"And it became the new status quo. The Aquarian Age! They all want sex. They all want to have fun. Everyone wants hope. We opened the door, and everybody went through it, and everything changed after that. Sir Edward Cook, the biographer of Florence Nightingale, said that when the success of an idea of past generations is ingrained in the public and taken for granted the source is forgotten."
Said Country Joe McDonald, quoted on this blog 12 years ago, here, and repeated today, because I'm reading the news that Country Joe has died. He was 84.
Here's his famous set at Woodstock:
Well, come on, all of you big strong men/Uncle Sam needs your help again/Got himself in a terrible jam/Way down yonder in Vietnam....
"Listen people I don't know how you Expect to ever stop the war If you can't sing any better than that. There's about 300,000 of you fuckers out there. I want you to start singin'. Come on..."
I was 12 in 1969, and we were stationed at Plattsburg AFB in northern NY. My best friend's older sister took off with her boyfriend and got stuck in the Woodstock traffic jam. It was a bit of a scandal in the social circle my parents were in.
And now it has devolved into the Summer of the Pussy Hat, the Summer of George, the Summer of Antifa, the Summer of Free Palestine, the Summer of No Kings, the Summer of De-fund ICE, the Summer of release the Epstein files, and I presume for 2026, the Summer of Stop Jim Crow 2.0 (the S"L"AVE Act), and the Summer of Stop Illegal Wars.
First as farce and then as slapstick. First as melodrama than as farce. First as pipe dream than as propagranda.......I know some people who went to Woodstook. Their immediate reaction was that it wasn't so great. Later on they learned that it was the best time of their life.
“…the Arab Spring is related to the Summer of Love…”
Did any Arab proclaim the Arab Spring? Did anyone other than Country Fucking Joe trace its lineage to a marathon mud wrestling event in Bethel, New York? Was the hippie movement (informally known as HM, to distinguish it from BM) ever praised by anyone other than hippies....
Give it a dozen more years and all paeans to the Summer of Love will be replaced by cricket chirps.
Their immediate reaction was that it wasn't so great. Later on they learned that it was the best time of their life.
…whenever I encountered anyone who bragged Woodstock was on their resume it was fun for me to innocently ask about Sha Na Na. The poseurs would usually sniff and ignore. Fun times…
who was this fish person? some old singer from the middle of the last century?
meanwhile, i just read that another 20th century personage.. Bruce Springstein is going out on tour to protest democracy. Apparently, floor seats will be $7,000.. with upper level seats $1,000. https://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/bruce-springsteen-faces-growing-criticism-over-sky-high-ticket-prices-anti-trump-democracy-tour-launch
Latest idea. We capture Karg Island. That's where all the refining takes place. No more money for the regime. Military doesn't get paid. Unconditional surrender. War ends before April 1, 2026.
So what's the current judgment of history? I'm inclined to think: Big deal--- a bunch of people got together, listened to music, and didn't kill each other. This is why people hate boomers. Some generations won the west or the Civil War or WWII, but what's really significant is listening to music for three days straight......Country Joe had one song that was pretty good. I guess that separates him from the common run of humanity, but as prophets and one hit wonders go, he wasn't all that special.
You've got that right. I call them The Class of '68 and their most famous representatives were the Clintons. And we can all see what failures they were. The Class of '68 thought they were so much smart and better than the WW 2 generation and they weren't.
But - as we know from "The Big Chill" - the Class of '68 had the best music. Lots of creative in the arts. But in terms of governance: Total failure.
And let's not forget, Joe Biden is Class of '65 for undergrad and Class of '68 at Syracuse Law.
All of our foreign and domestic problems were directly caused by Joe Biden
Sometime back in the late 70s I was having what I thought was a problem with one of the strings on my Martin D-28. So I took it into Lundberg’s (Lundberg’s Fretted Instruments - the go-to guitar shop then) in Berkeley. I was standing at the counter talking to Lundberg and he was tweaking around on the tuning peg. I heard the shop door open behind me, Lundberg glanced at it just as he said to me "Y'know, I think it's OK and doesn't really need any work." Then he handed it across the counter, to my side and behind me, and said to the guy who had just entered, "Here, Joe, what do you think of that G string?" And there was Country Joe McDonald, holding my guitar, fiddling around with some riffs on it. He handed it to me and said, "It sounds good to me; nice git."
Saw Joe and his Fish in the Spring of ‘68… Anaheim Convention Center. One week Spring break in high school and they were putting on nightly shows with top rock acts.
$2.50 for a ticket and one night, I took my older cousins (down for a visit from Utah) to see the openers Box Tops and headliners CJ and the Fish. Despite a tight set crowd from the openers, the crowd was very rude to the Box Tops… with catcalls throughout… a short break and then the headliners, who - with the exception of Country Joe - came out wearing animal masks (think Beatles Magical Mystery Tour album cover)… after their first song, my female cousin looked over at me with a look that was a combination of “are you sure about this and what did you get me into?” 😆
Saw Arthur Lee and Love and Canned Heat that same week. I was thoroughly stoked. RIP Joe.
That reminds me of a note I got earlier today from Amazon.
(Please read the following in the voice of M*A*S*H PA)
Caution: Protests Active There are confirmed protests, demonstrations, or civil unrest near your area. If you approach a road that is inaccessible, don't make the delivery. If at any time you need emergency assistance, please dial 911 first. Report any safety issues on the road using the 'Emergency Help' button in the [Amazon Delivery App/ Amazon Flex app].
Woodstock! It was groovy man! Weather sucked but the chicks were out of sight. Music was great also. I wasn't there, along with most of the people who claim they were but it was still awesome! I had to work that day so I could pay for my edumacation. Still, what great memories!
AI: "While the primary goal of war protesting is to end or prevent conflict, research and historical analysis suggest several mechanisms through which it can inadvertently contribute to further violence or escalation."
Sha Na Na. How did they get selected to play at a Hippie concert, all their songs were/are doo wop songs from the 50's. Bowzer was the best, love that baritone.
"One, two, three, what are we fighting for?" The internet says Joseph Allen "Country Joe" McDonald ripped that off from "Muskrat Ramble" written in 1926. He got sued for copyright infringement and would have lost but for laches, which sounds bogus to me on the face of it (prejudice how?).
Anyway, he managed to rack up $395,000 in attorney fees in 2006 and got to hand the bill to the plaintiff, who hopefully had the good sense to wait until she was out of the courtroom before letting loose loudly with the exclamation that did so much to make the defendant rich and famous.
Dave Begley at 1:30--"All of our problems foreign and domestic were caused by Joe Biden"? You give that senile old coot too much credit. He had help from Obama, the Clintons, Chuck You Schumer, Nancy Pelosi and Lil Adam Schiff.
Looking healthy in his last interview (?), Country Joe claims his Fuck Cheer spelled the demise of his career. Not sure that chant led to his commercial obscurity.
It is indeed all related to the Summer of Love: the sparsely attended protests I've driven past were 100% ancient geezers. These people have believed whatever the mass media has told them for their entire lives and they're not going to stop now.
The closest I got to Woodstock was the album. “Rock and Soul Music” is one of the top songs in the album. If you were to rank the performers, based on the album, there is Sly & the Family Stone way above anyone else.
In his tribute to the Summer of Love he failed to mention Altimont which was the Summer of Love brought to its inevitable conclusion.
Lived in Berkeley, summer of '67. One sunny Saturday, while walking around, stumbled on Country Joe and Fish giving a free concert in the park. Also lucked into Chuck Berry, The Animals and Steve Miller Blues Band for $3.00 at the Fillmore that summer.
Yah before my time but they were Columbia, the supposed epicenter of protest and division and the origin of the blue bloods of musicals, yah? Fifties nostalgia wasn’t a thing bit a common denominator for a divided student body and broader culture. All hearsay, but I don’t trust the revisionists to explain it either. Hendrix loved them…
There's no reason to occupy Karg island. Iran isn't exporting anything and wont be unless the US and all their neighbors let them. It would be, at best, symbolic.
But... Sha Na Na were college kids, graduate students at Columbia if I recall correctly. The group was formed solely as a result of their popularity at various side-hustle gigs they played while in school.
Some people just aren't satisfied with saying they wrote songs and sang them, and lots of people sang along. That's something, maybe not as much as you can make it into, but it's a cool thing by itself.
I was 11 in 69, and love was on my mind all summer. Love for a college student who supervised our school playground. I didn't think about much else, and despite her never saying a single word to me, I never recovered from those daisy dukes.
it would have been unnecessary to intervene with the diem coup, one of those self inflicted injuries, see a similar incident with Amin Taraki, but once we committed to said action, we should have handled it swiftly, of course that is too simple a template,
If they're hitting civilian targets in other countries, unprovoked, then I would say the most likely doomsday scenario would be for the IRGC to sabotage their wells, a la Saddam, in Kuwait. And since a lot of these wells have a 70s vintage, and since they've been under sanctions for a long time, I would guess they haven't spent much time worrying about down-hole fail-safe shutoff valves (Surface-controlled, subsurface safety valves, or SCSSV).
An anthem that was easy to get behind when boys were being fed into the meat grinder for no clear purpose. Just substitute Iran for Vietnam. And the answer to the question, "what are we fighting for" is just as elusive and baffling.
"for no clear purpose" It was a giant strategic-ideological struggle. The Soviet Union opened a "front" in this struggle among the ex-colonial countries, looking to make gains in controlled territory in what was called the "third world"; much of it was with the proximate aim of spreading the Soviet Navy bases to challenge the US for control of the seas - Sergei Gorshkov's strategy. Vietnam ended up being a Soviet client state with a huge Soviet Naval base right on the China Sea, right on the busiest global trade lanes. And a lot of Americans were deluded into assisting the Soviet Union in this existential struggle. Whether they wanted to admit it ot not they were all traitors to the cause of humanity. They excused themselves by a disingenuous profession of an inability to understand. Scum, every one. Only our victories in other places and by other means negated this Soviet victory.
Re the New York incident - This was no joke. The jars were filled with TATP, the notorious improvised high explosive. Thats the same stuff the Boston marathon bombers used. It was only due to the grace of God that these idiots didnt make the stuff correctly. It really was attempted murder, not just a prank.
US forces on Karg island certainly could be resupplied, and they will not be "sitting ducks" as Iran lacks the means to attack them there. It is out of range (25 km off the mainland) of most artillery or of manpads. The biggest danger to anyone landing on Iran will be those of Iraq - guerilla warfare, mines, IEDs, "invitations" to cause civilian casualties. Karg island has nowhere for such guerillas to hide or much of a population to exploit. I dont see the point of holding it, but it certainly is low risk.
It took the US 20 years, $2 trillion and thousands of Afghan and American lives to replace the Taliban with.... the Taliban. It took them 8+ years of combat to replace the Vietnamese communists with ..... the Vietnamese communists but they managed to kill 3 million Vietnamese people in the process.
It took Trump 10 days, $100 billion and 10 countries engulfed in war to replace Khamenei with.. Khamanei, but the worst is yet to come.
The Long-Feared Persian Gulf Oil Squeeze Is Upon Us ~ WSJ "Traffic through the Strait of Hormuz has ground to a virtual halt, unleashing the most severe energy crisis since the 1970s."
Trump would be better off with everyone talking about the Epstein files and not oil at $110 ⬆
@buwaya: It is becoming increasingly difficult to avoid the conclusion that the Trump administration launched this operation without a coherent plan and is now improvising as it goes along—seemingly betting that killing enough key figures and destroying sufficient Iranian assets will somehow cause everything to fall neatly into place.
The straits problem is strictly temporary. Vietnam was "won" - after much US incompetence. See Lewis Sorley, "A Better War". Nixon really did win it. This was thrown away by a failure to support South Vietnam (egregiously) 1973-1975, strictly as a side effect of poisonous US domestic politics. This led to a wave of Soviet adventurism in a dozen other countries.
Nothing is ever neat in war, especially if it depends on other peoples politics. The plan is unknown to us; anyone who pretends to know is talking through his hat.
As for plans - there was no useful "plan" for the advance out of the Normandy beachhead, other than logistics and force structure. There were phase lines, assuming a coherent ftontal advance to the Seine. The original plans did not work out, largely because of weather plus faster German reinforcements. And the British failed to take Caen per the schedule. The breakout was organized under a series of new plans, that didnt really have a fixed "what next". The US part was operation Cobra, the Brutish concurrently Charnwood-Bluecoat. After that everyone was opportunistically winging it, including the Falaise encirclement and the taking of Paris. Nobody was talking of the pre-DDay phase lines anymore.
We won the Cold War in part by not winning many of the hot campaigns: VN, Korea (okay, ghost of Col Summers, we restored the status quo ante, so we won), etc. Just keeping the Commies busy with all those peripheral engagements sapped their resources. Resources it turned out they didn't have. Also, postmodern VN loves us because they think we can protect them from their real enemy, the Chinese of whatever ideology. CC, JSM
Wonderful sentiment masterfully presented in concert. If only it was reciprocated in Communist camp, there would never be a war. The problem was that in Communist countries nobody dared to whisper to a close friend the words that Country Joe shouted on stage in US.
“What are we fighting for?” Just asking questions. Answer them while I laugh in your face.
I had a high school friend who was a roadie for Country Joe the summer after our senior year. I don't know much about his experience, but my friend was about as straight as you could be in 69.
The problem with the boomer generation is that we were coddled by the marketers because we were a massive group of consumers. And a large portion of us believed the hype we were fed. Most of us grew up in spite of it. Some few never did. Blame them.
One commenter paid 2.50 to seeCj. Another paid 3.00 to see CJ Chuck Berry, Steve Miller. Just looked it up, minimum wage, 1.65. 2 hrs work at McDonalds bought a ticket to see headliners.
Much as I admire Woodstock and Rock n Roll, Joe (may he RIP) presents a very hippie-centric history unsubstantiated by the facts. One could argue that the Sufferage Movement or the Civil Rights marches were the template for the Summer of Love. The French Revolution is more likely the ancestor of Occupy Wall Street. The only through line that rings true is International Socialists who organized anti-war rallies in the sixties and the Black liberation bombings of the seventies and the no-nukes marches in the eighties and the Move On and immigration protests in the nineties…, Occupy and BLM and the anti-ICE useful idiots screaming and crying now: all funded and organized by international communists like the CCP, Russia and Soros.
FullMoon, another way to look at it is that a 1967 dollar is worth about 10 of today's dollars. So those guys were paying about 25-30 bucks for a ticket - similar to today's small-venue tickets for up-and-coming bands. CC, JSM
seriously, assuming you liked/loved Springstein (or Taylor Switt (or whoever)).. WHY would you pay $1000+ to sit in in arena and listen to the echos? For the price of ONE TICKET; you could buy your house a pretty decent home entertainment system, and stream Really Good Shows. What is the draw of arena concerts in today's world? Woodstock had the draw of being "new" and "different!" but in today's world, WHY GO to a big concert? do you like crowds? do you like parking? do you like spending money? i don't get it.
A couple of years ago I saw the Eagles reunion show (with a couple of subs). It was in a large, indoor arena, Could not really make out the individuals except they had MASSIVE screens behind and beside the stage. Really well directed camera work. Really great music. Hit after hit after hit. Absolutely enjoyed the show (and my companions). BUT in retrospect... it was a theactrical experience as much as a concert. But at least it wasn't holographic images of the guys who have died .
I guess the earlier comments documented the fact that Country Joe's Communist parents named him after Stalin and the band was named after Country Mao Tse-Tung's dictum that revolutionaries must be like fish who swim in the sea of the people.
Add to that that the "Arab Spring" was named after the 1848 "Springtime of the Peoples [or Nations]" in Europe. That didn't work out so well either.
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104 comments:
"Listen people I don't know how you Expect to ever stop the war If you can't sing any better than that. There's about 300,000 of you fuckers out there. I want you to start singin'.
Come on..."
Sing like you give a dam.
I was 12 in 1969, and we were stationed at Plattsburg AFB in northern NY. My best friend's older sister took off with her boyfriend and got stuck in the Woodstock traffic jam. It was a bit of a scandal in the social circle my parents were in.
Country Joe dead at 84.
Thanks. I forgot he was alive.
Everyone at Woodstock is either dead or older than 75 today.
And now it has devolved into the Summer of the Pussy Hat, the Summer of George, the Summer of Antifa, the Summer of Free Palestine, the Summer of No Kings, the Summer of De-fund ICE, the Summer of release the Epstein files, and I presume for 2026, the Summer of Stop Jim Crow 2.0 (the S"L"AVE Act), and the Summer of Stop Illegal Wars.
Ah, Summertime, and the living is sleezy.
A red diaper baby named after Stalin - RIP
First as farce and then as slapstick. First as melodrama than as farce. First as pipe dream than as propagranda.......I know some people who went to Woodstook. Their immediate reaction was that it wasn't so great. Later on they learned that it was the best time of their life.
“…the Arab Spring is related to the Summer of Love…”
Did any Arab proclaim the Arab Spring? Did anyone other than Country Fucking Joe trace its lineage to a marathon mud wrestling event in Bethel, New York? Was the hippie movement (informally known as HM, to distinguish it from BM) ever praised by anyone other than hippies....
Give it a dozen more years and all paeans to the Summer of Love will be replaced by cricket chirps.
The say the fish rots from the head.
The war will be over by April 1, 2026 as much as the Dems don't want it to be.
Their immediate reaction was that it wasn't so great. Later on they learned that it was the best time of their life.
…whenever I encountered anyone who bragged Woodstock was on their resume it was fun for me to innocently ask about Sha Na Na. The poseurs would usually sniff and ignore. Fun times…
who was this fish person?
some old singer from the middle of the last century?
meanwhile, i just read that another 20th century personage..
Bruce Springstein is going out on tour to protest democracy.
Apparently, floor seats will be $7,000.. with upper level seats $1,000.
https://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/bruce-springsteen-faces-growing-criticism-over-sky-high-ticket-prices-anti-trump-democracy-tour-launch
Latest idea. We capture Karg Island. That's where all the refining takes place. No more money for the regime. Military doesn't get paid. Unconditional surrender. War ends before April 1, 2026.
So what's the current judgment of history? I'm inclined to think: Big deal--- a bunch of people got together, listened to music, and didn't kill each other. This is why people hate boomers. Some generations won the west or the Civil War or WWII, but what's really significant is listening to music for three days straight......Country Joe had one song that was pretty good. I guess that separates him from the common run of humanity, but as prophets and one hit wonders go, he wasn't all that special.
William:
You've got that right. I call them The Class of '68 and their most famous representatives were the Clintons. And we can all see what failures they were. The Class of '68 thought they were so much smart and better than the WW 2 generation and they weren't.
But - as we know from "The Big Chill" - the Class of '68 had the best music. Lots of creative in the arts. But in terms of governance: Total failure.
And let's not forget, Joe Biden is Class of '65 for undergrad and Class of '68 at Syracuse Law.
All of our foreign and domestic problems were directly caused by Joe Biden
Sometime back in the late 70s I was having what I thought was a problem with one of the strings on my Martin D-28. So I took it into Lundberg’s (Lundberg’s Fretted Instruments - the go-to guitar shop then) in Berkeley. I was standing at the counter talking to Lundberg and he was tweaking around on the tuning peg. I heard the shop door open behind me, Lundberg glanced at it just as he said to me "Y'know, I think it's OK and doesn't really need any work." Then he handed it across the counter, to my side and behind me, and said to the guy who had just entered, "Here, Joe, what do you think of that G string?" And there was Country Joe McDonald, holding my guitar, fiddling around with some riffs on it. He handed it to me and said, "It sounds good to me; nice git."
Yeah that Arab Spring worked out so well... O_o
Saw Joe and his Fish in the Spring of ‘68… Anaheim Convention Center. One week Spring break in high school and they were putting on nightly shows with top rock acts.
$2.50 for a ticket and one night, I took my older cousins (down for a visit from Utah) to see the openers Box Tops and headliners CJ and the Fish. Despite a tight set crowd from the openers, the crowd was very rude to the Box Tops… with catcalls throughout… a short break and then the headliners, who - with the exception of Country Joe - came out wearing animal masks (think Beatles Magical Mystery Tour album cover)… after their first song, my female cousin looked over at me with a look that was a combination of “are you sure about this and what did you get me into?” 😆
Saw Arthur Lee and Love and Canned Heat that same week. I was thoroughly stoked. RIP Joe.
FIrst came Woodstock, and then came what Hunter S. Thompson referred to as 'grinning hippie capitalism'.
That reminds me of a note I got earlier today from Amazon.
(Please read the following in the voice of M*A*S*H PA)
Caution: Protests Active
There are confirmed protests, demonstrations, or civil unrest near your area. If you approach a road that is inaccessible, don't make the delivery. If at any time you need emergency assistance, please dial 911 first. Report any safety issues on the road using the 'Emergency Help' button in the [Amazon Delivery App/ Amazon Flex app].
Dylan lives
Woodstock! It was groovy man! Weather sucked but the chicks were out of sight. Music was great also. I wasn't there, along with most of the people who claim they were but it was still awesome! I had to work that day so I could pay for my edumacation. Still, what great memories!
AI: "While the primary goal of war protesting is to end or prevent conflict, research and historical analysis suggest several mechanisms through which it can inadvertently contribute to further violence or escalation."
...and Keef Richards is still alive.
Sha Na Na. How did they get selected to play at a Hippie concert, all their songs were/are doo wop songs from the 50's. Bowzer was the best, love that baritone.
Greaser or Joe College?
Or Hippie?
Or Viet Mam?
"One, two, three, what are we fighting for?" The internet says Joseph Allen "Country Joe" McDonald ripped that off from "Muskrat Ramble" written in 1926. He got sued for copyright infringement and would have lost but for laches, which sounds bogus to me on the face of it (prejudice how?).
Anyway, he managed to rack up $395,000 in attorney fees in 2006 and got to hand the bill to the plaintiff, who hopefully had the good sense to wait until she was out of the courtroom before letting loose loudly with the exclamation that did so much to make the defendant rich and famous.
Dave Begley at 1:30--"All of our problems foreign and domestic were caused by Joe Biden"? You give that senile old coot too much credit. He had help from Obama, the Clintons, Chuck You Schumer, Nancy Pelosi and Lil Adam Schiff.
Whoever wields the autopen malley rice et al
Ethnic Springs, Summer of Lust, Occupy with Benefits, etc.
Biden's contributions were over decades of progress. The current conflict stems from the 70s, but with roots in the evolution of empires.
Looking healthy in his last interview (?), Country Joe claims his Fuck Cheer spelled the demise of his career. Not sure that chant led to his commercial obscurity.
“Well, come on, all of you big strong men/Uncle Sam needs your help again/Got himself in a terrible jam/Way down yonder in Vietnam....”
Too bad the song doesn’t scan if you replace Vietnam with Iran. We might need it….
It is indeed all related to the Summer of Love: the sparsely attended protests I've driven past were 100% ancient geezers. These people have believed whatever the mass media has told them for their entire lives and they're not going to stop now.
If you should choose your political positions in order to maximize your career prospects, Joe McDonald chose well indeed.
The Summer of Love is infrastructure.
of the boat people, the concentration camps, Country joe said little, what a brave man, sarc
The closest I got to Woodstock was the album. “Rock and Soul Music” is one of the top songs in the album. If you were to rank the performers, based on the album, there is Sly & the Family Stone way above anyone else.
In his tribute to the Summer of Love he failed to mention Altimont which was the Summer of Love brought to its inevitable conclusion.
like that meme they never stop to think 'are we the baddies'
honestly,
my entire Woodstock experience was watching The Omega Man
on WGN-TV9 on Friday night movies (about 4 times)
About the only thing I remember from Woodstock is Country Joe singing Tennessee Stud. The rest is pretty vague.
even more commercial artists seem to engage in this kind of simple bumper sticker morality,
Lived in Berkeley, summer of '67. One sunny Saturday, while walking around, stumbled on Country Joe and Fish giving a free concert in the park. Also lucked into Chuck Berry, The Animals and Steve Miller Blues Band for $3.00 at the Fillmore that summer.
Jimmie Hendrix and Janis Joplin, stars of Woodstock, chose early “retirement” with mind altering substances. Tune in, turn on, drop out. They did.
I don't that was their intention,
Us Boomers were the template for everything, it is all about us.
Yah before my time but they were Columbia, the supposed epicenter of protest and division and the origin of the blue bloods of musicals, yah? Fifties nostalgia wasn’t a thing bit a common denominator for a divided student body and broader culture. All hearsay, but I don’t trust the revisionists to explain it either. Hendrix loved them…
He got one thing right: "The only good commie is one that's dead."
I wonder. Did their enemies call them “Fishy Joe and the . . .”?
Like another great man once said, around 1989, "Democracy, whiskey, sexy"
America's entanglement in the Vietnam War was begun and sustained by lies, and young Americans were right to oppose it. Get over it.
"This is why people hate boomers."
Country Joe wasn't a Boomer.
"America's entanglement in the Vietnam War was begun and sustained by lies, and young Americans were right to oppose it."
Most didn't. And this sort of evaluation is only possible if you disregard how awful the Communists were at the time and what they were trying to do.
"So what's the current judgment of history? "
Incidental froth on historical waves.
There's no reason to occupy Karg island. Iran isn't exporting anything and wont be unless the US and all their neighbors let them. It would be, at best, symbolic.
But... Sha Na Na were college kids, graduate students at Columbia if I recall correctly. The group was formed solely as a result of their popularity at various side-hustle gigs they played while in school.
Some people just aren't satisfied with saying they wrote songs and sang them, and lots of people sang along. That's something, maybe not as much as you can make it into, but it's a cool thing by itself.
Begley and Buwaya: capturing Kharg would ensure the mullah regime doesn't self-sabotage it. CC, JSM
Kharg is vital to the rebuild after this war.
I was 11 in 69, and love was on my mind all summer. Love for a college student who supervised our school playground. I didn't think about much else, and despite her never saying a single word to me, I never recovered from those daisy dukes.
Columbia: Rodgers and Hammerstein, Ginsberg…Garfunkel….I see a trend of the era…
Yes, Commies were and are awful. I'll be the first to stipulate that.
it would have been unnecessary to intervene with the diem coup, one of those self inflicted injuries, see a similar incident with Amin Taraki, but once we committed to said action, we should have handled it swiftly, of course that is too simple a template,
If some Iranian faction wanted to "self-sabotage" oil exports it would just cut (or stop pumping) the mainland pipelines to Karg island.
Meanwhile Sharon Tate is unavailable for comment......
(And Bernadine Dohrn thinks that's just "groovy..."
If they're hitting civilian targets in other countries, unprovoked, then I would say the most likely doomsday scenario would be for the IRGC to sabotage their wells, a la Saddam, in Kuwait. And since a lot of these wells have a 70s vintage, and since they've been under sanctions for a long time, I would guess they haven't spent much time worrying about down-hole fail-safe shutoff valves (Surface-controlled, subsurface safety valves, or SCSSV).
An anthem that was easy to get behind when boys were being fed into the meat grinder for no clear purpose. Just substitute Iran for Vietnam. And the answer to the question, "what are we fighting for" is just as elusive and baffling.
Allahu Akbar Omitted: Brad Lander's Tweet Turns Attackers Into Victims and Victims into Bigots – Twitchy https://share.google/lJ7y0Nf31exzhhKtq
There’s a regular here who attended Woodstock, I believe. Douglas Levene, maybe? (Sorry if I misspelled his name)
"for no clear purpose"
It was a giant strategic-ideological struggle. The Soviet Union opened a "front" in this struggle among the ex-colonial countries, looking to make gains in controlled territory in what was called the "third world"; much of it was with the proximate aim of spreading the Soviet Navy bases to challenge the US for control of the seas - Sergei Gorshkov's strategy. Vietnam ended up being a Soviet client state with a huge Soviet Naval base right on the China Sea, right on the busiest global trade lanes.
And a lot of Americans were deluded into assisting the Soviet Union in this existential struggle. Whether they wanted to admit it ot not they were all traitors to the cause of humanity. They excused themselves by a disingenuous profession of an inability to understand. Scum, every one.
Only our victories in other places and by other means negated this Soviet victory.
Dave Begley writes: Latest idea. "We capture Karg Island."
The US is not seizing Kharg Island. Even if they took it, any US forces there couldn’t be resupplied and would be sitting ducks.
Re the New York incident -
This was no joke. The jars were filled with TATP, the notorious improvised high explosive. Thats the same stuff the Boston marathon bombers used. It was only due to the grace of God that these idiots didnt make the stuff correctly. It really was attempted murder, not just a prank.
And the cobra covers it with a pillow
The price of living in a diverse city as effendi khan calls it
US forces on Karg island certainly could be resupplied, and they will not be "sitting ducks" as Iran lacks the means to attack them there. It is out of range (25 km off the mainland) of most artillery or of manpads. The biggest danger to anyone landing on Iran will be those of Iraq - guerilla warfare, mines, IEDs, "invitations" to cause civilian casualties. Karg island has nowhere for such guerillas to hide or much of a population to exploit.
I dont see the point of holding it, but it certainly is low risk.
It took the US 20 years, $2 trillion and thousands of Afghan and American lives to replace the Taliban with.... the Taliban. It took them 8+ years of combat to replace the Vietnamese communists with ..... the Vietnamese communists but they managed to kill 3 million Vietnamese people in the process.
It took Trump 10 days, $100 billion and 10 countries engulfed in war to replace Khamenei with.. Khamanei, but the worst is yet to come.
The Long-Feared Persian Gulf Oil Squeeze Is Upon Us ~ WSJ
"Traffic through the Strait of Hormuz has ground to a virtual halt, unleashing the most severe energy crisis since the 1970s."
Trump would be better off with everyone talking about the Epstein files and not oil at $110 ⬆
@buwaya: It is becoming increasingly difficult to avoid the conclusion that the Trump administration launched this operation without a coherent plan and is now improvising as it goes along—seemingly betting that killing enough key figures and destroying sufficient Iranian assets will somehow cause everything to fall neatly into place.
"... It is becoming increasingly difficult to avoid the conclusion that the Trump administration launched this operation without a coherent plan..."
Well, we'll give you credit for trying really, really hard.
Wow hes really at zoolander + 3
The straits problem is strictly temporary.
Vietnam was "won" - after much US incompetence.
See Lewis Sorley, "A Better War".
Nixon really did win it. This was thrown away by a failure to support South Vietnam (egregiously) 1973-1975, strictly as a side effect of poisonous US domestic politics. This led to a wave of Soviet adventurism in a dozen other countries.
Nothing is ever neat in war, especially if it depends on other peoples politics. The plan is unknown to us; anyone who pretends to know is talking through his hat.
Afghanistan need not have fallen. The Biden administration grossly mishandled it over six months, crashing Afgan forces morale.
They must be a brown acid induced haze for the last 50 years
As for plans - there was no useful "plan" for the advance out of the Normandy beachhead, other than logistics and force structure. There were phase lines, assuming a coherent ftontal advance to the Seine. The original plans did not work out, largely because of weather plus faster German reinforcements. And the British failed to take Caen per the schedule.
The breakout was organized under a series of new plans, that didnt really have a fixed "what next". The US part was operation Cobra, the Brutish concurrently Charnwood-Bluecoat.
After that everyone was opportunistically winging it, including the Falaise encirclement and the taking of Paris. Nobody was talking of the pre-DDay phase lines anymore.
’It took Trump 10 days, $100 billion and 10 countries engulfed in war to replace Khamenei with.. Khamanei, but the worst is yet to come.’
Tokyo Kak!
We won the Cold War in part by not winning many of the hot campaigns: VN, Korea (okay, ghost of Col Summers, we restored the status quo ante, so we won), etc. Just keeping the Commies busy with all those peripheral engagements sapped their resources. Resources it turned out they didn't have. Also, postmodern VN loves us because they think we can protect them from their real enemy, the Chinese of whatever ideology. CC, JSM
Wonderful sentiment masterfully presented in concert. If only it was reciprocated in Communist camp, there would never be a war. The problem was that in Communist countries nobody dared to whisper to a close friend the words that Country Joe shouted on stage in US.
“What are we fighting for?” Just asking questions. Answer them while I laugh in your face.
Why did the Soviets invade...profit, Marshal ustinovs bright idea
I had a high school friend who was a roadie for Country Joe the summer after our senior year. I don't know much about his experience, but my friend was about as straight as you could be in 69.
The problem with the boomer generation is that we were coddled by the marketers because we were a massive group of consumers. And a large portion of us believed the hype we were fed. Most of us grew up in spite of it. Some few never did. Blame them.
One commenter paid 2.50 to seeCj. Another paid 3.00 to see CJ Chuck Berry, Steve Miller.
Just looked it up, minimum wage, 1.65. 2 hrs work at McDonalds bought a ticket to see headliners.
Speaking of Country Joes "Gimme an F, U, C, K!"
Here is a "Kroger Crash out", next stop is the unemployment site. Whoopi were all not gonna die.
beware the expletives. if you sensitive to such, please do not watch this video. you have been warned.
I never liked Country Joe. I saw him play a a very lame show show in Torino Italy ca. 1979.
"Special Envoy" is LLR Chuck's latest incarnation.
Much as I admire Woodstock and Rock n Roll, Joe (may he RIP) presents a very hippie-centric history unsubstantiated by the facts. One could argue that the Sufferage Movement or the Civil Rights marches were the template for the Summer of Love. The French Revolution is more likely the ancestor of Occupy Wall Street. The only through line that rings true is International Socialists who organized anti-war rallies in the sixties and the Black liberation bombings of the seventies and the no-nukes marches in the eighties and the Move On and immigration protests in the nineties…, Occupy and BLM and the anti-ICE useful idiots screaming and crying now: all funded and organized by international communists like the CCP, Russia and Soros.
FullMoon, another way to look at it is that a 1967 dollar is worth about 10 of today's dollars. So those guys were paying about 25-30 bucks for a ticket - similar to today's small-venue tickets for up-and-coming bands. CC, JSM
Also people selling to Boomers back then had economies of scale. CC, JSM
seriously, assuming you liked/loved Springstein (or Taylor Switt
(or whoever))..
WHY would you pay $1000+ to sit in in arena and listen to the echos?
For the price of ONE TICKET; you could buy your house a pretty decent home entertainment system, and stream Really Good Shows.
What is the draw of arena concerts in today's world?
Woodstock had the draw of being "new" and "different!"
but in today's world, WHY GO to a big concert?
do you like crowds? do you like parking? do you like spending money?
i don't get it.
---- do you like spending money?
Bingo. Status points. Same as it ever was.
A couple of years ago I saw the Eagles reunion show (with a couple of subs). It was in a large, indoor arena, Could not really make out the individuals except they had MASSIVE screens behind and beside the stage. Really well directed camera work. Really great music. Hit after hit after hit.
Absolutely enjoyed the show (and my companions).
BUT in retrospect... it was a theactrical experience as much as a concert.
But at least it wasn't holographic images of the guys who have died .
I guess the earlier comments documented the fact that Country Joe's Communist parents named him after Stalin and the band was named after Country Mao Tse-Tung's dictum that revolutionaries must be like fish who swim in the sea of the people.
Add to that that the "Arab Spring" was named after the 1848 "Springtime of the Peoples [or Nations]" in Europe. That didn't work out so well either.
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