John and me...by Mark Vaughn It seems today is a kind of John Lennon day for me. I cant say I always saw eye to eye with Lennon or to lennonites or their counterparts sometimes found in far away places such as the Kremiln, or the government establishments of Argentina, or their counterparts in remote places like the Carribean islands. But I think I understand Yoko Ono. And I understand why John was shot. It was not because he Imagined, or that he sought peace, but because he fell in love with a woman who was so different from what he had known that it changed him. It seemed he became what he had fought...in small, subtle unrecognizable ways. Late in life I had a John Lennon experience. I was never one who was loyal to Argentina, or to the Kremlin, but I found what it must have been like for John Lennon of the UK in America at the height of the Beatles fame and glory. He fled the UK, then known as Great Britian for some reason, and it was more than the business opportunity that presented itself to his group during the American sixties. I think something undefined occurred. I also think I understood what drove him far to the left, far from his roots. I think it was open rebellion and anger at a group who sent young boys off to fight a war with no objectives..in a pursuit of the higher profits of the Military Industrial Complex. It reminded him of what drove him to the shores of America where it was said opportunity did abound, for him and others. It made a mess of America. I never understood Lennon until I went trough a family squabble that pushed me far from my roots in a kind of open rebellion. For at the height of my rebellion a Chinese-America not unlike Yoko Ono brought me back from the cliff, and centered me again. It was Yoko Ono that motivated Lennon late in life. He was a fool for her so to speak. To hear some of his patriotism late in life you would have thought him related to Ronald Reagan. He was more for community and family and the American ideal than most Americans by the end of his life. I wonder had John Lennon not been shot, what the pictures on the covers of books would have looked like when portraying his image; the long-haired sun-glassed hippie of the early seventies; or perhaps the boy-man celebrity that was so big in the sixties. In a new group from the UK, One Direction you can almost hear the echoes of the past, as large crowds of women flock to see them, and scream like school girls just as those women just like them did in the sixties. Perhaps Lennons portrayal would have been like that of John F Kennedy, assassinated in 1963 by a troubled veteran. Or maybe what the portrayal of the South would have looked like had Lincoln survived to put into practice his plan for restoring the Union. We wont ever know what could have been, except in our own imagination, and experience. So today on this John Lennon day when I hear him misrepresented with the song Imagine, and the images that portray his more rebellious side I can say, God Bless him. And God Bless Yoko Ono. Imagine what it would have been like had John Lennon been allowed to be portrayed as John Lennon.
Posted on: Sun, 21 Dec 2014 18:55:09 +0000
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