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Suddenly, I Miss John Lennon

A world without organized religions fomenting intolerance and war? Imagine.

Brian Fawcett 8 Oct 2004TheTyee.ca
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I miss John Lennon.

I'm using the word "miss" in two ways: I mistook Lennon a long time ago, and now I'm wishing I hadn't.

I'm not the sort of person who misses John Lennon or anything else from the sentimental past. And I was never a Beatles fan. From about 1964 I was more comfortable with the in-your-face middle class disassociation of Rolling Stones. But who really expected Mick Jagger would turn into a octogenarian aerobics instructor, a kind of parched Richard Simmons with rhythm?

I didn't like the Beatles because they were soft and parent-friendly, and I never saw much reason to change my mind about them, not even during their late 1960s dalliance with Eastern religions and LSD. Since the band broke up in 1970 Sir Paul has played rock-n-roll-for-parents, and the other two, Ringo Starr and the pie-faced George Harrison, weren't much more than media-approved teddy bears for suburban girls, safe love-objects for the one screeching passion they'd be allowed before middle-class boredom.

Tomorrow's his birthday

But John Lennon, who would have been 64 tomorrow, was different from the other Beatles. He had a darker sense of play, without a trace of that irritating arty world-weariness. When Lennon fell in love with Yoko Ono, he was so over-the-top that it was interesting: a public Grand Passion pursued without embarrassment or second thoughts. Sure, most of the songs he wrote under Ono's influence had a Utopian naiveté that made me cringe whenever I paid close attention, and the only song he wrote that got my number was "Working Class Hero". The riskiness of the verse that went "Keep you doped with religion and sex and TV/ And you think you're so clever and classless and free/ But you're still fucking peasants as far as I can see" still gives me a buzz.

Then, at 10:50 p.m. on Monday, December 8, 1980, Mark David Chapman shot Lennon, he died, and that was the end of him and whatever music he would have made.

Genuine genius

I guess what I'm trying to explain is that until a few weeks ago I didn't think John Lennon was a genius. He was only a very good song-writer and an interestingly neurotic human being who managed to be of his time without glad-handing the Zeitgeist.

But maybe I underestimated him. His song "Imagine" was the sum total of the ideas that were ascendant between the end of the Second World War and, roughly, 1975, when the North Vietnamese did the nasty to the Military Industrial Complex and the corporations began the 15 year process of doing the nasty to social democracy and the liberal humanism that provided its fuel.

What am I saying? Well, look at these lyrics:

Imagine there's no heaven,
It's easy if you try,
No hell below us,
Above us only sky,
Imagine all the people
living for today...

Imagine there's no countries,
It isn't hard to do,
Nothing to kill or die for,
No religion too,
Imagine all the people
living life in peace...

Imagine no possessions,
I wonder if you can,
No need for greed or hunger,
A brotherhood of man,
Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world...

You may say I'm a dreamer,
but I'm not the only one,
I hope some day you'll join us,
And the world will live as one.

Lennon was singing the admittedly sappy refrain of liberal humanists, an impossibly impractical refrain, no doubt, but a refrain that resonates powerfully today, given the different, deadly Utopian visions of today.

His most important lyric

We find ourselves today with believers homing in from every direction wanting to impose their bigoted spiritual impracticalities and their self-serving virtue, wrapping C-5 around their bodies to blow up themselves and innocent infidel children, flying airliners into large buildings to spite men who, when plotting hostilities against any nation unfriendly to oil companies, themselves read The Book of Revelations at cabinet meetings.

What I'm saying here is this: if we'd gotten rid of religion, as Lennon imagined we should, we'd have gotten rid of its fundamentalists.

I'm pointing at the "no religion too" line, which Lennon may have stuck in the song as an afterthought or verse padding. But maybe not. Maybe it was the most important line he ever wrote. At the time, for sure, it sounded like a throwaway. If you'd asked anyone in 1968 where they thought the major religions would be in 2004, they'd have brushed you off with a curt "in sharp decline, if not gone".

Remember the Cold War?

When Lennon arrived on the world scene 40 years ago, most sensible people believed that the big threat the human species faced was the Cold War, and the military madmen on both sides. There were fleets of nuke-crammed bombers in the sky 24-7, seven minutes from the point of no return. Since the Soviets appeared to be equally crazy, that was going to be the end of days. This was what supplied the fuel for the anti-authoritarian bonfires of the 1960s: People -- young people, anyway -- wanted to go on living.

But if someone had suggested that 40 years later the chief threat to human survival would be an overabundance of religious zealots, you'd have been laughed out of whatever party you were taking drugs at. 

Cut to a warm day this year on a Mexican beach.

I'm in a restaurant with my wife and six-year-old daughter at a kid-friendly five star Superclub a few metres from the Gulf of Mexico in Playa Del Carmen. We're sitting beneath a huge thatched cabana and we're surrounded on all sides by loud oversize Americans and their loud, oversize offspring, all of them infused with the self-aggrandizing paranoia George W. Bush and 9/11 has bred in Americans.

That's where I understood that I'd missed John Lennon.

No safe harbour

In the aftermath of the Cold War, organized religion has become the prime threat to both the survival of the human and most other species, and the chief impediment to the intellectual and spiritual leap humanity needs to make if it is going to survive its obsolete instincts to dominate, murder and reproduce itself beyond the capacities of the food supply and land resources.

It isn't just one of the religions, either. I'm non-denominationally anti-religion. They're all bad: Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism… They make people crazy and murderous or they make them dangerously docile toward unearned authority. Either way, they make people intolerant of others. 

Does religion offer people comfort? Sure, it does: religions promise safe harbour from the complexity of the world. Do such safe harbours actually exist? No, they don't. And the illusion of these safe harbours incites people to kill.

Playa Del Carmen wasn't, by the way, a safe harbour from those realities.  More like a holiday from it, or, more literally, a resort built against them. We were insulated from the human beings outside the resort's boundaries with comfortable vulgarities, shopping and entertainment.

On this night we had the walled compound to keep the locals out; uniformed security guards to make us feel secure that the locals would remain absent; the warm air; the company of tourists sunburned and tamed by pleasure.

Muzak for tourists

Beneath the domed thatch of the resort restaurant a saxophone player was wandering about, getting in the way of the waiters trying to deliver orders of food chosen from a menu that had taken all the offense and punch from Mexican/Mayan cuisine, along with the bacteria. The sax player's job was to deliver Soft Rock melodies, to make us feel sentimental and easy about the tropical torpor.

Until the opening bars of "Imagine" began to waft through the balmy Mexican night, the sax player's third rate covers were merely background noise. But as the first bars of "Imagine" concluded, I began to recite, silently, Lennon's lyrics.

All I could do was -- just after I warned off the sax player with a "screw off and don't come near our table" look -- smile at my lovely daughter, be glad that she exists, and worry about her future among the fundamentalists.

And wish that she could have been born into a world that had John Lennon in it, "and no religion, too".

Brian Fawcett is the author of more than a dozen books, including Cambodia: A Book for People Who Find Television Too Slow, Virtual Clearcut (about globalization's toll on his hometown of Prince George) and, most recent, Local Matters. His website is Dooney's Cafe.
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