The pop generation
If the Isle of Wight pop festival had been a thoroughgoing orgy, complete with every vice named and nameless, or if, on the other hand, it had been an idyllic paradise of peace and love, there would be no dif- ficulty in knowing what to think about the affair. But, of course, it was neither. The assembled pop fans didn't behave too badly. They compared well with the gangs of skinheads who occupied Bank Holiday Monday by marching up and down in some seaside towns, chanting 'We want bovver V. But they are unlikely, never- theless, to have persuaded the residents of the Isle of Wight that they were exactly desirable visitors. There was a good deal of drug-taking and promiscuous sex, and there were outbreaks of violence, van- dalism and theft.
The festival wasn't a great mystical event or even a great cultural experience, but to dismiss it as just another commer- cial entertainment for a Bank Holiday weekend and therefore not worth any special comment is too facile. This parti- cular festival was no different, essentially, from last year's or from similar occasions elsewhere, though it was bigger ' than most. But these pop festivals, considered together, do epitomise what some news- papers have called 'an alternative life- style'. The phrase may be too pretentious, but that it can be used at all about an assembly of more than a quarter of a million young people—nearly 1 per cent of the population of the British Isles, as one of their own spokesmen pointed out— is clearly a phenomenon which deserves thought.
But what is one to think? What does it mean?
The organisers of the Isle of Wight festival—the five young men who call themselves, so poetically, Fiery Crea- tions—have apparently lost a lot of money because they were outflanked on 'Desola- tion Hill', the slope of downland which thousands of young people, including a contingent of French anarchists, used as an amphitheatre, defying all attempts to dislodge them or make them buy tickets. Pop festivals should be free, these un- profitable spectators declared.
Fiery Creations were understandably annoyed, since, whatever the anar- chists on the hill may have thought. arranging an event on this scale—hiring and staffing the ground, providing water and electricity and the celebrated half-mile of lavatories, bringing the principal per- formers across the Atlantic—is a very expensive business. But others may see a certain ironic justice in the debacle. As even one of the organisers admitted rue- fully, if you stage an event which deliber- ately scorns the conventions and commer- cial motivations of the adult world, you shouldn't be altogether surprised if some of the audience take you at your word.
But this aspect of the matter ought not to be treated too pretentiously either. When, for example, the correspondent of the Times writes that 'the old cash nexus' is 'irrelevant' to these youngsters, he is accepting at face-value the vacuous, pseudo-significant jargon which is one of the most irritating parts of the youth cult. What he means is that some of the young people on the Isle of Wight had no money because they either don't work or don't save, and were therefore unable to con- tribute to the cost of their entertainment or to feed themselves properly or to pay the ferry and train fares home. Cash isn't in the least 'irrelevant': it was simply lacking.
To look at this huge assembly of young people, and try to make deductions about them and about their generation, is not unreasonable, though it is an exercise which ought to be pursued with caution.
Individually many of them really are gentle people: but theirs is a mass culture, very imitative in its apparent anarchy, and must be judged as a whole. It isn't pure coincidence that pop festivals are apt to be drug festivals, and that a doctor on the Isle of Wight had to issue a warning about the spread of venereal disease. Even the unkempt hair and tatterdemalion clothes are not meaningless, because they arc de- liberate; they are a gesture. a symbol. All these things signify a rejection of authority, of discipline (including self-discipline), of the rules and restraints of organised society.
Perhaps they are not signs of decadence. That may be another word too big for easy use. But they are very like the signs of decadence which have accompanied the decline of other civilisations. They cer- tainly constitute a total abandonment of the military virtues, which in a strong civil- isation are generally respected. (Ragged guerrillas sometimes fight bravely, but, in the long run, the smartest, best disciplined regiments tend also to be the best fighting units.) In the dream-coloured world of pop and pot none of this matters. But the real world isn't like that. In the real world things have to be worked for and paid for and defended. There are wolves wait- ing to devour innocent lambs.
Joan Bacz has announced that she will give most of her fee for appearing at the Isle of Wight festival to 'anti-war' causes in America—meaning principally anti- Vietnam War. And an overwhelming maj- ority of the pop generation. in so far as they think about politics at all, would agree with her.
The result is a strange and worrying paradox. These youngsters. who profess to believe most of all in personal liberty, are ready to side in practice with the most illiberal and puritanical tyrannies the world has ever known. In the cause of peace they shout for the victory of a ruthless military regime in South East- Asia and for the unilateral abandonment of the nuclear weapons which have pre- served peace in Europe for twenty-five years. In the name of dissent they express sympathy for political creeds and political methods which would allow no dissent whatever. And they deride the govern- ments, the soldiers, the policemen, on whose skill and vigilance their own pre- cious freedom wholly depends.
Some of the wolves wear sheep's cloth- ing. It isn't only hippies and flower child- ren who reject the established order of Western society, who despise bourgeois conventions and who would gladly under- mine such military capacity as we still possess. So, for a little while, in demon- strations and university riots and even at pop festivals, the sheep and the wolves mingle.
One major characteristic of the pop generation in Western Europe and Amer- ica is its intellectual rootlessness, its al- most touching incomprehension of what really goes on in the world. This is very largely the fault of an older generation which seems to have surrendered: of adults who flatter or condemn but hardly try any more to teach or to lead.
The sort of young people who assembled last weekend on the Isle of Wight—and they were, in some ways, representative —are not in the least wicked or sophistica- ted. On the contrary, they arc frighteningly innocent and ingenuous; flower children indeed, oblivious of the sharp scythes and cold winds which could so easily destroy their playground. In a dangerous world such innocence is itself dangerous—not only to them but to us all.
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