LITMIR.BIZ

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Edward gloated.

      “If Woodstock — the bands, the festival — was what the producers made happen,” Jay said, ignoring his brother’s interruption, “something also went down there that we created.”

      “Yes — fifty tons of garbage.”

      En route back from the April 15 anti-war demonstration in San Francisco at the start of the Summer of Love, we had picked up a hitchhiker in the early evening on the shoulder of 101 near Salinas: long hair, clean-shaven, army jacket with an “A” shoulder patch, jeans. Once in the car, our passenger rapped non-stop. First he apologized for his slowness of speech, saying he was just down from a week on Dexedrine. He had hitched to San Francisco for the march, we learned, from Marina del Rey. He’d been staying with his younger brother there for the past three weeks, having recently arrived from Dallas to assist his sibling with a light show the brother put on for money.

      In San Francisco our passenger had crashed with the Diggers. These were the Bay Area hippie self-help group who took their name from a land reform movement during the English Civil War of the mid-1600s, suppressed by Oliver Cromwell as too revolutionary.

      “Diggers are a good idea,” the hitchhiker informed us. “It just doesn’t work. They’re against leaders, but too many slack off. Like there was nothing to eat at the Digger House, despite what you hear, Friday night. And the commode wasn’t working. They run out of paper and don’t buy more. Somebody uses a rag, and the commode backs up. They can’t afford a plumber, so it stays that way. About five in the morning they start waking us up because they had some hot spaghetti prepared. My taste buds aren’t ready for that at that hour of the morning.”

      After delivering himself of how bummed he was by his hosts’ shortcomings, our hitchhiker smoked a cigarette begged from somebody in the car, then nodded off. We woke him at 3:00 a.m. at the sign for Culver Boulevard. The last we saw of him was in the harsh illumination at the interchange as he dropped over the shoulder of the exit ramp.

      “What I’m trying to tell you, Eddie,” Jay was holding forth, “is that when hundreds of thousands of heads arrived at Woodstock, dug the scene, and wiped out the intentions of the money-grubbing guys, they created another way of existing.”

      “Yay!” Pump cheered. “The Woodstock Nation!”

      “That tag is strictly a media invention,” Edward scoffed. “Someone probably would have talked about the Monterey Nation if they’d thought of it. All it means is —”

      I didn’t disagree with our passenger’s criticism of the Diggers a couple of years ago. The hippie trip could be too disconnected from reality. Surely, a functioning toilet was a minimal requirement for a communal crash pad.

      Plus, the ideal of love and peace could be an opportunity for the unscrupulous to rip off naive freaks who believed in the inherent goodness of other freaks. Already in the Frozen North stories were circulating about land communes gone wrong. Several people would pool money to buy a rural acreage, and somebody would volunteer that the title be put in his name “just for convenience’s sake,” since the authorities frowned on twenty-six names on a title. A year later the hapless commune members found themselves kicked off “their” land by their obliging compatriot, with no legal recourse. Bridget, in a pronouncement I could get behind, once summed up why she couldn’t adopt the Flower Power philosophy wholesale: “We are all beings of light, true enough. But some of us have our jerk suits on.”

      The mysticism, the passivity preached by Eastern religions, and the belief in the eternal merit of non-violence that were stirred into the hippie mix resulted too frequently in pathetic scenes like the Laguna Canyon episode. Martin Luther King’s reward for preaching non-violence was a bullet, which I would’ve thought was a convincing argument against his approach to obtaining civil rights. Certainly, the ghettos didn’t express their dismay at King’s murder by adopting the peaceful forms of protest he advocated. To factor love into major social change, into revolution, that emotion had better be — to quote one of the new slogans I’d heard — Armed Love.

      “No, man, you’re dead fucking wrong.” Pump was jabbing a forefinger at Edward. “Dig it — when we were in the army looking out, you could see two different groups. I never thought of them as nations, but that’s what they are. One with long hair and drugs and a way of life different from our parents. The other the straight world. Like Jay says, the Woodstock concert might have been the promoter’s idea. The Woodstock Nation is all ours.”

      Not that I was a wild-in-the-streets, bloodthirsty violence advocate — far from it. I counted myself one of the biggest chickens alive. Brawwwk-awwk-awwk was my motto. One of the posters I kept tacked up on my wall on Cajon Street was issued by SDS after Malcolm X was shot. Underneath Malcolm’s portrait was the caption: HE WAS READY. ARE YOU? I looked at the words every day, and inevitably thought, Well, not really. No. The poster reminded me each time I glanced at it how far I was from measuring up to what social change probably would demand.

      How was it somebody like me, definitely deficient in the fearlessness department, could wear the buttons I had pinned on, believe the ideas I did? I recognized that I was able to participate in acts of resistance to injustice and oppression because I was surrounded by brave men and women whose leadership by example I could follow. If a protest picket involved only twenty of us circling outside the Santa Ana courthouse, for instance, while a bail hearing for a local anti-draft activist was proceeding inside, I felt embarrassed and vulnerable at being one of such a pitiful handful parading around and around while we clutched ferociously worded signs and raised a feeble-sounding chant: “Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh. NLF is gonna win.” But I was there.

      Even if an action involved many more participants, like a peace protest, I was gripped since Century City by nervousness at the first glimpse of the police and at the audacity of our radical contingent’s thundered call-and-response: “What do we want? Revolution. When do we want it? Now.” Yet as long as people more courageous than me were confronting an enemy I shared with them, you’d find me beside them in the fray — albeit twitchy, anxious, sweating.

      I couldn’t conceive any more of a life without participating in the fight to dismantle a social system that would cheerfully send my friends to die in a indefensible and unjust war, that would perpetuate its anti-human values through the educational institutions I was caught up in, and that would condemn me to a working life that would further enhance the control of a handful of individuals over huge portions of the globe and its citizens — including me. I was grateful, though, that so many people weren’t as inclined as I to tally up the hazards of taking action.

      I wakened to a silence between the boys and Edward. Though I was still ripped, my head felt clearer. Had I missed some resolution of the debate? Or had the hash finally affected their brains enough that the dispute had evaporated? What time was it? Shouldn’t I be getting home?

      “I read in the Free Press that Abbie Hoffman is writing a book called Woodstock Nation,” Jay said after a moment. “You can’t say Abbie is on the same trip as the Woodstock promoters.”

      The quiet that had startled me was obviously only a breather.

      “Hoffman!” Edward hooted. “You know what Don says happened to Hoffman at Woodstock?”

      “What?” Jay asked.

      “He was booed offstage by the crowd. There’s your Woodstock Nation.”

      “I don’t believe it.”

      “He got up onstage and was trying to give some spiel. People wanted to hear the music and shouted him down. The Who was either on, or on next. Peter Townsend bopped him across the head with his guitar.”

      “What was Abbie saying, though? Maybe he was on a different trip.”

      “Yeah, maybe he got hip to the scene after Woodstock was over,” Pump contributed. “Anyway, whatever Hoffman did or didn’t do, the Woodstock Nation is where it’s at.”

      “Bullshit,” Edward said. “You just don’t —”

      I

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