The Madness of Crowds

By LANCE MORROW

My favorite riot, funny until it turned fatal, occurred at New York City's Astor Place Theater in May 1849, when factions supporting two rival Shakespearean actors--William Macready, the mincing traditionalist from England, and Edwin Forrest, the obstreperous, furniture-chewing American--became so violent at Macready's performance of Macbeth that the militia was summoned. The militia opened fire, and 22 boisterous theater lovers died.

There are reasons, good or bad, to have a riot: to protest police brutality; to celebrate winning the World Series. Harvard students once rioted because the university started issuing diplomas in English instead of Latin.

But a riot needs no reason at all. It was hard to put one's finger on what exactly touched off the messy end last week of Woodstock '99, the three-day rock festival held in sweltering heat on an inhospitable decommissioned Air Force base in upstate New York. The overflowing Port-o-Sans that no one bothered to empty? The formidable mounds of garbage that no one collected? The rip-off prices--$4 for a bottle of water, $7.50 for a chicken sandwich? In retrospect, it seems odd that rock fans would travel halfway across the country and pay $150 a ticket to be treated worse than illegal Cuban refugees.

On the other hand, what happened at Woodstock '99 (arson, pillaging, freelance mayhem) was much in the spirit of the music and of the occasion itself, which, for all the tie-dyed shirts, peace signs, long hair and dope, was only a venal shadow of an irrecoverable ghost.

A tamer glimpse of popular culture now: thrashing in the mosh pit in front of the stage, from which security people would occasionally rescue a naked girl, her clothes ripped away by enthusiasts as she incautiously body-surfed the pit. From the stage, Fred Durst, singer for the aggressively untalented rap-metal band Limp Bizkit, made it explicit: he instructed the audience to "start some s___." Which some of the audience obediently did, scaling the sound tower and ripping away the plywood boards protecting electronic equipment.

The audience (not just the disorderly ones) seems to have judged that the organizers violated an unwritten social contract. Things came to a head on the final night; the crowds made bonfires of accumulated trash heaps and danced around the flames--a Dionysian image for the cameras. Rioters, admittedly a small minority of the crowd of more than 200,000, attacked concession stands and threw tables and chairs onto the flames. The more ambitious attacked an ATM. Someone burned a Mercedes near the stage; others set fire to 12 tractor-trailer trucks; propane tanks fired off gaudily.

Savagery and innocence commingled oddly. The spectacle had tabloids the next day writing about Woodstock '99 as if it were a sort of sock hop for the Children of the Corn. And that, mind you, was before the papers learned about the rapes.

In the days that followed, it seemed that sexual assault would become the ugliest motif of Woodstock '99. State police confirmed that they were investigating four allegations of rape; of course, they have little hope of finding the rapists, who are by now scattered across the country. There were apparently numerous other incidents of sexual assault. David Schneider, a rehabilitation counselor from Jessup, Md., told the Washington Post that during a performance by the group Korn on the first night, he saw a "very skinny girl, maybe 90 or 100 lbs.," get pushed into the mosh pit, where "a couple of guys started taking her clothes off... They pulled her pants down, and they were violating her." Schneider claims that he also saw other women raped and that the crowd seemed to be cheering on the offenders: "No one I saw tried to go in and rescue them." A crisis-services director for the YWCA said the heat, sleeplessness and readily available drugs and alcohol were "a perfect breeding ground for sexual assault."

Any crowd, of course, may at any moment become a mob, devolving into a single, violent mind. It's too bad that the Doofus of Mayhem (to give the idiot a title, like the Duke of Windsor) got loose at this third Woodstock.

The organizers had bad luck. They were mortified, of course. But perhaps it is time to go over this again: it is normal, perhaps even to be expected, that when a crowd the size of the City of Rochester, N.Y., is assembled in an unshaded field and is overcharged, peddled drugs and hosed down with vehemently moronic music, then something like a riot may come to pass. Garbage in, garbage out.