Tom DeLay and the Woodstock Nation

A
sorry state of affairs. If it wasn't for all the 40th anniversary
celebrations of Woodstock, the primary cultural contribution of the
month would be the announcement that Tom DeLay of Texas -- birther,
born again and former Republican House Majority Leader -- will be a
contestant in the next round of Dancing with the Stars.

Still, better to see DeLay trotting the boards of ABC's hit "reality"
show than back marauding the halls of Congress -- or roaming faraway
Saipan with now imprisoned lobbyist Jack Abramoff, praising the US
possession's sweatshops as "a perfect Petri dish of capitalism." ("It's
like my Galapagos Island," DeLay enthused.)

When he makes his debut on Dancing with the Stars,
you have to wonder if Tom will specialize in that favorite Lone Star
dance, The Cotton Eye Joe, or more appropriately, some variation of The
Sidestep, immortalized in Broadway's The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas.

The corrupt governor in the show sings, "Ooh, I love to dance a little
sidestep, now they see me now they don't. I've come and gone and, ooh I
love to sweep around the wide step, cut a little swathe and lead the
people on."

No doubt there will be a lifting groundswell of GOP voting that will
keep DeLay light on his feet through at least the first rounds of the
competition. But as far as leading people on, the ex-congressman would
do well to remember what happened the last time he tried to jury tamper
with the scorekeeping on Dancing with the Stars.

You see, this is not The Hammer's first time at the rodeo. Three years
ago, several weeks after his resignation from Congress, he sent a
letter to his fan base urging them to vote for country singer Sara
Evans, a Dancing with the Stars contestant.

"Sara Evans has been a strong supporter of the Republican Party and
represents good American values in the media," DeLay wrote. "From
singing at the 2004 Republican Convention to appearing with candidates
in the last several election cycles, we have always been able to count
on Sara for her support of the things we all believe in... One of her
opponents on the show is ultra liberal talk show host Jerry Springer.
We need to send a message to Hollywood and the media that smut has no
place on television by supporting good people like Sara Evans."

Jerry Springer wound up outlasting Evans, who dropped out of Dancing with the Stars
in the midst of a messy divorce during which she accused her husband of
serial adultery. He made similar charges against her. So it goes when
bad things happen to good people.

Now if DeLay equated the comparatively harmless Springer with smut on
TV, goodness knows what he would have made of Woodstock, the
peace-love-music, free-for-all celebration that in 1969 churned upstate
New York dairy farmer Max Yasgur's pastures into mud.

DeLay was 22 back then, perhaps just a hair past prime for the
Woodstock generation, but still in his pre-probity days. He might have
enjoyed himself (remember that while in the Texas state legislature his
nickname was "Hot Tub Tom").

At the time, he was working on his final credits toward a bachelor's
degree from the University of Houston. He majored in biology, which
before he went into politics led to a career not, surprise, in
evolutionary science but insect extermination.

Me, during the summer of Woodstock I was getting ready to go away for
my freshman year of college. I saw one of the first ads for the
festival in the Sunday edition of The New York Times
and enlisted one of my high school English teachers and her husband to
go with me -- they even had the requisite Volkswagen microbus. And the
concert site was only a four-hour drive away, tops.

Alas, my plan fell through for that most rudimental of reasons: my mother said no.

Several months later, at the end of my freshman year, some friends and
I hitchhiked to a midnight showing of Michael Wadleigh's extraordinary Woodstock
documentary. Hard to imagine that four decades later anyone would have
the creative courage -- or chutzpah -- to try to recapture the
experience.

But two sets of filmmakers have done just that and the results are terrific. Taking Woodstock,
a feature film directed by Ang Lee and written and produced by my
friend James Schamus, is a funny, touching look at the festival from
the periphery. The performances are on pitch and the movie captures the
period and the event perfectly, without once slipping into caricature
or retrospective smugness -- not a whiff of contemporary filmmakers
betraying their subject matter with a "weren't they adorable and
feckless back then" attitude.

(In fact, Schamus told me the only thing people who were there in 1969 think Taking Woodstock lacks for atmosphere is the stink created by acres of muck and half a million people.)

So, too, with Woodstock: Now and Then,
directed by the great documentary filmmaker Barbara Kopple. Using
footage from the original Wadleigh documentary, combined with a wealth
of other archival material and new interviews with many of the
participants, Kopple tells the story of the concert from its inception
through the bitter financial wrangling that tore its promoters apart
from the moment the music was over.

In his New York Times
review, critic Mike Hale wrote, "In one way her film is probably truer
to the actual experience of the average Woodstock attendee than Mr.
Wadleigh's was. She focuses less on the music, which for some portion
of the half-million people in attendance was merely a rumor."

There is a fearful, ironic symmetry in the Times'
praise of Kopple's documentary, for one of the most interesting points
of her film is how that paper, as well as other publications at the
time, initially tried to shape their coverage to match a prejudiced
preconception.

It was a "Nightmare in the Catskills," the Times
editorialized. "What kind of culture is it that can produce so colossal
a mess?... Surely the parents, the teachers and indeed all the adults
who helped create the society against which these young people are so
feverishly rebelling must bear a share of the responsibility for this
outrageous episode."

New York Times
reporter Barnard Collier, who was covering the actual concert, pushed
back. Interviewed in Kopple's film he recalled, "When the stuff started
getting back to New York, the editors there said, this is not what we
want. We want a story about what a mess this is. They wanted me to
write a story that said Woodstock was a catastrophe about to happen. I
said I wouldn't write it. They said, you gotta write it. I said, I
refuse to write it, unless it gets in [my] way. I said, and you gotta
read it to me before it goes in, so that I know somebody hasn't
penciled it, you know, taken it apart.

"Finally, I got to [Times executive editor] Scottie Reston, and Scottie Reston said, okay, we'll go with it the way you see it."

In this time of dying newspapers and the domination of television news
by cable networks featuring bombastic opinion and little else, it's
wistful to remember a time when a reporter could persuade an editor to
do the right thing. Wistful as well to reflect on a Woodstock Nation
that never really materialized, its moment of rhythm and harmony
trumped by the heavy-footed dance stylings of men like Tom DeLay.

(Taking Woodstock opens at theaters in New York and Los Angeles August 26 and nationwide on August 28. Woodstock: Now and Then already has premiered on the VH1 and The History Channel cable networks. Keep your eyes open for repeats. )