Woodstock and the moon landing

Michael Ventura ruminates on the paradoxes of 1969: a desire to get "back to the Garden" while we celebrated standing on the moon.

We wanted liberty – and security. We wanted the war to end – but not the excitement of being against the war. We wanted the fall of capitalism – and all that capitalism could supply. We wanted innocence – but did all we could to experience its opposite. We wanted to "drop out" – so long as we might still order pizza, which meant that someone, somewhere, had to keep the mechanisms of society going. We wanted holiness – and publicity. We wanted the self-knowledge of meditation – and to be stoned. Yes, these are vast generalizations (I, for instance, didn't want to get high). But if we are to believe our own music (and there is no doubt of its sincerity), through the technology by which it was created and disseminated we wanted all this and more, not the least paradoxical of which was how we wanted somehow to transcend the technological world that supplied the means by which the music connected us all. And one more thing, one more beautifully impossible paradox: Like many before and after us, we wanted a freer sense of order.

One irony lost on most, as it was certainly lost on me, is that the summer we yearned to get back to the Garden was also the summer we celebrated humanity's presence on the moon.

Here's his July 31st "Letters at 3am" column.