David Burchell, Woodstock, the French Revolution, Vietnam, and moral parables for all eternity

(Above: Jimi Hendrix seeks to revive Nazism, or perhaps the French revolution salute at Woodstock).

Dear lord, if there's one thing more joyous and totally excellent than Clive Hamilton celebrating the myth of Woodstock (Free love to narcissism), it's David Burchell flailing away trying to destroy the myth.

What a gob smacking wonder it is to read, and how's this for a florid opener?

As every good cultural revolutionary knows, it's not enough simply to erect the pristine scaffolding of your magnificent new social order under the fluorescent-white halos of truth and justice. First of all is the small matter of the past to be dealt with.

Wow, even a hippie bombed out of his mind couldn't come up with that kind of portentous pretentiousness. You might have thought the subject was Woodstock, given the header Mythic 60s revolution still mired in the Woodstock mud, but steady, we have to go back to the French revolution to get things clear.

And so we're told that - in-between such humdrum matters as proclaiming equality under the law, dis-establishing the church, and abolishing primogeniture - the French revolutionaries also set about a vast program of re-naming, re-describing and (last but not least) un-remembering. Some 1400 streets in Paris alone suffered redescription. The calendar was reconstituted on a self-evidently more rational and thoroughly decimal basis (although, frustratingly, the moon and the seasons obstinately refused to conform). St Cecilia's Day was re-born, bucolically, as the Day of the Turnip.

Wow, Woodstuck and the French revolution, co-joined and conflated, and let no rational person attempt to set them asunder:

Even after the passage of 40 years it's still not entirely clear what grand scaffolding those self-styled counter-cultural revolutionaries of the Woodstock generation believed themselves to be erecting, since, after all, most of their grandest social statements were clad in garments of the finest fluttering cheesecloth. And when all is said and done, most of the great social changes of the period owed more to dreary impersonal forces such as World War II and the Long Boom than they did to the spontaneous mystic energies of love-ins, collectives, or Capital reading-groups.

The finest fluttering cheesecloth! Oh muslin to that you cloth eared cotton denier. What about tie dye, and bell bottom and leather sandals and combat vests and peace symbol and corduroy and ankle bells and halter top and fringes and headbands with flowers in the hair, and hip huggers, and minis or even micro minis, and jeans and leather vests and hemp and beading and ... dude, were you ever around in the sixties, or did you just settle for a single breaster suit from Gowings?

Oh wait, I see where you're heading, it seems World War II was in fact more important than the hippies or Woodstock. Who'd have guessed it?

Why even the Vietnam war might have had something to do with the sixties? Oops, let's not go there, let's just get on with the business of de-mystifying the myth-makers. Because by golly those evil hippies were so good at it.

... there's at least one aspect of the cultural-revolutionary endeavour that the Woodstock generation can't be faulted in. They certainly knew how to handle the business of making history, as well as, by the same token, the business of un-remembering the past. And they've passed on this enviable facility for remembering only what's convenient about the history of the world prior to the moment of your own birth, and forgetting about the rest, so that it's become veritable second nature to all of us.

What, like dropping sundry trivia about the French revolution so that the reader can go WTF, and then cruelly dropping Robespierre like a hot potato? Time then I reckon to slag off the music of the sixties:

As The Wall Street Journal's music critic Jim Fusilli reminded us over the weekend, in reality the Woodstock music festival - which meandered to its conclusion in a sodden field in upstate New York 40 years ago today - was little more than three wearisome, mud-soaked days of musical chaos.

Oh well if Jim Fusilli from the WSJ says it, it must be true. That would be why the movie version did US$50 million gross in its first domestic outing, and has gone on making money ever since (let's not begin to count the CD spinoffs). Really it wasn't a bad assembly of mainstream and emerging bands, and the music is okay even if it reflects the standard of field recordings in those days, but no since the intent is to rubbish, perforce everything must be rubbished. How else to remember the past only in the way in which you wish to remember it?

Yet poor Burchell still wants to get agitated to a cosmic scale, even evoking the Druids:

And yet on every single anniversary since that day we have been treated to the ramblings of brain-addled pilgrims for whom an ill-organised rock and roll gig was the very spiritual summit of their life's experience. Why, even today the very mound of earth the Woodstock stage was jerry-built on has an eerie stillness befitting Stonehenge. No doubt the spiritual ecstasy of St Catherine, or the serene trials of St Sebastian, were somewhat elaborated on by the medieval church for the sake of a good story. But as a weaver of myths the church was surely no match for the combined efforts of the modern music industry and the tiresome, self-aggrandising idol-worship of a gaggle of badly aged rock groupies.

Stonehenge, spiritual ecstasy of St. Catherine, the trials of St Sebastian! Give me some of that acid, it seems extra fine.

Wow, second thoughts, dude, settle down and take a happy pill. Or perhaps a valium. I mean there's hate and then there's fear and loathing on a scale that might be life threatening.

As it happens, few of the claims made for the cultural originality of the rock and roll generation stand more than a moment's sober scrutiny. The world-philosophy of the Woodstockers was surely too eclectic to systematise.

Oh, you mean they weren't up to the French revolution? It was just a mud drenched chaotic rock festival, certainly not as bad as Altamont but perhaps no better than Monterey in '69, which set the pace. But how disappointing to write about such a banal event. Better to conflate the whole thing with your own diatribe of fear and loathing:

But at a pinch it could be described as a disorderly blend of 19th-century Transcendentalist spiritualism with the posturing self-discovery of the 1950s Beats, expressed in a painfully self-conscious argot culled from the private languages of the 40s jazz hipsters. All garnished with a light sprinkling of Karl Marx and Wilhelm Reich.

But mainly drugs and rock 'n roll? No, no, no transcendental posturing! And what ever you do, never express an interest in anyone's ideas or notions of history, or self, or the past or whatever. At least if they haven't passed the censorious gaze and inscrutable scrutiny of the fearless Burchell.

But I was reading Jane Austen back then. As well as a very light sprinkling of the very boring Marx and the weird Reich. Does she count?

No sweetie. More fool you for your posturing obviousness and painful self conscious referentialism.

Who today remembers that the word "cool" - that mystic talisman which, like a Fender Stratocaster, has served for three generations now to turn the nerdiest white teenager into the incarnation of a Greek god - was coined, not by some flower-bedecked San Franciscan youth, but rather by the jazz loner Lester Young in a New York tenement in the 1930s? (But then, Young was dead before Woodstock was born, and so he might never have existed.)

Jeez, dude, chill out, try to be cool. Are you so out of touch you aren't aware of the way "cool" has worked itself in and out of slang at least three times over the past forty years? Bummer dude, but whatever? Peace baby. And peace be to Lester Young, and Dizzy Gillespie and Duke Ellington, and whomever else, but what has this got to do with anything, except the crazed meanderings of a deluded outraged mind?

Or that Woodstock's "British invasion" all knew themselves to be pale replicas of the Memphis and Chicago bluesmen of a previous generation?

Okay, okay, you hated the music. We got that already. But can't pale replicas, white dudes, borrow from black dudes, and vice versa? And didn't the British invasion come into its own in due course? Or is Hal G. P. Colebatch right when he charted the decline and fall of Britain to the precise point color television and the Beatles arrived?

Presumably you stayed in the corner and listened to Cliff Richards and the Shadows. Whatever lit your wick baby. But why on earth should we care?

Who today recalls the patrician contempt with which their great idol, Jack Kerouac, treated the po-faced credos of the hippies and the yippies? Or the bewilderment and consternation of an older generation of social progressives towards the radical romper-roomers of the student dormitories, as the civil rights movement and the Great Society disappeared under a mountain of manifestos and a sickly-sweet herbal haze?

Well dude, now that you mention it, you seem to be the one who recalls it. And clearly you never got over being alienated from the hipsters. Perhaps black wasn't your color. Hey but I can dig that you couldn't dig it, I can get down with that, you being a cool cat and all, and perhaps even a lover of Maynard G. Krebs (look up The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis, children). I can't recollect Maynard saying it, but we all know a joint in the morning is a start to a day without sorrow, so grab your bongo drums and dig the skins.

Of all the grand spectacles of intellectual dishonesty and imposture that marked the Woodstock moment, though, surely none was more egregious than its moral triumphalism over the war in Vietnam. There were thoroughly defensible reasons for demonstrating against the Vietnam War, at least by the time it had descended into an endless strategic-bombing campaign against recalcitrant rice-paddies. The only problem is that these were hardly ever the reasons actually used by the anti-war leaders, who preferred instead to morally grandstand as pseudo-pacifists or part-time Maoists, or else, more commonly, as some improbable fusion of the two.

Moral triumphalism? Well I guess your number came up, the marble dropped and away you went, fighting for Robert McNamara's dream. Pity he got caught up in the fog of war, and changed his mind way down the track, but should Woodstock carry all of the burden?

What about Hair? Hey, that was on Broadway.

And of course it's this same slack, vainglorious attitude - the anti-war movement as successor to the early Christian saints, with the same icy disregard for individuals and peoples less holy than themselves - which has come to be taken as the stock response to foreign entanglements and emergencies everywhere by the political rockers of every generation. So that now we've become conditioned to supporting or ignoring foreign causes according to how much we think doing so would have offended our parents, had our parents been "straights" and wage-slaves back in the days of Woodstock.

Oh you poor straight wage slave. What did you do in the great cultural wars of the sixties, when the world was so close to a new French revolution even now I aspirate a little with the fear?

Whyse, honey chile, I went off and earned an honest dollar, while those grubby filthy hippies had a good time. No early Christian saints for me, why I love war and necessary killing, unlike these pathetic rockers and their peace man cry baby hugging.

According to the hagiography of Woodstock, the festival's apotheosis came with Jimi Hendrix's rendition of America's beautiful national anthem, the Star-Spangled Banner. Back in 1969 Hendrix's appearance was more or less ignored. (Almost everyone had left: the remaining kids in the front rows look uncomprehending.) In the grand Christology of the rock and roll moment, though, this three-minute epiphany of jazz-like improvisation and feedback has become the great ironic symphony of the Woodstock generation, not to mention the definitive repudiation of mindless patriotism and conformity everywhere.

Eer, actually dude, it's still pretty cool as a piece of music making, and it gets played a lot by hip cats. But then Hendrix could really play a guitar, dare I say it better than you can pound a keyboard to evoke outraged hysteria.

But I guess you'd like to have it both ways: mention how he mangled the national anthem, and then forget to mention how he managed to outrage many Americans with the way he did it. Better to focus on Eric Burdon and then draw a final far reaching conclusion:

As it happens, colleagues such as Eric Burdon still recall their arguments with an agonised Hendrix over Vietnam. ("Of course, war is horrible, but at present it's the only guarantee of peace.") And Hendrix himself explained his choice of tune to a television audience with the laconic observation: "I'm American, so I played it". But then of course Hendrix himself is long dead. And in the quest to turn the Woodstock moment into a moral parable for all eternity, small matters of fact must pass into history, for the sake of the cultural revolution.

Hah, and I always thought it was dumb lefties who stuck to that "maintain the rage" claptrap from the Whitlam years. When it's really strange surreal figures like Burchell ranging in deranged fashion across history, from medieval saints to the French revolution to Woodstock thinking what they're saying is making some kind of historical sense.

But I guess we'll all be dead soon enough, and while some might have forgotten Robert Johnson, others remember him, and while some don't care for Hendrix, others care for him, and the music will live on much longer than the fish and chips that constitute the rants of many outraged conservative commentariat columns.

That's the beauty of music, and that in the end was what Woodstock was, a music festival, and the people who inflate it are just as silly as those who go on a verbal bender trying to deflate it, and that's the one fact of history overlooked by Burchell as he tries to pin the tail on the donkey.

And wasn't it grand that Beethoven removed Napoleon's dedication in the Eroica symphony when that overlord decided to crown himself emperor.

So it goes, and ain't it grand that the peyote they sell these days is really strong stuff.

And what fun to read David Burchell, punching away at dreams, ghosts and nightmares in a fever, such hooting hollering good fun to read that I'll carry the memory with me until at least tomorrow morning.

Meantime, remind me to get out the stage recording of Hair:

You know kids, I wish every mom
and dad would make a speech to their
teenagers and say kids, be free,
be whatever you are, do whatever you
want to do, just so long as you don't hurt anybody.
And remember kids,
I am your friend.

I would just like to say that it is my conviction
That longer hair and other flamboyant affectations
Of appearance are nothing more
Than the male's emergence from his drab camoflage
Into the gaudy plumage
Which is the birthright of his sex

There is a peculiar notion that elegant plumage
And fine feathers are not proper for the male
When ac---tually
That is the way things are
In most species

Damn you, you hairy hippies, damn you all to hell. What with your shocking music and your sexism and what's worse your recently discovered affinity with the French revolution. How dare you try to turn Woodstock into a moral parable for all eternity. When you really were just a bunch of naughty boys (and girls) ...

(Below: damn you Woodstock hippies, back into the mud and the cheesecloth, for blessed are the cheesemakers).