It is characteristic of this kind of movement that its aims and premises are boundless. A social struggle is seen not as a struggle for specific, limited objectives, but as an event of unique importance, different in kind from all other struggles known to history, a cataclysm from which the world is to emerge totally transformed and redeemed.
—Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium
. . . the consciousness of the liberals had proved inadequate to the task.
—Charles Reich, The Greening of America
By the time you read this, the mud of Woodstock ’94 will have been washed away, the sea of brand-name litter deposited by three hundred thousand weekend Corybants neatly disposed of, and the memories of Youth and Excess hardly more than a fading headache. And yet the fact of Woodstock ’94 remains, and it provides much food for thought. Who would have believed that even now, in the mid-1990s, a small city of people could be induced to spend $135 for a ticket entitling the holder to insinuate himself for hours into a traffic jam and then to camp out in a muddy field while off in the distance aging pop stars competed loudly with this year’s epigones for his attention?
Yes, it was easy to poke fun. One cartoon depicted a man on stage gazing out over an enormous crowd punctuated with tents advertising espresso and other yuppie comestibles: “People,” he warned, “there is some bad Chardonnay going around.” And although
