A lot of things coalesced for me today thanks to, of all things, a piece in the Wall Street Journal. What it comes down to is that the establishment will always find a cultural boogie man against which to rail, and this will stand in for true societal ills.

The WSJ piece was a reprint of an editorial from Aug. 29, 1969, "By Squalor Possessed," taking offense at the Woodstock festival. It was part of a larger look back celebrating the pending 40th anniversary of the festival. One sentence really hit home, and confirmed my long-held thought that each generation eventually opposes the one that follows, only to see that following generation become the status quo that complains about the next.

"For various reasons it is being suggested that many rebels will not abandon their 'life-styles (the cliches in this field!) and that there are enough of them to assume some of the levers of power in the future American society," they wrote. "It would be a curious America if the unwashed, more or less permanently stoned on pot or LSD, were running very many things."

Of course, this is exactly what happened, and "the unwashed" are now donning power suits and complaining about the violent video games and risque Internet usage of their kids and grandkids. I'll leave comment about the the further-expressed worry that "it will be at best a culturally poorer America and maybe a politically degenerated America" to sharper political minds than my own.

This is nothing new. I recently slogged through David Hajdu's 2008 book, The Ten-Cent Plague, a book about the creation of comic books and the campaign against them waged in the 1950s. Though Hajdu seems to have modeled early chapters on the first books of the Bible (his tedious and exhaustive life histories of each player reading like a he-begat-she-who-begat..." section of the good book), he does eventually get around to describing the hilariously absurd lengths to which Congressmen, parents, teachers and religious leaders went to demonize what were only words and pictures printed on the page.

These people, while winning short-term victories, ultimately failed. Comics persevered, and were quickly superseded at the top of the cultural and societal evils list by films (which by that point already had already been attacked by puritans aghast at the idea of bare flesh on the big screen), television and yes, rock 'n' roll.

But guess what? Each of these art forms outlasted their opponents and took on a depth and breadth and richness that made them absolutely indispensable chroniclers of our time in a way that the most erudite, reasoned opposition to these forms did not. "Today, the young's addiction to rock is at the same time a rejection of classical and the more subdued types of popular music, and considering the way rock is presented it must be counted a step down on culture's ladder," reads the WSJ editorial. Who needs parody when the real thing is so blissfully out-of-touch and funny?

"In any event, opting for physical, intellectual and cultural squalor seems an odd way to advance civilization," the WSJ writes. I wonder what they thought about that squalor as they saw it's celebration become, over the years, a multi-billion-dollar cash cow. That, of course, may be the biggest lesson of all: Where there is a dime to be made, even the most repulsive things will be tolerated, if not embraced.

Labels: commerce, music, Woodstock