Voices
Moonshine and folk song: changing the world
Who gets to see a new culture being born? Is it the Woodstock groupie, gathering his guitar, beads, jeans, and marijuana to join 400 000 people watching the likes of Janis Joplin on a New York dairy farm on 15 August 1969? Is it the guy in the Western world transfixed by his TV and the moon-landing in July of that year? Or is it you, with your 50-year vantage point on all this?
GEOFF SIFRIN
It’s fascinating to cast an eye at what the world looked like 50 years ago. These were exciting times: the moon landing and Woodstock.
As Neil Armstrong descended onto the moon using the most advanced technology of the time, in America, social tensions were roiling concerning sexuality, women’s rights, psychedelic drugs, and interpretations of the American dream.
The previous year, civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr, famous for his “I have a dream” speech, was assassinated. Iconic entertainers were alive and active: Elvis Presley, Jimi Hendrix, the Beatles, and others.
In South Africa, the apartheid regime was fully entrenched, with no end in sight. Five years before the moon landing, Nelson Mandela was sentenced to life imprisonment. For whites, life continued as usual. The whites-only Johannesburg CBD was still a place of handsome art deco buildings and fancy stores such as Anstey’s, which you would dress up to visit.
Nobody in South Africa saw the moon-landing from the comfort of their own homes because the government didn’t allow television. Nationalist Party leaders saw it as a threat to the Afrikaner folk.
The then minister of posts and telecommunications, Dr Albert Hertzog, said television would come to South Africa “over my dead body”. Television became available countrywide only in 1976.
Was a new culture being born? Politically, in the West, the new left had arisen. It was hatched as a counter-culture movement, led by numerous Jews such as Mark Rudd, Jerry Rubin, and Abby Hoffman, with their coolness towards Zionism and Israel, which alarmed many Jews.
It was only 21 years after the end of World War II and the Holocaust, thousands of survivors were alive, and the knowledge of what had happened was gradually being put together. Israel was paramount in the Jewish psyche: it was two years after the Six-Day War in 1967, in which Israel captured the Sinai Peninsula, West Bank, and Old City of Jerusalem.
It was the middle of the Cold War, and definitions were clear: East versus West, capitalism versus communism. Kennedy sent a man to the moon, though he did not live to witness it – he was assassinated in 1963.
Everything changes, but everything stays the same.
As we sit here in 2019, apartheid has been demolished, Israel is all grown up, the American Dream has been captured by a clown, and the left has lost its punch. What’s our “Woodstock”? What’s our “moon-landing”?