I meant to bitch about this months ago, but… well, I didn’t. Such is life.
Two events hit their fiftieth anniversaries in 2019: the Apollo 11 moon landing and the Woodstock music festival. While Apollo 11 certainly got a fair deal of press, it was nothing compared to the slobbering retrospectives that greeted the anniversary of Woodstock. I actively avoided the numerous documentaries and such about Woodstock that polluted the airwaves, but it was impossible to avoid all the constantly yammerings about it. And something that seemed to be repeated a lot were three words: Touchstone and Generation/Cultural. Examples:
The Woodstock generation reflects on the legacy of a cultural touchstone
Woodstock: Three Days That Defined a Generation
Celebrate the 50th anniversary of the concert that became a touchstone for a generation.
Woodstock at 50
Re-examining a generation’s touchstone.
Celebrating Woodstock at 50
Woodstock was more than just a music festival, it was a cultural touchstone that has echoed far beyond its own generation.
And so on.
A Google search on those terms return 230,000 hits. A similar search with “Woodstock” replaced with “Apollo 11” returned 59,000 hits, but many of these seem to refer to a “touchstone” in the context of an actual rock that you can physically touch.
This, I believe, is part of the reason why society is such a mess. Instead of the greatest achievement in the history of mankind, that of landing men on the moon, what the Boomer generation seems to consider their “cultural touchstone” was a bunch of losers rolling in filth, filling their bodies with mind-scrambling chemicals and listening to pretentious crapular music that has gratefully largely faded from history.
I’ve often heard of people of roughly the right age claiming to have been at Woodstock when they actually weren’t. This to me makes no sense. Sure, I understand the urge to lie about things in order to make yourself look better… for example I have scars that might seem impressive had they had better origin stories (I once used “I got these when I was a Ranger in the Marines fighting Nazis in Viet Nam,” but oddly I wasn’t immediately believed). But given the option of claiming to have been at Woodstock or having been involved with the Apollo missions… goddamn, who the frak would actually pick the muddy field? Hell, I’d proudly claim to have been the night janitor in the VAB rather than having been some filthy hippie.
Gah. While it’s popular among everyone downstream of the Baby Boomers to blame them for everything, their generation is composed of stock-standard baseline humans. What corrupted them corrupts everyone. But there seems to have been something special that made the lowest elements of their generation rise to prominence to give us damaged entertainment/news industries and politicians who support things that prior generations knew to be vile, and the fact that Woodstock rather than Apollo 11 is their “cultural touchstone” is a prime symptom. Of course no subsequent generation has really improved on that, and that does not speak well of the last half century’s worth of Westerners. Nor for the future.
