The American Debate: Woodstock? - Get over it already

Brace yourselves for yet another round of Woodstock overload. Next weekend marks the 40th anniversary of that mythical music mudfest, so naturally we're getting eight new books, a new TV documentary, a new Hollywood movie, and a newly remastered DVD of the old documentary, which will enable aging baby boomers to mourn their lost youth in high definition.

I'm not sure what has made me recoil from this contrived celebration. Perhaps it's the leather fringe on the DVD packaging, supposedly reminiscent of those late-'60s jackets worn by young boomers who wanted to look like Buffalo Bill.

But, as a certified boomer, I simply want to say: Enough about us.

Enough about how Woodstock was supposedly the apogee of flower power, the moment when young people showed how they would change the world and transform human consciousness. Enough with the documentary footage of the festival organizers clutching their flowers and gushing about cosmic, utopian oneness.

The truth, omitted from the 1970 documentary, is that hundreds of kids ingested bad acid and required medical treatment in the "freakout tent," that the Grateful Dead were almost electrocuted on stage during a downpour, that stoned musicians traveling in helicopters vomited on the crowd, that two festival organizers wound up suing the other two (there were 80 lawsuits in all), and that many of the people in attendance remain confused about what they actually witnessed vs. what they saw in the documentary.

(Did I go to Woodstock? Nope. I had a low-paying teenage summer job and was convinced that the tickets were too expensive: $18 for three days.)

And enough about the purported bliss of camping incommunicado for three days and nights in mud and rain. If kids today told their boomer parents that they intended to follow the Woodstock template, they'd never get out the door - not unless they agreed to pack the GPS-equipped family SUV with SPF 50 (to guard against sunburn), 100 percent Deet bug spray (to fight Lyme disease), electrolyte-enhanced bottled water (for extra hydration), condoms (duh), a North Face tent (to ensure privacy), an EMS parka (to guard against raindrops), and a nonnegotiable directive to check in via text message at the top of every hour.

Boomers are risk-averse as parents because they realize they haven't changed the world. If anything, the world is more dangerous now than it was in 1969, when Woodstock's public-address announcer was intoning that "the man next to you is your brother." We've spent much of the past decade wondering whether the man next to us is a bomber.

The cold undertow of middle age is probably enough to prompt some boomers to smile upon the Woodstock anniversary once again. But I say, Let it go. It was all such a myth to begin with.

Even the name is wrong. The festival was actually staged in Bethel, 45 miles from Woodstock, and only because the town fathers of Walkill nixed the deal for the original site. Which was fortunate, because the term Walkill Nation would have lacked the requisite crunchy vibe. Worse yet, Joni Mitchell would have been forced to pen the lyric "By the time we got to Walkill, we were half a million strong."

But Mitchell never got herself "to the garden" anyway. Stymied by the rotten travel conditions, she crafted her famous song about Woodstock in a Manhattan hotel room. She boasted that "we are stardust, we are golden," and boomers loved that line. It airbrushed over the evil underside of the '60s - most notably the Charles Manson murders, which occurred just six days before Woodstock.

Nobody in the '70 documentary talked about Manson, or about the violent radicals applauding his work. Indeed, all political content was deliberately excised from the film - which means that most boomers, having only seen the film, have come to believe that Woodstock was a totally apolitical event. In truth, there were constant tensions between the organizers, who wanted simply to stage a music party, and activists, who wanted to galvanize the crowd for various political purposes.

The most priceless moment - which undercut the myth of the blissful, monolithic counterculture - wasn't even captured on screen. In the midst of a post-midnight set by The Who, celebrity radical Abbie Hoffman strode onto the stage (or perhaps staggered, since he was addled by LSD at the time) and tried to make a political speech. In response, Who guitarist Pete Townsend raised his guitar and bonked Hoffman on the head.

Or maybe he jabbed Hoffman's neck; nobody is quite sure even today. What's indisputable is that Hoffman got the last word shortly thereafter, when he marketed the myth during a highly publicized federal trial. When asked to name his place of residence, he testified: "I live in Woodstock Nation. It is a nation of alienated young people. We carry it around with us as a state of mind."

That was quite a heavy load - this notion that Woodstock was supposed to be more than a party, that it was supposed to define how a generation felt about itself, to crystallize its political and cultural potential. Looking back 40 years, Woodstock has managed only to inflate boomers' expectations of themselves and, sadly, to amplify many of life's inevitable disappointments.

So enough about the utopia that never was, and all its cosmic freight. There's only one way to get back to the garden: Stick to the music, and grab some sun. And slather on the SPF 50.