Woodstock And The Slippery Economic Slope

The country is now remembering the Woodstock weekend’s 40th anniversary. I missed that big mud slide four decades ago. I was bumming around Europe at the time after doing my military service. But Woodstock and my bumming have something in common — both, in very different ways, represented the very acme of American economic life.

I don’t want to pretend that the Ozzie & Harriet generation’s lives were the best most Americans have ever led. Racism, sexism, conformity and other awful defects of the period were very apparent at the time and have become even more apparent since. In purely economic terms, however, the post-WW II through Vietnam War era were astonishingly favorable for an astonishingly high proportion of Americans.

After 1945 the United States, with about 6 percent of the world’s population, was consuming about 60 percent of its total resources because other big consumers in Europe and Japan were war wrecks, and the tigers of Asia and Latin America were yet to exist. If you were a WW II veteran on our shores you could buy a three bedroom home in a nice suburb for $10,000—12,000, little or no down, and a VA guaranteed loan at 3 percent. You wanted to go to college? The VA not only paid tuition but enough extra in living expenses so if you lived in New York you could afford a cheap pad in the Village and have enough left over to go out drinking and meet a new bed mate — provided you also had the stomach to put up with the socialist twaddle that passed for foreplay in this time and place. If you just wanted a more conventional home and family, and weren’t a vet, you still had a very good shot at doing this with little trouble AND with only one member of the household earning enough to fund the aspiration.

With the inevitable dips and breaks, and the unavoidable individual quirks, this was the lotus economic life to which most Americans had even greater lotusland access by the end of the 1960s. — the economic backdrop for Woodstock and my own happy sojourn in Europe. The tie dyed doppers playing at being poor while doing acid mud slides felt in their gut that if they ever really wanted to live past 30, and endure the horrors of steady and well-paid employment, it was there for them in abundance. No problems, No hassles. You wanted to descend into the world of vulgar prosperity, just take a shower, put on a suit, and leap on the ever speeding along national gravy train.

I felt exactly the same way. At about the same time as Woodstock, I was living in windmill on an island off the coast of Spain with the woman who would later become my wife. The island was so laden with psychedelic drugs its a wonder it didn’t sink — and if it had sunk no one would have noticed for weeks. We laughed back then at those “Europe On $5 a Day” books because who needed that much to live the way we were living, what with the U.S. dollar trading at four to the German mark. If I did need extra cash I could sell some of the American smokes I’d squirreled away while in the service, smokes I’d bought for 10 cents a pack, a dollar a carton.

That’s my Woodstock economic memory this 40th anniversary weekend — or rather my personal Woodstock era memory. A memory of near total American economic ascendancy. No, it’s not morning in America as Ronald Reagan often proclaimed. At least not in an economic sense. The present deep slide in national living standards (bonus pigs on Wall Street notwithstanding) is only the culmination, the present incarnation, of a slippery economic slope whose peak can now be timed almost to day to Woodstock.

It was a great ride while it lasted. I hope that at least some of those reading this post had the chance to enjoy the hell out of it.