In which we ponder getting wee-wee'd up over Woodstock

I was born too late to appreciate Woodstock. Thank God. And thanks to loving, sane adult parenting, by the time I heard of Woodstock when I was in my teens, I thought, "Yuck," or something like that. I can't actually remember what I would have said, but I do know there was never a moment when the abandonment of self-control and the embracing of self-destruction and anarchy that was Woodstock did not repel me.

Here is a great piece that says "Call Woodstock what it was." Indeed.

And this one, noting that the brainless Woodstock worshippers are today's authoritarians.

"The self-delusion of liberalism is bottomless. It blithely celebrates the inane though no less destructive nihilism of Woodstock while treating as nihilistic traitors serious, property-holding, taxpaying citizens who protest a statist takeover of one-sixth of the United States economy.

Beneath the well-pressed suits of those establishment liberals who are now touting the virtues of "civility" lies the sordid attire of Woodstock, illustrating once again that no one is more authoritarian than a successful left-wing protester. And as the agents of previous liberal revolutions understood acutely, the Woodstock authoritarians know that they must cow vigilant citizens into docility, for the most sweeping revolutions are not carried out against state power but with it."

***

Here's the verbalization of something long observed: the UPCHUCK FACTOR.

"The Upchuck Factor is, quite simply, the length of time it takes the US voter to decide that s/he's "had enough" of the Democrats.  And it looks like this year it is hitting a new record.

You may have been taught in school, for instance, that the American people loved Franklin Delano Roosevelt so much that they would have gone on voting for him forever.  In fact the American people demonstrated in the mid-term election of 1938 that they were ready to upchuck him and all his works.  The 1938 elections featured an 81-seat gain in the House of Representatives for the Republicans.  Figure that FDR's Upchuck Factor was 6.

What was the problem in 1938?  It wasn't that complicated.  After six years of political bombast and war on the private sector -- and after FDR gunned the economy into the red zone in 1936 with unprecedented stimulus -- the economy collapsed in 1937 and the American people decided that they had had enough.  They determined to upchuck the New York machine politics of FDR.  But then along came World War II and saved his political skin.

The 1960s is another era in which we are taught that Americans loved their government.  They basked in the sun of JFK and LBJ, and loved the exciting space programs and wars on poverty.  But in fact, the American people decided they had had enough after six years of it. In 1966, well before the Summer of Love, American voters upchucked and gave the Republicans 47 additional seats in the House.  Two years later they sent the very un-sunny Richard Nixon to the White House.  Give the JFK/LBJ Democrats an Upchuck Factor of 6.

In the late 1970s President Jimmy Carter came into office promising that he'd never lie to the American people.  Maybe he didn't, but he wrecked the economy and this time the American people didn't wait six or eight years before upchucking. 

It was then that the voters' digestion really started to go south.  They vomited up Carter and the Democrats after four years in 1980 and elected a man that "everyone" agreed was little more than an amiable dunce.   Things must have been really bad for the American people to go to that extreme.  President Carter moved the Upchuck Factor to 4."

Brilliant.

 

Comments

[Old Guy]

Your attack on Woodstock misses the point of the festival in the era ... In history, context matters.

[Martha]

Nothing good came of Woodstock in any context.

[Vicki Small]

Okay, I'm really late in reading these. And yet, I'm in plenty of time, as those well-dressed establishment liberals--those wealthy folks who shed crocodile tears over the plight of the poor, those "ecology-minded" criers of "global warming" while living in houses that drain more energy in a month than most of us do in a year--are still in power and doing all they can to cow the rest of us. And those conferences they fly to where they talk about "climate change"...haven't they heard of teleconferences? Or even video-conferencing?

And they aren't just in Washington; they've been washing the brains of university students for more than 30 years. I hope the upchuck factor works really fast, with conservatives gaining control of both Houses of Congress next year--and then not wimping out when the Liberals bark.