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Fisking John Lennon's "Imagine"
by Mark Shea, Catholic ExchangeRolling Stone recently informed us what the "500 Greatest Songs of All Time" are. Of course, in a culture with the historical memory of a fruit fly, Rolling Stone meant "rock songs" and not, for instance, ancient ballads like "Greensleeves" or ancient hymns like "Adeste Fidelis" which predate immortal works like "Muskrat Love" by some time. Rock culture is preternaturally concerned with the Now and therefore sees the '60s as Pleistocene antiquity before which all the ages were formless and void. I like Rock as much as the next guy. But let's face it: Rock specializes in the Big, the Loud, the Grotesquely Dionysian, and the Strongly Felt, not the Small, Nuanced, Proportional, or Considered. Consequently, in the world of Rock, a ballad is often thought to be Deep, when it is really just Not Blaring. It's a sort of Pavlovian acoustic response that conflates mere noise reduction with contemplation. That is why, I'm convinced, a song as stupid as "Imagine" by John Lennon can still be regarded by millions as both profound and moving to the degree that it is the Number Three Greatest Song Ever according to Rolling Stone. You can see imbeciles swaying to this tune, eyes closed in beatific bliss, at everything from school assemblies to soccer matches to September 11 commemorations. How does it honor the dead to "Imagine there's no heaven"? How does it honor the firefighters who sacrificed their lives to mewl about "Nothing to...die for"? Indeed, it is sung by earnest churchgoers, even at Catholic Masses, who seem to perceive no particular contradiction between the liberating wonder of imagining there's no Heaven and the prayer which begins "Our Father who art in heaven." It seems to be because the words of the song are more or less treated as sonorous replacements for singing "La La" to its pleasant tune. Me, I pay attention to words. That is why I have always thought of it as a sort of anthem to Original Sin fallen man's infinite capacity to believe he can create Heaven on earth if he's just permitted one more chance to get it right. Everything the song advocates and hopes for as a supreme good was the fountainhead of all the horrors of the 20th century. . . . Hit the link and read the rest of it. An aging hippie wrote Mr. Shea to register her disagreement with his article. He fisked her argument to within an inch of its wretched life on his blog: As Dostoyevsky says, "If there is not God than everything is permissible." John Lennon, when you boil it down, is wishing for a world in which Everything is Permissible. That is the essential folly of the song. . . . He was advocating, in an intellectually lazy way, a wish that all that stuff would just go away and not bother him anymore. So instead of bothering to find out what causes social injustice, he just wished for a world where nobody had any possessions (except him and his $25,000,000). Telling a starving man that you hope he has nothing is not a glowing and poetic sentiment. It's a sloppy cop out from the hard work of recognizing that it is sin, not possessions, that is the problem. Telling a victim of genocide that "above us, there is only sky" is another way of saying "the death of you and all you love means nothing in the grand scheme of things, all that matters is power. The regime that slaughtered your people wins!" "Imagine" is a poem by a dilettante who wants to fancy himself a philosopher, but doesn't want to be bothered with the hard work of thinking. Posted by: Mike 2006-09-28 |
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