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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
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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
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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. |
