June 03--The dreams of marijuana and rock music that drew 300,000 fans and hippies to the Catskills had little more sanity than the impulses that drive the lemmings to march to their deaths in the sea. They ended in a nightmare of mud and stagnation that paralyzed Sullivan County for a whole weekend. What kind of a culture is it that can produce so colossal a mess?
"Nightmare in the Catskills" -- The New York Times, Aug. 18, 1969
What perhaps gets us most is the infatuation with squalor, the slovenly clothes and the dirt; at Woodstock they were literally wallowing in mud. How anybody of any age can want that passes our understanding. Again, though, it's not a question of age. A person doesn't have to be young to be a hobo. He does, however, have to have certain tastes and values (or non-tastes and non-values) which are not generally regarded as being of a civilizing nature.
"By Squalor Possessed" -- The Wall Street Journal, Aug. 28, 1969
Somehow we can't believe that rootless revolutions and personal affirmations of rejection of the old institutions and values represent a serious threat to society, or that inchoate mass movements can develop the cohesion necessary for positive action. For Woodstock was a variant on the Buddhist nirvana. It was divorcement from pain, care and particularly external reality, induced by the beatific spiritual condition of joy, intoxication, and release.
"The New Nirvana" -- Chicago Tribune, Aug. 27, 1969
