"the weight of this sad time we must obey/speak what we feel, not what we ought to say"

[excerpts from and thoughts after a recent Rolling Stone article on John Lennon]

[if you want to skip all the quotes and get to the thoughts, scroll to the next orange part]

"For years, starting before the end of the Beatles, Lennon and Ono had pursued a mdia-directed campaign for hte cause of peace--which at that time meant promoting an end to the war in Vietnam, though they were also advocating the larger philosophy of nonviolence that had guided India's Mahatma Gandhi and the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. In March 1969, following their marriage in Gibraltar, Lennon and Ono flew to Amsterdam, where they staged a "bed-in" for peace. For seven days they sat in bed in their pajamas at the Amsterdam Hilton and gave hundreds of interviews, discussing their views that true peace begins as a personal pursuit and talking about intersections between activism, popular culture, ideology, and Eastern and Western religion...Lennon later said that he was trying to change his own heart as much as anybody else's. 'It's the most violent people who go for love and peace,' he told Playboy. 'But I sincerely believe in love and peace. I'm a violent man who has learned not to be violent and regrets his violence.' "


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"Lennon also studied feminist history and theory. 'It's men who have come a long way from even contemplating the idea of equality. I am the one who has come a long way. I was the real pig. And it is a relief not to be a pig. The pressures of being a pig were enormous. They were killing me. All those years of trying to be tough and the heavy rocker and heavy womanizer and heavy drinker were killing me. And it is a relief not to have to do it."


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" 'We sold out. The music was dead before we even went on the theater tour of Britain...The Beatles music died then, as musicians.'...'Fuckin' big bastards, that what the Beatles were. You have to be a bastard to make it, man. That's a fact, and the Beatles were the biggest bastards on earth.' ' One has to humiliate oneself to be what the Beatles were, and that's what I resent...About all we can do is do it like fuckin' circus animals. I resent being an artist in that respect, I resent performing for fucking idiots who won't know--who don't know--anything. 'Cause they can't feel. I'm the one that's feeling, cause I'm the one that's expressing what they are trying to. They live vicariously through me and the other artists.'

"It was difficult to read his words without feeling that Lennon was indicting not just the band but those who had placed a stake in the Beatles. No other major artist ever razed his own image so devastatingly.

"However--not surprisingly--when Lennon applied his hurt and vitriol to his music, the result was transcendant...[for his first solo album he chose] minimalist instrumentation. Lennon sang about the most painful memories and undercurrents of his life--the death of his mother, the failures of faith and fame, the betrayals in misplaced ideals--in such a way that there was nothing to shield a listener from the resulting raw anger and anguish...he decided to 'shave off all imagery, pretensions of poetry, illusions of grandeur....Just say what it is, simple English, make it rhyme and put a backbeat on it and express yourself as simply and straightforwardly as possible.'..."

" 'The dream is over/What can I say?/The dream is over/Yesterday/I was the dream weaver/But now I'm reborn/I was the Walrus/But now I'm John/And so, dear friends/You'll just have to carry on/The dream is over."

[the album sold poorly.]

"With his next album, Imagine, Lennon tried to present his concerns more accessibly...Lennon's lyrics still chased troubling themes--but this time he wrapped them in a savvy pop sensibility. The album's title track, in particular, put forth some daring notions--and it did so in a beguiling and haunting way. The song was a prayer, the most radical prayer that ever played widely on radio. 'Imagine, both the song and the album,' Lennon said, 'is the same thing as "Working Class Hero," "Mom" and "God" on the first disc. But the first record was too real for people so nobody bought it..."Imagine" was the same message but sugarcoated...it's a big hit almost everywhere--anti-religious, anti-conventional, anti-nationalistic, anti-capitalistic, but because it is sugarcoated it is accepted. Now I understand what you have to do: Put your political message across with a little honey.' "


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"After his death, things changed around us. America entered the years of Ronald Reagan; Britain, the years of Margaret Thatcher. Modern history was reversing its hopes. Rock 'n Roll, and later hip-hop, has still pushed against that reversal, but it has never pushed as hard as it did in the years of John Lennon. That isn't simply because Lennon was killed. Rather, it's because he lived. The Beatles set something loose in their time: a sense of generational transformation that moved quickly from the blissful to the artistic to the political, and for a few remarkable years, it seemed irrefutable.

"The story of our times since then has been the product of a determination to make sure that nothing like that could happen again. While "Imagine" can still be played on the radio because its music sounds familiar and comforting, there's little-if anything-with that sort of nerve in today's mainstream pop. The free market of ideas just isn't that free right now. A pop star as popular as Lennon proclaiming similar ideals in our current environment would run the risk of being judged a heretic.

"So we got something when we had John Lennon, and we lost something when his voice was killed. We lost somebody as fucked up as us, who worked his whole life to overcome himself, and, in doing so, his creativity would help us overcome the madness of our times - at least for a while. Through it all, he told us to keep faith, to keep courage, to defy our hurt, our fear, to find love and hope and fight for their meaning."

--now for the thoughts of the wildebeen--

if the opportunity presents itself to get December 15th's Rolling Stone in your hands, do yourself a favor and read Mikal Gilmore's article on John Lennon. it's concise, profound, and moving. it explores Lennon as a person growing and living and wrestling with redemption and pain through the length of his life.

in particular, it wrestles with the tension between stability and change, the competition between pragmatics and ideals, and the prophet's dilemma of speaking to a people who long for change and comfort at the same time: redemption without repentance, new life without death.

i've been remarkably sad lately over a situation at one of my adopted home-places, Houghton College. the passionate and often exciteable and ever-engaging Dr. Beech, a philosophy professor with a penchant for drawing even the most uninterested student deep into charged discussions and redeeming the potentially boring philosophy requirement into riskily deep introspection and examination, was asked by the administration not to apply for tenure. In short, he's being canned and asked not to make noise about it.

several semesters ago, Dr. Beech gave one of the few chapel speeches i have heard in my four years worthy of presentation at an institution claiming to be academic. he vigorously called for an examination of issues of justice and righteousness, for honest introspection and inquiry into the justice of acquiescing to an overwhelming flood of blind nationalism and patriotic furor.

in the aforementioned philosophy prerequisite, Dr. Beech maintained with vigor and passion the necessity of self-examination. quoting either Socrates, Plato, or Aristotle (i cannot remember which, i did not do so well in the exams) he maintained that the unexamined life is not worth living, and went further to say that Christ himself compels us to examine our lives and our selves and not merely float along on popular ideas or live comfortably as we are pleased to.

the only comparison i can find for Dr. Beech is a hippie--a youthful man driven by ideals and a sense that all is not as it should be, and in the light of such wrongs revolutions of thought and action are necessary. admittedly, he was far too well-dressed and groomed to be an actual hippie, but the spirit was there--the spirit of John Lennon's decade where the idea that humanity was being crushed by machines of metal and social and political construction was felt widely enough to become a popular movement. people threw themselves, en masse, at change.

the movement died. the eighties of greed and power and the reduction of people to systemic grist and numbers in macroeconomic models and marketing plans happened. Lennon died, and now we have the knowledge of our human dilemmas without any real hope for change. there is no The Man and there is no revolution. Just an entire world of pragmatic individuals.

no one rocks the boat anymore. no one speaks the words worth hearing--or they are not spoken loud enough. the church contents itself with a sort of Feng Shui of theological furniture. the only freedom pop culture desires is the freedom to consume. and all around us peace is being slaughtered, any meaningful communities that are not being actively destroyed are dying of neglect, people are lonely, and increasingly visible to all is how disfigured we all are as humans. but no one has the will to speak up, to challenge the status quo or the powers of the air that hold us captive.

Lennon grappled with those powers. That's why his music--even the sellout music, the sugarcoated together with the deeply honest, is treasured for its beauty and ability to speak about life to our cold dark hearts.

Dr. Beech paces behind a podium in a required class in a school specializing in speaking to the happy comfortable people and declaims with a spirit fervor dead and cold and unheard in our society since the seventies. his words kindle little fires, risky scary and necessary, in the ears of his hearers.

why are we stoning our prophets?