By Jordan Michael Smith
After John Lennon was shot on Dec. 8, 1980, thousands of fans spontaneously gathered around his apartment in New York City, imagining what the apostle of peace might have accomplished with the rest of his life. The New York Times Neediest Cases Fund received an outpouring of donations, some of which described the late Beatles songwriter as a “humanitarian.”
That was one John Lennon. And it was the one the world chose to remember, the Lennon opposed to the Vietnam War and hosting bed-ins for peace with Yoko Ono. But that was not the only Lennon, nor the final one. In fact, the one who emerged in 1980 after five years of shunning public life held views far removed from those of the counterculture icon. Yet this Lennon—a wiser, more honest self, according to the singer—seems to have been erased from public memory in favor of the bearded prophet perpetually singing “Imagine.”
In the last major interview Lennon gave, to Playboy in late 1980 (and later released unedited as a book, All We Are Saying), he and Yoko Ono offered opinions that can fairly be described as chastened, jaded, even provincial. The Lennon memorialized in Strawberry Fields in New York City, John Lennon Park in Havana, or the Imagine Peace Tower in Reykjavík—or the Lennon martyred at monuments in Italy, Spain, Peru, Hungary, and England—would not have said the following: “I am not going to get locked in that business of saving the world on stage. The show is always a mess and the artist always comes off badly… . All of you who are reading this, don’t bother sending me all that garbage about, ‘Just come and save the Indians, come and save the blacks, come and save the war veterans’.”
When it was pointed out that a Beatles reunion could possibly raise $200 million for a poverty-stricken country in South America, Lennon had no time for it. “You know, America has poured billions into places like that. It doesn’t mean a damn thing. After they’ve eaten that meal, then what? It lasts for only a day. After the $200,000,000 is gone, then what? It goes round and round in circles.” It’s a critique of foreign aid readers of P.T. Bauer would be familiar with. “You can pour money in forever. After Peru, then Harlem, then Britain. There is no one concert. We would have to dedicate the rest of our lives to one world concert tour, and I’m not ready for it.”
This was not the ’60s revolutionary who hung out with Yippies and Black Panthers. Not only did Lennon dismiss his earlier efforts, he rejected the entire idea of social change through political action. “I have never voted for anybody, anytime, ever,” he said. “Even at my most so-called political. I have never registered and I never will. It’s going to make a lot of people upset, but that’s too bad.”
“I dabbled in so-called politics in the late Sixties and Seventies more out of guilt than anything,” he revealed. “Guilt for being rich, and guilt thinking that perhaps love and peace isn’t enough and you have to go and get shot or something, or get punched in the face, to prove I’m one of the people. I was doing it against my instincts.”
For Lennon, the political gave way to the personal and what he saw as a much more important, difficult battle. “The hardest thing is facing yourself,” he told Rolling Stone. “It’s easier to shout ‘Revolution’ and ‘Power to the people’ than it is to look at yourself and try to find out what’s real inside you and what isn’t, when you’re pulling the wool over your own eyes. That’s the hardest one.”
Nothing seems less like the popular idea of Lennon, but there was more. In his definitive song, “Imagine”—Yoko Ono has said its lyrics express “just what John believed”—he famously dreams of a world with “no possessions.” The mature Lennon explicitly disavowed such naïve sentiments:
I worked for money and I wanted to be rich. So what the hell—if that’s a paradox, then I’m a socialist. But I am not anything. What I used to be is guilty about money. … Because I thought money was equated with sin. I don’t know. I think I got over it, because I either have to put up or shut up, you know. If I’m going to be a monk with nothing, do it. Otherwise, if I am going to try and make money, make it. Money itself isn’t the root of all evil.
The man who famously called for imagining a world with “No religion” also jettisoned his anti-theism. “People got the image I was anti-Christ or antireligion,” he said. “I’m not at all. I’m a most religious fellow. I’m religious in the sense of admitting there is more to it than meets the eye. I’m certainly not an atheist.”
Even more shocking to the idea of Lennon as a secular leftist, or a deep thinker, the man rejected evolution. “Nor do I think we came from monkeys, by the way,” he insisted. “That’s another piece of garbage. What the hell’s it based on? We couldn’t’ve come from anything—fish, maybe, but not monkeys. I don’t believe in the evolution of fish to monkeys to men. Why aren’t monkeys changing into men now? It’s absolute garbage.”
To some extent, Lennon simply took the same path that many Baby Boomers followed, from sloganeering left-winger to almost conservative father and husband. His final interviews make clear he was above all concerned with his family. “I’m not here for you,”he said, speaking to his fans. “I’m here for me and her and the baby.” He revered the institution of marriage, explaining how much it meant to get the state approving his union with Ono. “[R]ituals are important, no matter what we thought as kids. … So nowadays it’s hip not to be married. But I’m not interested in being hip.”
More than anything else, the Boomer sense of entitlement enraged him, to the point of sounding a little like another John—the Sex Pistols’ Johnny Rotten:
I used to think that the world was doing it to me and that the world owed me something, and that either the conservatives or the socialists or the fascists or the communists or the Christians or the Jews were doing something to me; and when you’re a teenybopper, that’s what you think. I’m forty now. I don’t think that anymore, ‘cause I found out it doesn’t f—-ing work!
Lennon’s disillusionment, if that’s what it was, never carried him all the way to the right: he never became a Reagan Democrat, let alone a neoconservative. He was a stay-at-home husband and avowed feminist and remained deeply antiwar until his death. But he was far removed from his adoring fans’ image of him as a walking United Nations.
In fact, Lennon died as something of an individualist. “Produce your own dream,” he advised in lieu of getting involved in politics. “If you want to save Peru, go save Peru. It’s quite possible to do anything, but not if you put it on the leaders and the parking meters. Don’t expect Carter or Reagan or John Lennon or Yoko Ono or Bob Dylan or Jesus Christ to come and do it for you. You have to do it yourself.”
Lennon once sang, in “Revolution,” “But when you talk about destruction / don’t you know that you can count me out” to express his ambivalence about Weatherman-style violence. By 1980 he was skeptical even about nonviolent social change. “I can’t wake you up. You can wake you up. I can’t cure you. You can cure you.”
He had traveled a long way from his New Left days. This Lennon was more complex, less idealistic than the one on posters and T-shirts worldwide. Imagine that.
Jordan Michael Smith has written for The Boston Globe, The Atlantic, and The New Republic.
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Apparently money does change people!
What a bastard. I’m glad he’s dead.
[...] Stop Imagining December 6, 2010 tags: american, conservative, imagining, stop by rightbill http://www.amconmag.com/blog/stop-imagining/ [...]
John Lennon represented to the Left, the epitome of their fairy tale world that was to become the final result of Cultural Marxism. Cultural Marxism is the shoving aside of the values of Western Culture and substituting a Marxist system of values.The Left only uses people. A generation earlier a good example, in the entertainment world ,of using people was Paul Robson.If John Lennon had lived, I assure you that the Left would have dropped him like a hot potato.
Good perspective. Imagine, if Reagan replaced Bush with Lennon. The actor-singer duo at the helm would have prevented the Iraq mess. Besides the VP would put Bob Hope out of business.
BTW, Anyone: was Yoko really the femme fatale in the break-up of The Beatles? I for one truly miss their melanchonies…(save for those wasted years & tunes with that fraudster hari krishna)
I think Lennon reflects something that I’ve always said about “liberalism,” “progressivism or whatever you want to call it.
It is first and foremost mental disorder, characterized by arrested mental development.
Selfish egoism, narcissism, sentimentality, and social and moral aggrandizement are the other characteristics, all of which Lennon demonstrated.
I didn’t know that Lennon became more reasonable as he got older though. Looks like marriage and family stabilized him a bit by forcing him out of his self centered shell and into a broader, healthier minded perspective.
Thanks for the article.
Ken
Laser Guided Loogie
John Lennon was not a narcissist. He was a young men who went straight from art school to crushing fame without any actual education. In time, he sorted the world out in a pretty impressive way. There was nothing wrong with “Revolution,” which actually defends the Constitution against the violent. It takes on Mao, who at the time was the trendy-popular idol of the Left. It’s skeptical of political projects.
Lennon was a marvelously gifted songwriter. Far from “sentimental,” his songs were — as his son Sean points out in Philip Norman’s _John Lennon: The Life_ — achingly introspective and path-breakingly vulnerable. I also don’t see the “moral aggrandizement” you attribute to him.
Lennon decided at an early point that the stupefying fame he had gained as the leader of The Beatles should be used for something other than self-gratification. He decided that peace was a good cause. Years later, he determined that he would give his contemporaries a message of, “Emphasize family, that’s what counts.” His mature message wasn’t “Imagine,” but “Starting Over” and “Beautiful Boy.”
John Lennon: I love him.
Interesting comments, although delusional in the extreme. As an individual, Lennon found himself, which is the grand prize for any human being. It always starts out as selfishness, then transcends into treating others as you’d like to be treated. Here was a guy who had the weight of the world on his shoulders, and given more responsibility for social causes than what he was capable of carrying, who ultimately realized that he had to be responsible for for himself and not others-and that’s PRECISELY the STAPLE and base of neo-conservative thinking, not liberal. Oh well, dream on neocons
There seems to be an almost deranged movement afoot to “prove” that all of the truly important figures in the 1960′s entertainmnet scene were not “liberal” at all, but were “really conservative.” Thus we have articles like this one on Lennon and a recent one on Dylan that I read elsewhere. The real point is, as has been mentioned, that these artists were never so easily pigeonholed in a traditional right/left spectrum. and most of them never really had a comprehensive “political” ideology at all.
The New Left always contained criticism of the Old Left. Lennon was NEVER a dogmatic “leftist” in the mode of say, a Paul Robeson, following some kind of “line” laid down in Moscow or anywhere. The lyrics of “Revolution” are right on point, and not just the ones about Chairman Mao! Go listen to the whole song, it calls into question, to say the least, the primacy of class based political revolution at the heart of traditional Marxist theory (“…you better free your mind instead….”). That was Lennon in the 1960′s already.
And, as has been mentioned, as Lennon aged he matured. He lost the naivety that thought a rock concert could save the world. He focused on his wife and children. He tried, at least, to cut out the excessive drug use and to come to grips with the emotional and psychic pain caused by his orhpanhood. But his not understanding even the basics of evolution (the theory does not hold that man evolved “from monkeys,” but rather that monkeys and man have a common ancestor whom they both evolved from) hardly qualifies him as some kind of “wise” conservative. Instead, it shows the limits of his knowledge and education. His comments about spirituality don’t “negate” the desire to transcend the boundaries of organized religions found in “Imagine.”
Lennon was a great songwriter and a decent musician. He was the leader, for a time, of the most important rock and roll band that ever existed. And, like almost anyone with half at least half a brain, he could see that the US war in Vietnam was wrong, as was racial segregation. Beyond that, to attribute any kind of great “political” signficance to him, for whichever “side,” seems, to me anyway, to be a complete waste of time.
Nice thoughts, Mr. Gutzman. As for the douche that said “I’m glad he is dead,” you are truly a piece of work.
Those of us who followed Lennon at the time, who devoured “In His Own Write” at its release and listened to the songs looking for meanings and finding them from “Revolver” forward, those of us who understood the interviews from the first days of “more popular than Jesus” see very clearly that John was ALWAYS changing, always seeking and frequently finding an external source of “enlightenment.” From Leary through the Mahrishi Mehesh Yogi and Yoko, herself, and Marx and the psychologist Arthur Janov (who is still reflected in this final interview) Lennon was always a lost soul claiming to have just found himself or the “key” to it all. My prayer is that he finally did. He was a vessel through whom flowed much of the enchantment that permanently changed American Culture… and it was astonishing in power.
I think it was Churchill who said if at 20 you’re not a liberal you have no heart and if at 40 you’re not a conservative you have no brain”
Lennon seemed to have both + talent
To NY Teacher: NPR recently played some interview tapes with John Lennon, which are quite interesting. In one of them he commented about whether or not Yoko broke up the Beatles. His answer (I’m paraphrasing from memory) was that it wasn’t that she broke them up, but that when a man gets married he settles down with his wife, and doesn’t hang out as much with his old buddies. He just preferred spending more time with his wife and child. It wasn’t that she had any mysterious influence on him — it was just what people normally do when they settle down and get married.
“who ultimately realized that he had to be responsible for for himself and not others-and that’s PRECISELY the STAPLE and base of neo-conservative thinking, not liberal. Oh well, dream on neocons ” not true, if lennon got older he would have found a balance between worrying about himself as well as other world causes and gone into philanthropy. after all you CAN change the world and look after yourself at the same time. that is the blessing of being rich.
” He lost the naivety that thought a rock concert could save the world. ” I would strongly argue that rock concerts can change the world. most of the new gen-x who have built the new world were raised on those values and we are not selfish like boomers. the gen y group is also extremely collaborative and aware. this is the zeitgeist and legacy he left.
Lennon SHOCKER!!: He was a musician and artist, not a politician!! (i think most fans have known this for a while).
It’s a pity he isn’t here today. Would he be like he was in 1968? Of course not. Would he be speaking out against US occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan? I’m sure of it.
I always thought he was just a crazy junkie.I never really cared what he thought.
[...] This is pulled from the American Conservative. [...]
[...] This is pulled from the American Conservative. [...]
@ruddyturnstone
Great perspective. The bottom line is that John Lennon’s ideas and thinking continued to evolve through his personal experience. He was never so dogmatic to cling to a particular philosophy or worldview and, as you point out, it’s too convenient and inaccurate to place John Lennon on some point in the Left-Right spectrum. John’s worldview was articulated through his music. He remains the John Lennon of “Norwegian Wood,” “God”, “Instant Karma”, “Imagine,” and “Watching the Wheels.”
[...] say all of this as an introduction to this column by Jordan Michael Smith in which he dredges up an interview Lennon gave to Playboy a few weeks [...]
Thanks EJ!
mrfixit:
“‘He lost the naivety that thought a rock concert could save the world.’ ” I would strongly argue that rock concerts can change the world. most of the new gen-x who have built the new world were raised on those values and we are not selfish like boomers. the gen y group is also extremely collaborative and aware. this is the zeitgeist and legacy he left.”
I really don’t believe in “generations” much at all–they are media, and BS pop sociology constructs, for the most part…people are born every year, and the exact year in which one happens to be born is then arbitrarily placed in one “generation” or another. Trends are actually just that, trends. There is no bright-line cut off between one and another. Yes, there really was such a thing as a “baby boom,” in that there was a noticiable spike in births following the Depression and WWII, lasting from 1945 to about 1950. But the spike fizzled shortly thereafter. In any event, some folks say that “boomers” were born up until 1964! Thus, President Obama is a boomer too, even though, when the supposedly seminal, signature boomer event took place (Woodstock, 1969), he was only around 8 years old! How people born 20 years apart (the actual “baby boom” kids and folks like Obama) can be said to be part of the same “generation” is beyond me. Moreover, unlike the Baby Boom, the other so called “generations” have no definite markers at all. Generation X, by its very name, shows that it is a fake construct. Gen Y all the more so, as it’s only significance as a term is that it follows gen x. Even the term “the Greatest Generation” was manufactured by Tom Brokaw, long, long after the fact, to describe the “generation” that supposedly won WWII. Of coiurse, in reality, it was not one generation that served in that war, but men ranging in age for their late teens into middle age. Some, officers especially, had been born as early as the late 1800′s, others, the youngest, perhaps as late as the end of the 1920′s. Really, this “generation” thing, and the supposed “traits” of them is just lazy thinking.
Moreover, even if one were to accept the real existence of the generations that you mention, it still seems a bit facile to ascribe to them simple, black/whjte charecterizations such as “selfish” and “collaberative.” But, if one were to go through this exercize, couldn’t a strong case be made that the so called “boomers,” who worked to end segregation and stop the US war in Indochina, and create a counter culture, were at least as “collaberative” as the later ones? Gens X and Y, from what I can telll, have never “collaberated” to do much of anything. And selfishness certainly seems as rampant now as it ever was. Wasn’t the X generation originally called “the me generation?”
Furthermore, leaving all of that aside, I still don’t see how you have contradicted my contention that it is naive to believe that a rock concert can change the world. Did Woodstock change the world? And, if if didn’t, how much weaker is the case that any subsequent rock concert did so? And, notice too, that Lennon was not at Woodstock. Or any subsequent supposedly earth shattering concert
Finally, your statement leaves me puzzled, because, on the one hand, you call Lennon and the other boomers (if Lennon belonged to a “generation” it was clearly the boomers) “selfish,” but then you go on to say his “legacy” is what helps makes the x’ers and y’s less so. I doubt too many so called y gens are or were taking their cues from Lennon, and even X’ers less so than Boomers.
Liberalism all comes down to the old Winston Churchill quote. “If liberal when 20 its because you got heart, but if your not conservative by the time your 40, you got no brain.” After reading this article. I can see that even the liberal pop culture icon John Lennon was not exempt from growing up.
It’s interesting to see the progressive/liberal infection here even among “conservatives.” For example, the idea of “finding yourself” is pure Dewey. Moreover, the implicit approval of rock music is pure decadence.
Johnny Rotten now advertizes butter on TV, dressed up as the country squire that he has quite possibly become.
[...] and insightful than my own take. (Speaking of the late, great Beatle, Russ shares with me this essay whose author argues persuasively that Lennon abandoned much of his jejune statism before he was [...]
[...] rebellierte gegen den Vietnamkrieg und forderte die Mächtigen moralischen Argumenten heraus, war aber später alles andere als eine revolutionäre Ikone, Bono moralisiert zwar auch, wie viele andere Stars neben ihm, gegen die Armut, doch macht er sich [...]
Great article; there was an old ’60s British spy show called “The Prisoner”, that, among other individualist maxims, espoused what John Lennon discovered a bit sooner in life than I did: we are all our own jailers. Personal freedom is in our hands, not someone else’s. Our lives are our own. By extentension, we can free no one else. At best, we can show them the way by example, but that’s all. John Lennon – avowed Libertarian?
“I think it was Churchill who said…” it was George Bernard Shaw.
The vendetta against Lennon by the Nixon fed to deport him as an undesirable ground him down and he decided family and a green card were better than going back to the UK and/or prosecution..
He was never comfortable with the tags of sage/saint/political leader as he was smart enough to know his own personal flaws far too well but Lennon wasn’t by any stretch of the imagination a ‘conservative’.
It’s interesting Lennon said, he wasn’t anti-christ, or anti-religion, and also claimed he believed in rituals. No one knows, maybe except Yoko, which she isn’t telling, but, Lennon may have died an Anglican in his heart. After all, that’s how he was brought up. Especially from his comments about sin, at the end, he may have adherred to Original Sin, and the words of Christ.
He was right about evolution, its common ancestor is goo. It isn’t clear he would be against the War in Iraq either. The alternative having Al queda in control of that nation, with possible wmd’s.
Lennon was an angry, lost soul who was beginning to come to grips with the emptiness inside.
I doubt that he ever thought about politics in a serious way. He was spoiled and pissed at the world and the Left is ready made for that kind of individual. In Lennon’s case the attraction was magnified tenfold because of fame. Leftists like Hoffman and the rest of his ilk made the lost Lennon feel wanted. He jumped in naively with both feet.
In one of the Dick Cavett interviews Lennon rails against the “population explosion” propaganda current at that time. Shallow, Leftist elitist Cavett grimaces while Lennon expresses his belief that the world needs more people and not population control.
NIxon and Mitchell were correct in trying to get Lennon deported. Lennon was giving aid and comfort to domestic terrorists. However, I think he grew out of it and some of the common sense of his working class Liverpool background came back to him. RIP.
[...] like TAC‘s Jordan Michael Smith got it right — news today that John Lennon’s last assistant, Fred Seaman, says in a documentary, [...]
Hey, wasn’t Fred Seaman the guythat stole a lot of Lennon’s personal diaries and other things? Didn’t he do five years probation for said thefts? Didn’t he issue an apology for said thefts decades later?
yeah, I’d trust him as a source of information alright.
“There seems to be an almost deranged movement afoot to “prove” that all of the truly important figures in the 1960′s entertainmnet scene were not “liberal” at all, but were “really conservative.””
Nothing like the movement to try to prove historical figures to be liberals in some way or another. I can’t tell you how many articles I read by leftist pseudo-scholars that speculate on the latent homosexuality of this famous hitorical figure’s paintings or writings or music. Transposing 60s sexual liberation ideology onto people who had nothing to do with it. That’s just one area. There are a host of examples demonstrating the left attempting to rewrite history and make figures appear as contemporary Democrats.
[...] Hollywood Editor-in-Chief John Nolte noted a compelling piece at The American Conservative by Jordan Michael Smith published more than a year ago which fisked [...]
The writer, Jordan Michael Smith, seems to have made up most of these quotes. Read the original Playboy interview: http://www.john-lennon.com/playboyinterviewwithjohnlennonandyokoono.htm
Example (about atheism):
From the American Conservative:
“‘People got the image I was anti-Christ or antireligion,’ he said. ‘I’m not at all. I’m a most religious fellow. I’m religious in the sense of admitting there is more to it than meets the eye. I’m certainly not an atheist.’”
Here’s the actual quote from Playboy:
“People always got the image I was an anti-Christ or antireligion. I’m not. I’m a most religious fellow. I was brought up a Christian and I only now understand some of the things that Christ was saying in those parables. Because people got
hooked on the teacher and missed the message.”
Lennon sounds a lot smarter in the actual interview.
Lennon “sounds a lot smarter” because what was published in Rolling Stone was edited. The unedited transcript from which Jordan Michael Smith quotes appears in David Sheff and Barry Golson’s The Playboy interviews with John Lennon and Yōko Ono, among other books by Sheff.
Thanks. I was in fact referring to the Playboy interview, not Rolling Stone. The article by Smith is rather confusing in that many quotations are not directly attributed to a particular source. It seemed like the quotation I pasted in from the published Playboy interview was complete, while the quotation Smith used was a paraphrase, but I take it that the unedited interviews from the book are what Smith used.
I’ll have to get the book, “All We Are Saying.” Thanks again.
Just checked the presumably accurate quote in the Sheff book. It’s very lengthy, so I’m not going to cut/paste it here. Lennon comes off as fairly knowledgeable and nuanced on the subject of religion, and clearly is having fun with the discussion. Both the Playboy article and Smith’s piece above paraphrase and edit what was actually said. (I’m assuming the Sheff book is accurate.)
That said, Lennon does say, “I’m certainly not an atheist,” so I apologize for getting it wrong. But Lennon immediately adds, “I think this magic is just a way of saying science we don’t know yet or haven’t explored.” That type of limited belief is generally considered agnosticism, and is now characterized philosophically as “god of the gaps.”
As long as Jordan Smith is not claiming Lennon made the remarks to him, we can absolve him of being an American Johann Hari…
[...] Hollywood Editor-in-Chief John Nolte noted a compelling piece at The American Conservative by Jordan Michael Smith published more than a year ago which fisked [...]