Imagining "Imagine" : John Lennon's gibberish-filled anthem.

Daily Standard ^ | Joel Engel

[Hillary's Folly]

Imagining "Imagine"
On the anniversary of John Lennon's death, it's worth taking a look at the gibberish in his beloved anthem.
by Joel Engel
12/08/2003 12:00:00 AM

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TODAY MARKS the 23rd anniversary of John Lennon's murder by a deranged fan, an act that at once revivified the ex-Beatle's career and established his 1971 song "Imagine" as the official utopian anthem. For millions of people around the world, the song's three minutes of bumper-sticker slogans describe the best of all possible worlds.

But before the faithful gather in memoriam to light candles and sing "Imagine" together, as they always do on the anniversary, a few of them might want to stop and consider that the lyrics are hardly a recipe for universal bliss. Chaos may be closer to the truth.

Put aside for a moment the inconvenient fact that John once admitted he'd written "All You Need Is Love" as irony. Or that, as a Beatle, his most spirited vocals may have been on the group's cover of "Money (That's What I Want)," which begins: The best things in life are free / But you can keep them for the birds and bees. Or that, on his solo debut album, recorded a year before "Imagine," he sang: I told you before, stay away from my door / Don't give me that brother, brother, brother, brother . . . Let's just take the words of "Imagine" at face value.

Imagine there's no heaven . . . No hell below us . . . Imagine all the people living for today. Okay, let's imagine that; let's imagine six billion people who believe that flesh and blood is all there is; that once you shuffle

off this mortal coil, poof, you're history; that Hitler and Mother Teresa, for example, both met the same ultimate fate. Common sense suggests that such a world would produce a lot more Hitlers and a lot fewer Teresas, for the same reason that you get a lot more speeders / murderers / rapists / embezzlers when you eliminate laws, police, and punishment. Skeptics and atheists can say what they like about religion, but it's hard to deny that the fear of an afterlife where one will be judged has likely kept hundreds of millions from committing acts of aggression, if not outright horror. Nothing clears the conscience quite like a belief in eternal nothingness.

Imagine there's no countries . . . Nothing to kill or die for / No religion too / Imagine all the people / living life in peace. Hmmm. A single, borderless entity. No passports or customs inspectors rifling through your luggage. So far, so good. But wait a second. By what laws, rules, cultures, customs, and mores would we all be living? America's? Saudi Arabia's? Iceland's? Cuba's? Obviously, organizing billions of people from different traditions around a common mindset would require some serious coercion that progressives (many of whom will be out in force tonight with lighted candles) keep reminding us is not our prerogative--not even in countries with brutal dictators. And if there's nothing to kill or die for, then there's really nothing to live for, either--not equality, not liberty, not justice. It bears remembering that those young Englishmen who declared, in the 1930s, that they wouldn't fight for king and country did nothing for the cause of peace; quite the opposite. Lennon's own Oxford Pledge may warm the hearts of pacifists, but it's true music to a tyrant's ears.

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. . . . Let's begin implementing the third stanza's message by splitting up the royalties to this copyrighted song. Mrs. Lennon, I imagine, will be only too happy to share with the rest of us the proceeds from the semiannual checks she receives for its licensing. In fact, why don't we all participate in every revenue stream created by John's invaluable catalogue? No, even that's not good enough. John wants us all to own everything, so we're each entitled to an equal share of not only his catalogue but also every album, tape, and CD ever made--by every artist. True, in such an egalitarian world, there soon won't be any record stores from which to take home recorded merchandise, since the owners will have nothing left to sell and are anyway no longer the owners (we all are). Nor will there be anything to play or record the music on (assuming any artist still wants to record), since there'd be no one to build the equipment. Why should anyone volunteer to work in a factory making hard goods when everyone else is living in the poshest houses and eating at the finest restaurants for free? Of course, housing and food are going to be problems, too, unless someone volunteers to mine the quarries, hammer nails, plant corn, and catch salmon for the rest of

us. In John's imagined world, su casa es mi casa. So is su radicchio.

And the world will live as one. One what? Violent mess, apparently.

Imagine that.

Joel Engel is an author and journalist in Southern California.

[Stone Mountain]

I'll agree and then submit that the Ideas challenged in Imagine have already won out and you simply have a man rehashing what we all figured out long ago. Not very "Edgy" is it?

Nope, not edgy. Like I said, that's why I don't understand someone who would take the time to write an article like the one above. Does he also deconstuct poems line by line forcing them to apply to the real world?

What Ideas challenged in Imagine have already won out? As far as I can tell, the main idea in "Imagine" was to imagine a utopian world. How does an idea like that win or lose?

[Hildy]

You don't have to like them, but if you know anything about music, you have to respect them. I was referring to the posters assertion that ALL BEETLE FANS ARE DERANGED.

[Taliesan]

I just can't imagine what music would be like without them.

[Taliesan]

Does he also deconstuct poems line by line forcing them to apply to the real world?

I'll just point out that liberals don't hold hands and recite "The Waste Land" with a dreamy, far-off look.

[johnb838]

I liked Instant Karma much, much better.

[Hildy]

Besides, WHY do we keep spelling "BEATLES" wrong!

[Skooz]

Pink Floyd revolutionized music - before them The Beetles revolutionized music - before them Elvis revolutionized music -

Yep. Floyd's "Pink Floyd Live at Pompeii" still seems ahead of it's time--30 years after it was recorded.

Robert Johnson is still better than almost anything out there today--almost 70 years after his last recording.

The truly great stuff is A) highly influential and B) timeless.

[CyberCowboy777]

We all know that the world of Imagine cannot exist as man currently exists. The Idea has lost.

The idea of Capitalism, Religion, Realist has however proved to work in reality.

I think the only reason to even talk about it is parallel to discussing the comment by Chamberlain (Peace in our Time - appeasement of Evil). It was shown to be short sighted and wrong - yet it is still used today as a valid concept.

You may not see Imagine as anything but a song of a dreamer - but you would be surprise at the number of people who build their life philosophies on such trivial works. The number of Communist Congressmen should validate this point nicely.

[CyberCowboy777]

Besides, WHY do we keep spelling "BEATLES" wrong!

I do that all the time - just a mental block!

[CyberCowboy777]

Absolutely on both counts.

I think rabid Beatles fans are mostly from that generation and have lost perspective of the last 100 years or so of music.

In reality I guess we could go back further, Handel and Mozart have left a bit of a mark.

[TASMANIANRED]

Imagine there's no brain cells
Easy if you try
Just sit around your apartment
And get massively high


Sir or Miss, My your rapier like wit never have need to sythe in my direction. This is much better than the origional.

[ZULU]

The Beetles were also responsible for a lot of the kind of leftist, mindless garbage we have to deal with today.

Turkeys like Lennon and his wife who posed naked for "art's sake" get knighted.

What drivel.

I don't care if they did write some good music. Their lifestyles and world views were incompatible with the kind of decent moral lifestyle once practised by MOST people in this once great nation.

And no, I'm NOT 90 years old. But I AM old enough to remember the flower children of the 60's and their venomous offspring.

[Hildy]

Boy, talk about holding a grudge!

[Skooz]

Their lifestyles and world views were incompatible with the kind of decent moral lifestyle once practised by MOST people in this once great nation.

As opposed to the to the moral purity of their cool-cat contemporaries?

[Zionist Conspirator]

What most bothers me about that disgusting new age paean is that it is internally contradictory. Its purpose is to inspire an idealism that seeks to put an end to idealism ("nothing to kill or die for"). How many have been inspired to kill or die to bring this about?

"We hope some day you'll join us" and do what? Create a world where there is no longer any "us" to join because all goals have been eliminated?

And just who are "we" and "us," anyway? David Rockefeller? Walter Cronkite (the owl of the Bohemian Grove)? Force X? Sauron? Le roi du monde???

My theory is that Lennon wrote the song to scare people into the John Birch Society. [jk]

[ZULU]

Will YOU listen to the Dixie Chicks, and watch Ed Asner on TV??

[Helms]

The next time you listen to "Imagine", try thinking of it as a sort of suicide note ( I don't mean this in a callous way but it actually sounds better as an eulogy in effect saying to all of us on this side,
that by joining him we can all live as one).

In that way I can make sense of what he is saying. Certainly where he is there is no country but for his sake there is a god.

[Zionist Conspirator]

No, its not hard for me to imagine no religion at all. I'm doing fine without it.

Of course, that means that you don't believe anything is absolutely right or wrong (good thing the subjective moral hang-up about murder is so wide-spread at present; makes G-d unnecessary for you, I suppose).

Or maybe you're depending on that "social contract" none of us can remember signing.

[ZULU]

Two wrongs don't make a right. Sinatra was a sinister low-life hood and his buddies were also a bunch of low-lifes.

I prefer entertainers like John Wayne, Jimmy Stuart, Gary Cooper, etc.

By funding low-lives, you contribute to their lifestyles and the destruction of our national moral fiber.

So, if you want to go out and watch Johnny Deppe, listen to Jayne Fonda exercise tapes, or buy Frank Sinatra records (he had a lousy voice in my book, anyway) go right ahead. Its your choice. But I will spend my money on positive role models - no matter how increasingly difficult it may be to find them.

[Zionist Conspirator]

Yes, I am agnostic. I do not believe in organized religion so its not too much of a stretch for me to imagine a religion-free world. But thats as far as it goes. I do not expect anyone to see things as I do nor do I care a fig if people want to worship whatever god they choose (or none) as long as they harm no one and don't try to shove it down my throat.

Now why are you going around setting up artificial barriers to other people's freedom? Why should their freedom magically stop when they want to shove it down your throat? There's no G-d (according to you) to make this objectively wrong. If objective right and wrong do not exist, then neither is it wrong to violate your "rights."

No wonder you so enjoy that song. Both of you are riddled with internal inconsistencies.