WOODSTOCK'S LEGACY.

No, not Snoopy's buddy, the music festival in a mud field that took place shortly after the first Moon landing and the Golden Spike Centennial.

In a sentence, it might be this question from Selwyn Duke.  " How can you build a moral society when its shades-of-gray people don’t even believe in morality?"

It's been a long time coming, but then, there has been a lot of erosion of bourgeois norms in the past half-century.

Here's Reason contributing editor Glenn Garvin, pouring on the scorn.

The most notable thing about the PBS Woodstock is the contortionist specter of a generation blowing smoke up its own ass. The last 15 minutes or so are mostly devoted to people who attended Woodstock declaring it a utopically transformative event that changed everything. Really? Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin would be dead of drug overdoses within a year. The Vietnam War continued for another three. The next president elected was not George McGovern but Richard Nixon, and when Baby Boomers finally did start electing presidents, the result was Afghanistan and Iraq. And raise your hand if you think race relations are any better today than they were in 1969.

You could as easily make the argument that what defined a generation was not Woodstock but Altamont or the Manson Family. Baby Boomers didn't change the world at Woodstock, or create a New Man. Their only accomplishment was to stand up in public, half a million strong, and chant the word "Fuck!"without getting spanked. It's sad that, 50 years later, they still can't tell the difference.

Perhaps so, although "Gimme an F" might have been the leading edge of "My transgressiveness is OK, yours is not."

We start with a few young people sleeping rough and not bathing and yelling profanities in a field in rural New York.  We now have tent cities of reality-challenged people sleeping rough and not bathing and yelling profanities and pooping in the streets of some of our proudest cities.

We start with a few young people using "Do your own thing" as an excuse for their "open" relationships, their drug use, their long hair.  We now have a one-time Olympic decathlon champion being hailed as a pioneer for deciding a retirement career as a woman is what creating that New Man, er, crosser, is.

There's a passage from Anatoly Kuznetsov's diary on the fiftieth anniversary of the Great October Socialist Revolution that's germane.

Shout hurrah, clap your hands.  Otherwise they will notice at once that you are not "reacting" and they will ask you why ...

I am getting stupider.  I am gradually turning into Ionesco's Rhinoceros.  I feel the hardening on my forehead.  I feel sick ...

(Shub, An Empire Loses Hope, page 316.)

And celebrating what?  Maureen Dowd laments, Glenn "Insta Pundit" Reynolds elaborates. "All the stuff that the Dowds of the world wanted to extinguish — because, you know, chivalry was a system, one that demanded certain behaviors of women as well as men. And demanding behaviors of women might limit their options, or hurt their self esteem, or make them regret their life choices, all things that are not allowed."

Taken together, fifty years of enabling social rot and calling it social progress culminates in today's E-T-T-S moment, as summarized by J. H. "Clusterf**k Nation" Kunstler.

In a nation afflicted by fads, crazes, manias, and rages, mass murder is the jackpot for nihilists — [provoking] the question: why does this country produce so many of them? Answer: this is exactly what you get in a culture where anything goes and nothing matters. Extract all the meaning and purpose from being here on earth, and erase as many boundaries as you can from custom and behavior, and watch what happens, especially among young men trained on video slaughter games.

For many, there is no armature left to hang a life on, no communities, no fathers, no mentors, no initiations into personal responsibility, no daily organizing principles, no instruction in useful trades, no productive activities, no opportunities for love and affection, and no way out.

Perhaps a few random crazies going off is going to look like the good old days. "It’s not hard these days to imagine the political animus ratcheting up to something like a new civil war. If it works out that way, it will be the most psychologically confused political event of modern history."

It's only going to get more interesting with China buying dollars, the better to be able to undersell Our President's tariffs, refusing to buy U. S. agricultural products, thereby making the lot of the toiling masses more difficult there (and the Chinese one-child policy ensures that there are millions of adolescent males with no hope of getting a date) and China's rulers deciding that now might be a good time to crack down on any uppity hopes of home rule in Hong Kong.  " Clarity is a lagging effect," indeed.