It was today, the events outside the New York City apartment building known as The Dakota. Today, Mark David Chapman, a huge fan of the Beatles, and one of their founding members – John Lennon – got an autograph from Lennon in the evening, then, as John Lennon and his wife Yoko Ono were coming home to their apartment, he shot John in the back, four times. Four times. He pulled the trigger four times. When he was asked if he knew what he had done, he answered “I just shot John Lennon.”
But it could have happened yesterday – DID happen yesterday – December 7, 1941, when John Lennon was one year old, thirty-nine years to the day before his death – Japanese pilots flew across the mountains behind us, and dropped bombs on Pearl Harbor, sinking ships, and killing more than 2000 people, all of whom were passing a quiet Sunday.
It could have happened three months ago – DID happen three months ago – on Sept. 11, 2001, when a group of terrorists boarded airplanes, and with box knives and a willingness to do violence hijacked those aircraft and drove one into the ground, one into the Pentagon, and two into the World Trade Centers, killing thousands.
It happened in August, when a Honolulu man killed his ex-girlfriend and their 13-year-old daughter.
It happened last night, and the day before, and the day before that. Every day, someone is a victim of violence.
John Lennon would have been proud of this sculpture. It has taken me some time to see that. It is not so much that Lennon was an activist for peace, though he was. He had a unique position in the world, and in an ironic way, he owed the end of his life to that position – John Lennon was perhaps the biggest celebrity of his time. He had a bully pulpit – a soapbox bigger than anything anyone had seen before – maybe since. As he once famously said, surveying a crowd of Beatles fans – and I paraphrase – the Beatles were bigger than God. He meant to make this a comment on how popular they were. He later apologized, recognizing that few people understood the irony of his comments. But he knew why he had this public stature – why people listened to him. Lennon was under no illusions. He was a former Beatle, and continued to make music after that revolutionary band broke up in 1970. His fans stayed loyal, and more came to know him as his own reputation grew, and as the impact of the Beatles, like ripples in a still pond, continued to increase the numbers of their listeners, in a macabre dance of death – heck, I didn’t know about the Beatles until six years after their breakup, but I became a fan anyway. He knew that he was a pop icon – a clown – a dancing bear – and to his credit, he embraced that, and made it what it never was before – maybe, again, not since.
John Lennon did not run away from the public. He embraced us. He knew that his fans were at once the source of his voice, and the chief means of its transmission. He invited the public into his life – even into his bed as he and Yoko Ono, his wife, on their honeymoon in 1969, held a “bed-in” for peace at the Amsterdam Hilton, where they were staying. Media photographers came it to take some of the most controversial, and popular, photos of the year. In their second “bed-in”, John sang the tune “All we are saying, is give peace a chance” – a song which became an anthem for the anti-Vietnam war movement. Imagine was released in 1971, followed in 1972 with “Happy Xmas (War is Over)”. Not all of Lennon’s songs were successful, but he did have a talent for creating tunes that captured certain prevailing social moods, and his post-Beatles career was to some extent, though he would protest, defined by these anthems – anthems that, as I am reminded looking around the place, shaped and comforted the ideals and values of an entire generation – my generation – the late baby boomers.
We watched Lennon, one of the most public figures for his time, navigating a very difficult life, and we identified with him, and with his music. We felt the loss of his mother and the abandonment of his father. We identified with the rebellious streak that led to his music with the Beatles and lived the rock ‘n roll dream with him. We watched him get married, have a child, then send that marriage into the rock and roll round file, dropping his son and his immensely successful band along the way, and go off with a foreign girl and we felt the pain, the anger, the pity, and identified with the romance and the weakness and the love.
John Lennon lived his life for all of us to see, and we routed for the reunion of the Beatles and witnessed their public feuds. All the while we sang the old songs, and the new songs, and hoped for peace – not just freedom from war and from violence, but peace between John and Paul. It never really came. None of it. But it was, and is, a grand dream, and one that we can live up to if we continue to try.
Mark David Chapman was right – John Lennon was in many ways privately different from his public persona. He was wealthy, he lived a stormy life that at times appeared to follow no moral compass, and at most other times to be a complete wreck. Yet, in his public life – the life with makeup on – the life where he performed John Lennon, Pop Star, he gave us a moral compass. He said to us, if we give peace a chance, it can happen. He told us, if we want it to be, war can be over – not next week or next year, but now. He stood on a soap box, as who he was, and got tomatoes thrown at him for expressing the best of himself – for dreaming that he, along with all of us, could learn the ways of peace, love, and care. Despite his many flaws, he sang to the world of making an effort to be better – and to care for each other.
Yes, John Lennon was a pop star, and he would be first to remind us that a pop star is nothing special – just a clown in a zoot suit, made up and dressed up for all to see, performing an idealized dance of life, and giving us all some space to imagine who and what we can be – with love, without violence, without forcing each other to conform to pre-established assumptions or rules. He asked us to imagine what we can be…imagine.