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 7th
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.
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