lack of basic amenities, Governor Nelson Rockefeller declared it a disaster area. The health department documented 5,162 medical cases, including 797 instances of drug abuse. But Time magazine called it ‘The greatest peaceful event in history;’” • “While most acts reveled in having appeared there, sitar player Ravi Shankar found it a ‘terrifying experience’ and said the crowd in the mud reminded him of the water buffaloes at home in India;” and • “Actor and country singer Roy Rogers—billed as King of the Cowboys for his western movies—was asked to close the show, singing his trademark song, Happy Trails to You. But Rogers’ manager vetoed it, and years later Rogers admitted: ‘I would have been booed off stage by all those goddam hippies.’”
Malcolm A. Kline is the Executive Director of Accuracy in Academia.
stuck in the sixties - stuck on stupid
He sure paints a pretty picture.
Hey hippy, why don’t ya all die now that you’re old? Talkin bout MY generation. We have to repair the destruction you wrought.
Only in Liberaland could the naive, simplistic crusades of a 50-year old drug-addled counterculture be seen as “progressive.”
My husband, a child of the 60’s, says that the only way to change things, “is for all the old hippies to die off”. He is embarrassed of his generation.
The mindset of the sixties is destroying this nation and Obama has been brainwashed by the old guard communists of the 60’s.
A friend in academia was telling me about the hippies that came to the President’s office to demand ROTC be booted off campus. He sent some ROTC guys to talk to them. All of whom were black.
The hippies suffered a brain reboot when they couldn’t figure out how to respond. All the hippies I knew in college were ex-military.
I still dig 60’s music, factory muscle cars and somewhat liberated young women between the ages of 18 and 32 who like to go camping. Having been heavily influenced by such things and by people 10 years older than me, I’ll never be a ‘maturity snob’. Especially since I’ve seen how a lot of them became maturity snobs.
Woodstock had some good musical acts but it was pure debauchery and shouldn't be celebrated.
It was dope, not hope, that propelled the 60’s, and this country has been paying for it ever since.
Hey, I was one of those sixties hippies... Ultra left wing, against the war, rtc. Within a little more than 10 years I’d become a Republican and started to become the conservative I am today. Occasionally I run into friends from that era, almost all of whom are still stuck in that mindset, and my changes disturb them.
What I realize, and what I tell them is that I was actually a small “L” libertarian all along. I didn’t want anyone to tread on me in those days, and I still don’t.
They don’t see it. To them, I am nothing more than an apostate, and in the reactionary left, that can be abided.
Lol! “I used to ovulate”...
Woodstock was theft. The bands didn’t opt to play for free. The radicals (Abbie Hoffman and the Black Panthers) extorted $25,000 out of the investors and demanded table space, then still agitated the masses leading up to the event, caused havoc at the event, and Abbie tried to interrupt the Who’s concert performance. The film crew (which had rented EVERY available camera from NYC) almost had their gear hijacked by famous radicals. The burger guy got his rented booth burned down by anarchists (”Hey if you still don’t think Capitalism is too weird an idea, you might go buy one of his burgers to help him out” is my from memory account of what the announcer said from the stage in the concert film).
Every act admits to being stoned to the max (they couldn’t even bear to look at the audience, a sea of mouth and teeth). It took hours of plugging Hendrix with drugs to take him DOWN from the trip he was already on (he was supposed to be on Dick Cavett later that night but was too f***ed up).
Hippies stink.
I hate old people...they all suck
Can we eat them?
Swiftly..
I like that phrase, “the reactionary Left.”
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