[ckilmer]

I generally tell my fellow boomers that we have arrived at 1969 again.

There were two prophetic events that year. One was that a man walked on the moon. the other was woodstock. they prophecied two different futures.

Boomers have lived in the woodstock future.

But high school and college students will live in the moon landing future.

(the woodstock future will still be there—as the moon landing has always been there. but woodstock will be crushed for a time.)

[Fiji Hill]

In 1970 the liberal columnist Stewart Alsop identified three "nations" that dominated American culture: the Black Nation, consisting of black nationalists and the radical wing of the civil rights movement, the Woodstock Nation, made up of hippies, student protesters, anti-Vietnam War activists and the like, and the Wallace Nation, comprised of working-class and lower middle-class whites who were stimulated by Alabama governor George Wallace, a populist Democrat. Richard Nixon called the latter constituency the Silent Majority and it was also part of what Richard Scammon and Ben Wattenberg called the Real Majority. Scammon and Wattenberg, who were Democrats, argued in their 1970 book The Real Majority that this voting bloc was typified by a 47-year-old wife of a machinist in Dayton, Ohio, and that winning her vote was the key to getting a Democrat back into the White House.