that I was able to participate in acts of resistance to injustice and oppression because I was surrounded by brave men and women whose leadership by example I could follow. If a protest picket involved only twenty of us circling outside the Santa Ana courthouse, for instance, while a bail hearing for a local anti-draft activist was proceeding inside, I felt embarrassed and vulnerable at being one of such a pitiful handful parading around and around while we clutched ferociously worded signs and raised a feeble-sounding chant: “Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh. NLF is gonna win.” But I was there.
Even if an action involved many more participants, like a peace protest, I was gripped since Century City by nervousness at the first glimpse of the police and at the audacity of our radical contingent’s thundered call-and-response: “What do we want? Revolution. When do we want it? Now.” Yet as long as people more courageous than me were confronting an enemy I shared with them, you’d find me beside them in the fray — albeit twitchy, anxious, sweating.
I couldn’t conceive any more of a life without participating in the fight to dismantle a social system that would cheerfully send my friends to die in a indefensible and unjust war, that would perpetuate its anti-human values through the educational institutions I was caught up in, and that would condemn me to a working life that would further enhance the control of a handful of individuals over huge portions of the globe and its citizens — including me. I was grateful, though, that so many people weren’t as inclined as I to tally up the hazards of taking action.
I wakened to a silence between the boys and Edward. Though I was still ripped, my head felt clearer. Had I missed some resolution of the debate? Or had the hash finally affected their brains enough that the dispute had evaporated? What time was it? Shouldn’t I be getting home?
“I read in the Free Press that Abbie Hoffman is writing a book called Woodstock Nation,” Jay said after a moment. “You can’t say Abbie is on the same trip as the Woodstock promoters.”
The quiet that had startled me was obviously only a breather.
“Hoffman!” Edward hooted. “You know what Don says happened to Hoffman at Woodstock?”
“What?” Jay asked.
“He was booed offstage by the crowd. There’s your Woodstock Nation.”
“I don’t believe it.”
“He got up onstage and was trying to give some spiel. People wanted to hear the music and shouted him down. The Who was either on, or on next. Peter Townsend bopped him across the head with his guitar.”
“What was Abbie saying, though? Maybe he was on a different trip.”
“Yeah, maybe he got hip to the scene after Woodstock was over,” Pump contributed. “Anyway, whatever Hoffman did or didn’t do, the Woodstock Nation is where it’s at.”
“Bullshit,” Edward said. “You just don’t —”
I missed his next sentences under a throbbing crescendo of noise as five Marine choppers swept low above the house and out to sea. Overflights of Marine helicopters and fighter jets occurred several times a day: training missions from the Corps’ El Toro airbase northeast of UC Irvine. I assumed the choppers were ultimately headed toward the USMC’s Camp Pendleton, which sprawled for twenty miles along Pacific Coast Highway south of San Clemente, not far down the coast from Laguna. I had no idea where the Phantom fighters were bound when they screamed by. Neither type of aircraft ordinarily rattled Laguna this late, though. I watched the choppers’ blinking lights as their racket faded across the Pacific.
My attention slipped off to ponder Pump’s and Jay’s advocacy of a Woodstock Nation. The freak world, for all its flaws, was no supporter of the system. If their numbers could be combined with the political energy of active opposition to the root causes of the war, the result would be mighty. I knew this was the notion behind Abbie Hoffman’s and Jerry Rubin’s pronouncements, supposedly on behalf of the Youth International Party. But with no actual organization, the Yippies had to rely on the media to carry their message — a shaky basis on which to build social change.
Plus, missing from the Yippies was any hint of democracy. Had anybody elected Rubin, or his sidekick Hoffman, to their roles as spokesmen? Or were they essentially media creations — flamboyant, highly inflated egos posturing as emblems of rebellious youth, depending on attention from the media for their legitimacy?
I heard from a distance Jay taunt his brother. “Is there anything that would convince you the Nation’s real?”
“Wayman’s the history scholar,” Edward said. “Ask him what constitutes a nation.”
I was absorbed with considering how I enjoyed the Yippies’ energy and regarded lots of their pronouncements as right on. But there was no Yippie equivalent to SDS’s ongoing work at hundreds of universities and colleges, to the mass demonstrations on campus and in the community we had sparked or helped spearhead. SDS chapters across the country were involved, I knew from New Left Notes, with local labour issues, with high-school kids, with black and Chicano and Puerto Rican youth organizations, even with church groups. Few of these activities were covered by the mainstream press. The Yippies, for all their great rebellious theatre in the media spotlight, seemed to be solely about symbolic gestures by relatively few individuals. The idea of a Woodstock Nation, I concluded, could possibly represent the evolution of both aspects of the youth movement: the hippie and the political. Of course, the Woodstock Nation concept could also have zero potential to be anything other than hype, as Edward maintained.
“Wayman.” Someone was trying to get my attention.
“He’s tripping free.”
I tried to focus. Everyone was staring at me.
“What characteristics define a nation?” Edward demanded.
“Nation?” I stalled for time, mentally reviewing the disputes in the Frozen North about whether Quebec, or the rest of Canada for that matter, constituted a genuine country. I recalled Fanon’s thesis in The Wretched of the Earth about how a population effects the transition from colony to state. My thoughts seemed tangled in webs of molasses-like ganglia.
“Uh,” I finally managed. “A nation? A nation, uh, is a population with, um, common beliefs? Shared … usually a common language or religion? Also, uh, common attitudes toward certain historical events. Toward the past. Their past, I mean. It —”
“Check,” said Jay.
“What?” Edward and I both blurted.
“That all applies to the Woodstock Nation.”
I dredged up another facet. “Usually, um, there’s a geographic component to nationhood.”
“Check,” Pump contributed.
“Which specific territory does your addled brain believe the Woodstock Nation occupies?” Edward asked archly.
“When I went into the army,” Jay said, “I always felt it was California I was going to fight for, not the U.S.”
“Irrelevant,” Edward said. “Give me the name of the place you believe the Woodstock Nation inhabits.”
“Planet Earth,” Pump said promptly.
Edward rolled his eyes.
“Like
