Imagine a Less Political Lennon

Daniel J. Flynn offers another perspective on John Lennon:

After stumbling through a haze of drugs and alcohol in the 1970s, a sober Lennon returned to wife Yoko Ono, finally succeeded in starting a family with her, and lived the quiet life of a "househusband" from 1975 to 1980. Fatherhood the first time around had eluded the essentially fatherless Lennon. Removed from Beatlemania hysteria, Lennon had been for son Sean what he hadn't been for son Julian: a dad.

His musical comeback owed as much to the comeback of his personal life as it had to his renewed focus on rock 'n' roll to the exclusion of politics and drugs. Politics, Lennon concluded, had "almost ruined" his music. "It became journalism and not poetry. And I basically feel that I'm a poet -- even if it does go ba-deeble, eedle, eedle, it, de-deedle, deedle, it." That politicized John Lennon -- holding bed-ins for peace, singing for marijuana offender John Sinclair, featuring activists Bobby Seale, Ralph Nader, and Jerry Rubin on The Mike Douglas Show during a guest-hosting stint -- coincided with the chemicalized John Lennon. The stringy-haired beardo rhapsodizing about imagining no religion was John Lennon. But so too was the leather-clad child of the fifties belting out a stripped-down cover of "Stand By Me."

http://spectator.org/archives/2010/12/08/imagine-a-less-political-lenno

From Ben Stein's Diary

Ben Stein's take on the coming result of our public education:

This condition -- not wanting to learn or even knowing how to learn -- is going to kill this country, or at least the idea of a fluid, meritocratic society. The poor will stay poor and the rich who are willing to learn will stay rich.

This will eventually drag down national productivity to the point where we truly become a Third World nation with a thin slice of first world on top of. The process will take a long time, but it will happen. It is already happening.

http://spectator.org/archives/2010/12/01/one-of-eight-billion/1

Imagine

Catholic writer Mark Shea has taken John Lennon's song "Imagine" to the woodshed:

How does it honor the dead to “Imagine there's no heaven”? How does it honor the firefighters who sacrificed their lives to mewl about “Nothing to…die for”? Indeed, it is sung by earnest churchgoers, even at Catholic Masses, who seem to perceive no particular contradiction between the liberating wonder of imagining there's no Heaven and the prayer which begins “Our Father who art in heaven.” It seems to be because the words of the song are more or less treated as sonorous replacements for singing “La La” to its pleasant tune.

Me, I pay attention to words. That is why I have always thought of it as a sort of anthem to Original Sin — fallen man's infinite capacity to believe he can create Heaven on earth if he's just permitted one more chance to get it right. Everything the song advocates and hopes for as a supreme good was the fountainhead of all the horrors of the 20th century. Imagine there's no countries? Hitler dreamt of a world without borders. Imagine there's no heaven? No religion too? Stalin and Mao sought to free us from religion and the burden of hoping for something more than this life. Imagine no possessions? Communism was all about freeing us from possessions (though multi-zillionaire Lennon seems to have honored this dream more in the breach than the observance). Imagine all the people living for today? You got it! A culture of brain-dead MTV-educated “fornicate-today-and-abort-tomorrow” zombies has accomplished the mission.

http://catholicexchange.com/2006/09/27/94446/