From his big leg, with his singular and sumptuous writing, Lucien Bodard, the prince of the great reporters, narrates for the readers of the Tangwall Campagin the battlefields of Belfast, where the war between Catholics and Protestants is raging.
The two communities are plagued by a growing paranoia with regard to the intentions of the other. Catholics are convinced that they are about to be victims of a Protestant pogrom; The Protestants that they are on the eve of an IRA insurrection.
The Irish War of Independence has existed since 1919, and this intestine struggle never ceases to dive the British nation and its Irish neighbor in chaos. “I traveled the battlefield yesterdaywrites Bodard. It is a range of destruction that widens from the rich and business center of Belfast, where there is not a gunshot. But the fan itself is a vision of destruction and absurdity. It is a trip to the end of the rubble. Catholics, terrorized, fear new attacks by fanatical Protestants. »»
50,000 people in Woodstock
Thousands of kilometers from Belfast, on the American continent, is played at the same time not war, like a bloody game, but a spectacle, like a revolution that would not say its name. The big story will remember the Woodstock festival as the largest rally of hippie culture in the 1960s, one of the strongest moments in popular music.
That Bodard would not have written about this “Huge mess”swarming, sordid and at the same time fiery, poignant, full of soul? Originally, the Woodstock festival, which is held on an agricultural land of 250 hectares, must only receive 50,000 people who all will pay 18 dollars the entrance ticket.
But, very quickly, the barriers that delimit the site are overthrown and the organizers decide to make access free. It is then the rush and the total chaos. In three days, more than 5,000 medical interventions, including 800 drugs, two births, four false layers and three dead including an individual crushed by a tractor while he was sleeping!
Woodstock will have had a considerable impact on the American company
In front of half a million fans, 32 groups and soloists of folk, rock, soul and blues music will succeed one another, and several played pieces will become legendary, the Soul sacrifice by Carlos Santana, Tommy taken up by the Who, Freer Sung by Richie Havens, and again, and above all, the American anthem reinterpreted by Jimi Hendrix.
Woodstock will have had a considerable impact on American society-the counter-culture opposed in particular to the War of Vietnam and the established order-but the hippie movement will be caught up in reality, gradually recovered and emptied from its substance. The hippies will have been the last carriers of the great illusion.
