Why I Smiled When I Heard "OK Boomer"

The Altamont concert was such an irresponsible botch disorganized by some of the biggest names in rock who, after their stupidly, irresponsibly botched disorganization had the entirely predictable effect of devolving into a violent, deadly debacle, all tried to put the blame for it everywhere except on themselves.  I would like a listing of the people involved in bringing it about who took personal responsibility for it, I've never seen one, I've only seen ass-covering and putting the blame everywhere else.  

It's certain that the members of the Rolling Stones, Jefferson Airplane and The Grateful Dead and their management were in on coming up with the idea and, decidedly, not on carefully organizing it to avoid problems.  It would seem that the Jefferson Airplane and Grateful Dead might have had the absolutely and grotesquely irresponsible idea of getting the Hells Angels for security - they'd reportedly done it before - and paying them in beer.   That would be because we all know how $500 worth of beer, in 1969 dollars and prices would tend to calm a raucous situation full of drugged up, drunks, especially if the $500 worth of beer was inside the guys who were supposed to be keeping order.  I've read that they might have taken their cue from that other massive asshole of the time, Ken Kesey through his absurd romanticization of the Angels.   You know, the more I find out about the counter-culture celebrities of the 60s, the more I find out they were largely a bunch of massive assholes. 

I am rather enjoying the outraged reaction to the "OK, boomer" thing because if there is one thing my age cohort was, it was full of shit about itself.  The as seen on TV, in the media and pop-music "counter-culture" of the 60s was bull shit, the real counter culture was the Civil Rights movement and the part of the anti-war movement that wasn't just the "I don't want to get drafted" movement which is what it was for a lot of them.   Nixon's ending of the draft so he could continue the war was as brilliant as it was cynical.  I think he knew, in his foul heart, that a lot of the counter-culture types had more in common with him than they'd ever have wanted to believe.  Certainly Mick Jagger does, one of the reported reasons for the "free concert" was the criticism Mick and his then not so old Stones got for price gouging on their American tour.  As people were getting killed and stabbed, right in front of them, he and the stones did "Street Fighting Man".  He's been rakin' in the cash ever since. 

The 60s "counter culture" had several different faces, the hippy-psychedelic-flower-child one was self-indulgent and bound to go nowhere as the dolts were too drugged up and self-involved and style-based to do anything.  It was, essentially, a marketing thing.   The Marxist one was self-discrediting, as I've noted, they're the equivalent of neo-Nazis, they just liked their dictator-gangsters to be of a different sort with a somewhat different cover-story of what they were going to do with the money.  The one that would soon find its annoying and idiotic explanation in that most useless of long-on-the-friggin'-best-sellers-list Greening of America was as full of shit and maybe was even more full of itself.  

There was, as I said, a real counter-culture that was not based in any of those and was not so full of itself but that mostly consisted of hard work and wasn't associated with products and pop-culture bull shit.  It persists but it won't be featured much on TV or get concert movies made of it. 

As I mentioned, the mutual ass-covering scenarios that have been invented to explain how it happened are several and varied.  The Airplane centered scenario of how the disaster started has a couple of its members,   Kaukonen and one of the others, I can't remember off hand, saying they wanted the Stones to have their Woodstock kind of moment - which is bull shit, what they wanted was to hitch their wagon to a bigger act, 

If there is one thing that I wish had happend at Altamont it would be that Jefferson Airplane had sung that rock anthem of self-righteous idiocy,  Paul Kantner's Crown of Creation.  The clueless, egotistical, self-centered self-righteousness might have gotten it right, that the establishment was bad but what they were bad for the same reasons the commercial counter-culture was, it was vainglorious and materialistic.   There were no bigger materialists than the big name rockers.  Mick Jagger was a big fan of Maggie Thatcher just a few short years later.  

I do have a word of warning to the young people who are enjoying the "OK boomer" thing.   You want to watch out that you're not doing what the boomers did as you're making fun of us.  I might never have bought into the worst of 60s youth self-righteousness but I could have learned something from people I should have taken more seriously.  Just not the ones TV and pop-culture was telling me to listen to.   Pop culture is commercial shit about 98% of the time.  That goes for the "counter culture" stuff as sold, too. 

Update:  I probably could, if I spent a couple of days going through my boxes of long unused books, find the early second-wave feminist essays about how the 60s counter-culture was not a feminism friendly thing.  One of the essays I remember was about how when feminism came to the back-to-the-land, agriculture intending commune that the boys and not a few of the gals didn't like it one bit.  As I recall one of them quoted one of their communauts as saying "I don't want some pussy driving MY tractor." 

Second-wave feminism, especially the parts of it that avoided Marxist sidelining and involvement with other bull shit is an excellent example of non-pop-culture counter culture.  It was largely pop culture of what the flower-child marketing ploy turned into that became its most formidable foe.  And I have mentioned the ever worsening violence promoting misogyny of the central act at Altamont, The Stones in their "Black and Blue" album of a few years later.  I read Robin Morgan and Catherine Mackinnon now and, if you can wade through some of Morgan's more regrettable writing, it is as freshly radical today as so much of the 60s counter-culture stuff is as rotted as Miss Havisham's wedding cake. 

I will note that there is far less of the gay liberation stuff from the same period that has aged as well.  I think the best content in that is yet to come.  It will not be selfish and self-indulgent and it will be informed by accurate and non-ideological history.