Press Action ::: 25 Years Later

Thursday, December 08, 2005

25 Years Later

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.

When asked once in the 1960s how he expected to die, John Lennon’s offhand answer was “I’ll probably be popped off by some loony.” Although he might have meant it as a joke and did not expect it to happen, the comment turned out to be chillingly accurate. Another chillingly accurate comment was made in his last interview, where he mentioned that he often felt that somebody is stalking him: first it was federal agents in the 1970s trying to deport him and later the obsessed fan in 1980.

But was it really an obsessed fan who killed John Lennon?

Some have cast doubt on the official theory that Mark David Chapman was a deranged fan who harbored a paranoid obsession with Lennon. British lawyer Fenton Bresler, author of the book Who Killed John Lennon?, concluded that Chapman was not a fan of John Lennon and that he may have been programmed by the CIA to kill the ex-Beatle.

Whatever the case behind Lennon’s killing, it’s a fact that Lennon’s antiwar and anti-establishment activism caught the attention of US government officials, starting in the late 1960s.

In his remembrance of Lennon, 25 years after his killing, Mikal Gilmore writes in Rolling Stone:

In 1971, John Lennon and Yoko Ono moved to New York. Lennon felt vitalized by its art and music and politics, and he and Ono became friendly with some prominent radical activists, including Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman of the Yippies. Lennon had been politically concerned for some time, but in New York his politics grew more radical and outspoken. For years, starting before the end of the Beatles, Lennon and Ono had pursued a media-directed campaign for the 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. In May, they staged a similar “lie-in” for peace in Montreal, where they recorded the enduringly popular “Give Peace a Chance” in a hotel room with several friends and visitors. 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.”

After arriving in New York, the couple played some political benefits on the East Coast and appeared at demonstrations for social justice and against the war, though they still refused to take part in anything that might result in a battle. “We are not going to draw children into a situation to cause violence,” Lennon once told Rubin and Hoffman. “So you can overthrow what? And replace it with what?” Lennon and Ono capped their political activity with a double album, Some Time in New York City, which addressed concerns like harsh drug laws, feminism, the Irish conflict and justice for black radical Angela Davis (a philosophy instructor tried and acquitted in a death-penalty case for the shooting death of a California judge). It was . . . well, it was a truly awful album—the worst work of Lennon’s career. The problem wasn’t his political stances but instead how he expressed those concerns: The songs lacked any of the lyrical originality or effectiveness of Lennon’s prior writing. He later said he was aiming for a journalistic style of immediacy, but other artists—most notably Bob Dylan—had done better with the same tack by humanizing their subjects, drawing portraits of people who embodied the pains of war and injustice. For the first and only time in his life, Lennon demeaned his material. There was nothing threatening or inspiring about Some Time in New York City. It worked only as a parody of itself.

Unfortunately, the U.S. government, under the administration of President Richard Nixon, saw Lennon’s politics as a serious hazard. In 1972, a Senate internal-security subcommittee of the Judiciary Committee sent a memo to Sen. Strom Thurmond, noting Lennon’s political activities. The letter suggested that Lennon intended to interfere with Nixon’s renomination at the Republican Convention in San Diego. Thurmond then wrote Attorney General John Mitchell, hinting that Lennon should be deported. The Immigration and Naturalization Service informed Lennon he must leave the country within weeks, due to a guilty plea he had entered in a 1968 marijuana-possession case in England. Lennon fought the order and managed to win an extension, but he had to fight the matter for years. It wasn’t until 1975, after Lennon had sued the federal government, that he finally prevailed and the government withdrew its case. Later, when the matter was all settled, and Nixon and much of his administration had been forced out of power over their criminal actions in the Watergate matter, Lennon told journalist Pete Hamill, in a Rolling Stone interview, that he didn’t want to talk about the president’s fall: “I’m even nervous about commenting on politics. They’ve got me that jumpy these days."