This week, I rented a documentary film about the 1969 Woodstock Festival. I couldn’t imagine being there with 500,000 people on a pig farm, as I am not a fan of mud, porta-potties, or of large crowds, ever since I was made permanently clausterphobic when Tracy Earl sat on top of me in a tree house stuffed with twelve fifteen-year-old girls and no one heeded to my screams for freedom.<\/p>\n
Well, okay, if I were to have been there I imagine I would have had to secure a nice little circle of green grass on a hill, with a ring of marigolds around me, and I would have made a sign stating “The Nation of Solitude,” just so I could keep some breathing space. For food, I could eat some of the marigolds<\/a>. They have a lovely smell to me. I think people would have let me be, as they all seemed happy and at peace with each other’s idiosyncracies.<\/p>\n Anyway, on to the main point! While I listened to Jimi Hendrix play the national anthem I felt so sad. The way he played it was so deeply sorrowful, as if he is (and all of us are) being betrayed by the reality of what America is.<\/p>\n His music reminded me of that poem by Langston Hughes, “Let America Be America Again.”<\/p>\n