Health Care Woodstock

Forty years ago, Baby Boomers were out rocking and rolling in the mud to, as one put it, "terrify our parents in a deeply satisfying way." Now, facing Medicare, they are acting out in public again, this time over death panels that might finally put those aged begetters out of their misery.

"It’s a vivid reminder," Frank Rich observes, "that what most endures from America, 1969, is not the peace-and-love flower-power bacchanal of Woodstock legend but a certain style of political rage. The angry white folk shouting down their congressmen might be--literally in some cases--those angry white students whose protests disrupted campuses before and after the Woodstock interlude of summer vacation ’69."

Politically the Baby Boomers never did get it right. For all their idealism about race, sex, gender, war and politics, they produced only two presidents, Clinton and W, both of whom managed to dodge serving in Vietnam and went on to exemplify selfishness that marred their tenures and helped wreck the economy.

Now the first president after them is struggling to overcome, in his words, "the psychodrama of the Baby Boom generation--a tale rooted in old grudges and revenge plots hatched on a handful of college campuses long ago.”

But the Boomers have migrated from campuses to town halls, turning health care reform from an issue that deserves serious, rational debate into another me-first sandbox squabble, with a little help from Obama's post-Boomer polar opposite, Sarah Palin, with what Maureen Dowd calls "her visceral talent for aerial-shooting her favorite human prey: cerebral Ivy League Democrats."

At least back in Woodstock there was music to compensate for all the madness.

Mixed Feelings About the Sixties

Suddenly we are back in the 1960s with Hillary Clinton citing virtues for what she did back then, Barack Obama claiming he is of a new generation above the divisiveness of those days and Tom Brokaw, as usual, writing a book to explain it all.

At her alma mater, Wellesley, this week, Clinton said, "I need your help to make the calls and knock on the doors and talk to your friends and family. That's what I did back in 1968 when a group of my dear friends and I jumped in a car…and would drive from Wellesley to Manchester, New Hampshire, stuffing envelopes and walking precincts for Eugene McCarthy. He was running for president on a platform of ending the Vietnam War. I am running for president on part of a platform of ending the war in Iraq."

In Iowa, Obama is telling voters, "Senator Clinton and others have been fighting some of the same fights since the '60s. It makes it very difficult for them to bring the country together to get things done. And I think that's what people hunger for."

Politicians hype everything about themselves, including the accident of when they were born, but the 1960s were formative years for today's America, exposing fault lines in our national life that still divide us.

From my ancient perspective, what happened back then goes too deep for glib generalizations and political pandering.

On the one hand, the first generation of Americans not entirely driven to outdo their parents materially turned to moral superiority--about war, race, gender. In the 1950s movie, "The Wild One," biker Marlon Brando, asked what he's rebelling against, answers, "What have you got?"

There was awakening from complacency to challenge injustice and try to create a better society. But there was also self-righteous and self-serving acting out by draft-card burners, culminating in the chaos of the 1968 Democratic convention where anti-war protesters and delegates, including me, were tear-gassed.

We started the decade with JFK's "Ask what you can do for your country" and ended up with Richard Nixon and his dirty tricksters in the White House.

The culture wars began. People Nixon called "The Silent Majority" were appalled by privileged kids publicly trashing their traditional values at Woodstock and elsewhere, paving the way for Reagan's revival a decade later of the fictional feel-good America he lived in as an actor in 1940s movies.

In looking ahead to 2008, it would be a mistake to overuse the 1960s as a template. America was going through social and political growing pains back then that are not quite parallel to what we face now, but at the same time, there is no virtue in dismissing all that and assuming we can just turn to a blank new page in our history.

If Republicans are living in a nostalgic past, Democrats can't just push ahead to a fantasy future. There are enough questions to answer about what we do now in today's world.

Good Vibes From Wobblers' Woodstock

Jimmy Carter, Kofi Annan and a bunch of the gang got together for Nelson Mandela’s 89th birthday, Peter Gabriel and Richard Branson came and, before you knew it, the golden oldies of world leaders were having their own Woodstock.

There were tears and humming along as Gabriel sang his song "Biko" about the anti-apartheid activist who died in police custody in 1977. But most of the time, the aged attendees were looking ahead.

"We’re coming up to the 60th anniversary of the universal declaration of human rights," Mary Robinson, former President of Ireland, reminded them, adding that “people feel alienated. The elders can make it a living document."

With Branson’s prodding, the formerly powerful decided to form a group of elderly flower children to "bring hope and wisdom back into the world."

"The elders,” Branson predicted, “will play a role in bringing us together to help unnecessary human suffering and to celebrate the wonderful world we are privileged to be part of.”

In 2003 Mandela was to see Saddam Hussein and urge him to take steps to avoid war, but the U.S. invasion began before he could get there. "An elder or a group of elders could have persuaded Hussein to leave and we would have avoided the war," Branson said.

Asked why they might be able do now what they failed to do in their prime, Jimmy Carter answered, "There were problems we did not solve because of a lack of time, or because of very intense pressures from our own constituencies, or because we were too bogged down with multiple, simultaneous questions to answer.

"But the elders ... have complete freedom to escape from the restrains of political niceties and be able to do as Nelson Mandela pointed out--we can talk to anyone and become involved in any issue."

George Bush and Dick Cheney would be a good start, but don’t mention Woodstock.

Love, Actually

Anglophilia is hard to resist. Like a Hugh Grant-Richard Curtis movie, the British just can’t help charming us.

After politely following our lead into Iraq, they are now getting out in their understated way by quietly withdrawing their troops and disposing of Tony Blair.

Less stodgily, they are stoking nostalgia this weekend by re-creating Woodstock--music, mud and all. In Glastonbury, 175,000 of their young are sloshing around in what, for most of us, evokes memories of a happier time:

"Many party-goers had been up all night at the silent disco, where revellers plug into personal stereos to listen to dance tunes. The aim is to dance the night away in silence...

"Another big attraction overnight was at the King's Meadow where Banksy, an anonymous graffiti sensation who has rocked the art world, had erected a mock version of the Stonehenge prehistoric site out of graffiti-strewn mobile toilets."

More than two centuries after the unpleasantness between us, the British are still colonizing our spirit. When that boob George Bush is gone, come back, Your Majesty, and bring along the young princes. We’ll have a ball. A dignified one, of course.

Make Love, Not War

The “gay bomb” would never have worked. Al Quaeda and the Shiite militias would have countered with “don’t ask, don’t tell,” and the end result would have been a new generation of better-dressed terrorists.

If the Pentagon is really serious about sexual warfare, they should be working on a straight bomb that could be used against civilian populations. Instead of Los Alamos, they could try it out over Washington, D.C. after removing all Congressional pages to a secure area.

Better yet, combine the two and turn the Capital into a new Woodstock with everybody in tie-dyed clothes passing a timetable for getting out of Iraq and chanting “Make Love, Not War.”