Did Woodstock lead to the economic meltdown?

I was surprised at how pleased I was to learn this morning that there will be no Woodstock 40th anniversary concert.

Don't get me wrong: as a 14-year-old hippie wannabe in Nebraska at the time, Woodstock was a big deal to me, and I adored the album and movie when they came out the following year. I still love Jimi Hendrix. But enough already with baby boomers (and the culture they've controlled for several decades) fetishizing their youths. I've got no quarrel with sex, drugs or rock-and-roll, but I think the economic screwiness that came a cropper last fall was in some significant measure the result of the forever-young dream that got hardwired into Americans around 1969.

As I write in Reset:

After achieving generational consciousness as a hedonistic, freedom-worshipping mob of Peter Pans...many of the boomers aged but never quite grew up. Waiting a while to get everything you want is—or anyhow was—a definition of maturity. Demanding satisfaction right this instant, on the other hand, is a defining behavior of seven-year-olds. The powerful appeal of the Web is not just the “community” it enables but its instantaneity: for better or worse, you can send a message now, get any question answered now, pick your airline seat now, buy anything you want right now. Cell phones and the Internet, together with FedEx and U.P.S., finally and fully satisfy the permanent child within each of us—the impulsive child with zero tolerance for waiting. And as a result, during the last quarter century, delayed gratification itself came to seem quaint and unnecessary.

The postwar generation was the first to refuse to grow up, but Gen-X and the rest have followed in their footsteps. And the selfish, heedless, if-it-feels-god-do-it approach enshrined by young boomers subsequently enabled the risk-taking, party-hearty paradigm that has governed so much of American life, economically and otherwise, for the last quarter century.

So no matter how old you are, make love, get high, rock out, do your own thing, etcetera. But while you're at it? Don't forget that you're adults, with adult responsibilities.