Congenial-speak#59

He saw it, Axis, Filters, and All

I was thinking of John Lennon yesterday, of what's transpired in the 37 years without that voice, that perception, for whatever reason, of an immigrant. He saw something in America, in NYC specifically, that made him want to live here badly enough to take on Nixon, Liddy and a government that wanted him out. Five years he fought to stay in America, all stemming from a bogus drug charge in England in 1968. On July 27,1976 he emerged victorious with a green card. Two years earlier the man who saw his presence in America as a threat to “democracy” resigned “for the good of the nation) before an impeachment trial would likely have ended in conviction. John W.O. Lennon saw something in America worth saving, worth imagining, worth throwing out the despots that every score or so float to the top of the filtration system.

Lennon first came here at the height of the phenomenon know as Beatlemania. On the 7^th of February, 1964 the four sat in the Pan American terminal in JFK flippantly answering questions of how they found America (“turned left at Greenland”). I do think that in all seriousness Lennon found the reaction to them as a group “not normal.” That inhuman reaction, that devil-detailed music that made girls swoon, scream so loud that the Beatles (accepting the amplification of the day) could not hear themselves, lost some momentum, some of that rebellion against good old puritan values, in 1966. Lennon, as the most thoughtful, forthright mouthpiece of the four claimed that they were more popular that Jesus. The words did not sit well in America's South, in states like Alabama where next week a child molester might go to the senate. John Lennon's statement which, as he put it was more true in England than America, prompted the burning of Beatle records, staged marches of the KKK, and death threats to individual members of the Beatles. All because it was said off the cuff that something was more popular than religion, at that time. That was America's Achilles heel. Lennon was perceptive and pointed it out. Something was sacred then. I'd wager now if a Beatles caliber wave came along, and a statement was made suggesting that it was more popular, temporarily embraced more that religion, nothing would be said. Even in the Bible-belt.

Achilles in 2017 wears his heel on his sleeve. The bar has been raised to indeterminate heights or simply removed from its precarious rests above the port-a-pit. I listen to a song like “Happy X-mas (War is Over)” and I'm deeply moved, saddened, seeing a grossly bleaker world perhaps than Lennon had seen. It was in the “bitter end of the war,” after Nixon had vowed to try things LBJ had never thought to do. I listen to the song and can only think of the fact that in 46 years, as we cycle toward the holidays, the perennial time for reflection on good will to all, we are fighting one war that beckons lessons from Vietnam. From the beginning, when the French were fighting off the Communists, to 1960 when America “took the baton,” a critique was that the region's history was not well known. America, much more than the French, was ignorant. By 1967 any understanding of the region, who's loyal to who, a clear object, had pretty much eroded away. The US government began lying to keep the war going, to save face, to. . .preserve a political base? Any war or global conflagration fought today will be done with fathoms less insight into history from a commander in chief. Lennon saw something in America, from his first taste of its insanity, its hypocrisy, insecurity, its denial of true nature of man. As he fought to stay here, he found paranoia, he watched Watergate, seeing a tyrant deposed. In 1971, as he and Yoko took to the streets of NYC, financially supporting Yippies, America still had the insecurity, the denial of who they really were, a fear of an outsider exposing them (Nixon, Liddy) for the frauds that they were, for the lies they were precipitating in America for the good of a chosen few.

The Real Celeb, the working class hero

I argue that John Lennon, in his own right, was the least phony artist of his time. He was brutally honest, perhaps cajoling America to be honest with themselves. They did not like what they saw, retreated in the warm cocoon of the bible-belt (libel) and re-wrote the book, re-phrased the article, asked journalistic integrity to take another hit, CHANGED the narrative. At a very young age Lennon had to chose between his parents, and the one he chose copped out on him and was later killed by a car. He had problems, was insecure, was a very angry youth. Lennon was moved, quite literally, by America and, in the last years of his life, used his celebrity to show it where it was. Some say he was a phony because while preaching love and peace he had been an absent father to his first son, fought with his first wife, and lashed out at the media. By 1980 Lennon had been through a kind of therapy known as Primal Scream, rid himself of all the negative baggage that caused him to appear a fraud, and was raising his son by Yoko Ono, acting like a father (mother if needed), and was writing music not angry, not overtly political. Like almost all of the Beatles's songs the music on Double Fantasy and Milk & Honey is about love, either his for life, of his son, for his wife. They are autobiographic and optimistic and do not attempt to comment on the state of America or the world. That is why, to me, his slaying at age 40 was doubly tragic. “The Monster” had gone. Lennon I surmise would have gone on to be a well-adjusted musician, activist, and family man. He saw something (then) in America worth saving, worth arguing over, an idiosyncratic nail whose head he hit in a misquoted 1966 comment.

Measured Karma

Personally, he saw the world, he saw America for what it was, for what it could be, for what it desperately, pathetically, wanted to be. There is a story that “Blue Jay Way” was written about George Harrison's visit to Haight/Ashbury during “the summer of love.” It was the height of the counter-culture, the short-lived excess from nothing but music and drugs, ending that October with the staged event Death of the Hippie. Harrison reported what he'd seen. The wasted hippies clamoring for LSD, vowing to disavow material goods. They were, by his account, dirty, starving, going nowhere. Something less than a third of America had joined the summer of love, grown their hair, gone to San Francisco by any means possible. I mean it was small, a tiny percentage of Americans chose to really rail against the establishment, to totally blow off the doors of democracy as it was known (drafting men, forcing them to fight an illegal war), to permanently change the national paradigm of how we treat one another and how things are prioritized. If it turned out that the trickle of Americans who banded in the Haight in 1967 turned out to be roughly the same as the Americans who stay loyal to their base today, that truly would be something. You can not get more empirically full-circle than that, intrinsically twisting ideologies like the famed double helix. It is all in that DNA. If that happened, if we advanced past opening the door (ajar) to Nazis, Confederate sore losers, let child molesters make laws, sparred with N. Korea until doom, opened another box of Pandora in the middle-east and then the camel broke the straw pole and the percentage was like 1967's. I think even John Lennon would have found it remarkable. He may have even said that, after five decades of economic experiments, wars (decisive and protracted), social programs, all while the control group's in church every Sunday, it's proof that the trickles in the world are more popular than Jesus.