Thoughts At 30

December 8 was the 30th anniversary of John Lennon’s death. You no doubt read, heard or saw the tributes and commentaries on TV, online or in the newspapers earlier this month, but felt something was missing because I hadn’t yet weighed in.

Right?

Hello?

Well, you can chill out now.

I read an incredibly sappy piece in the Washington Post on December 7 of this month that was written by someone with a “special to” byline, which in these days of print-media freefall tends to denote a freelancer who has a passionate viewpoint, a low price tag and good timing. This guy, the former editor of a Beatles “fanzine,” had interviewed fellow Lennon acolytes in this country and in England about the day Lennon was shot to death in front of his New York City apartment building. The story’s second line was, “We”—meaning every Beatles fan in existence –“all know where we were and what we were doing when we found out.”

That statement struck me as vastly overstated, in keeping with the article’s consistently hyperbolic tone. I do think Lennon was an exceptional artist and an admirable man, whose passion and acerbic wit served the peace movement well. But I don’t see his assassination as a body blow to humanity on a par with those of MLK and JFK, as some people do. Nor am I even convinced that Lennon’s outsized role as moral authority and pain in the establishment’s ass was ultimately as effective in his day as is, in our day, Bono’s oft-criticized sleeping-with-the-enemy activism on behalf of the world’s poor. That written, however, I was and am a huge Beatles fan, and I do well remember where I was and how I reacted when (per Lennon’s “A Day in the Life”) I heard the news, oh boy.

In December 1980 I was a 22-year old reporter at The High Point Enterprise, an afternoon daily in North Carolina. The newswires’ accounts of Lennon’s shooting and death popped up on our comically primitive monster-sized computers, simultaneously stunning, saddening and energizing those of us in the newsroom. It energized us because it had happened on “our cycle,” in the lexicon of that time and place. Meaning, it had occurred too late in the day for morning newspapers like the hated (and of course much more successful) Greensboro News & Record to do anything but play mop-up the next day. This scoop would appear first in our paper, when it rolled off the presses before dinnertime.

Never mind that in the blue-collar, insular High Point of 1980, the death of John Lennon was apt to be of less interest to our readers than would any news out of NASCAR. We young reporters—many of us, including me, were barely out of college—were thrilled to envision such a major story running on our front page just hours after the shooting had occurred. It wasn’t merely a big story, but one of national and even international importance. This wasn’t just some pronouncement from city hall or morning wreck on a local stretch of I-85.

The newspaper’s editor at the time—who I won’t name here because he’s retired, infirm, and probably still fancies himself to have had great news judgment—emerged from his office to ask what all the fuss was about. When we told him, he was equally adamant about the story’s importance. Only, he was firmly of the belief that it in no way was front-page stuff.

I can’t remember exactly what he said, but the gist was that, big deal, some aging-hippie musician had died. Too bad he’d gotten shot, but Jesus Christ, hadn’t the Beatles broken up a long time ago? (He may have looked at us for confirmation on that, not being by age or ear a rock ‘n’ roll fan.) “Let’s play this one inside,” he said, meaning let’s publish the Lennon story on an inside page, alongside the jumps from those more-important city hall and I-85-crash stories.

He was the editor, so I’m sure our pleadings were a bit more analytical and less hysterical than this, but in my memory we were all but shouting, “Are you f*cking crazy? What’s ‘news’ to you, you sorry-ass block of dead wood? Maybe if the Percy Faith Orchestra were coming to the High Point Theatre for a show, you’d think that would a front-page story?!”

I seem to remember the city editor was on our side. John Lennon didn’t have any personal meaning for him, either, but his news instincts were good and he didn’t like seeing us kids all riled up. Anyway, the editor ultimately relented, and the Lennon story indeed made the front page of our December 8, 1980 edition, 30 years ago earlier this month. Albeit “below the fold.” Topped by which stories, I’ve no recollection. But I imagine city hall had issued a big press release about trash collection or something that day. We couldn’t very well let Greensboro scoop us on that, even if only in some tiny blurb they’d run on their back page the next morning.

I have two other thoughts about the 30th anniversary of John Lennon’s death. One is kind of bitter, the other more reflective.

The bitter one relates to a column that Tony Norman, a consistently outstanding opinion writer for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, published on December 10 headlined “Lennon’s Legacy Lost Among Gun Passions.” Norman, who’d been a college student when Lennon was murdered, recounted the “visceral disgust at guns”—their easy availability and deadly abuse in America—that had followed both the Lennon shooting and the attempted assassination the following spring of President Reagan. The five-shot, short-barrel .38 that Mark David Chapman had used to kill John Lennon, Norman noted, had been purchased legally, in cash, at a Honolulu gun shop. “On the mainland,” he added, “the borderline psychotic was supplied the hollow-point expanding bullets he would fire into John Lennon’s back by a friend who later became a sheriff’s deputy.”

In those days before what Norman described as “the unbreakable chokehold the NRA now has on the US Congress,” real hope existed that meaningful gun control laws might soon be passed to slow, if not stop, the madness. But now, three decades later, Norman wrote, “Holiday dinners are no longer ruined by arguments about what constitutes sane gun control. These days, we argue about whether citizens have the constitutional right to pack heat at Sunday church services, in national parks and in bars. President Barack Obama doesn’t even mention gun control in passing.”

The reason for that, Norman hadn't needed to mention because it was so obvious, was that the one-time Mister Hope and Change would be politically crucified for doing so, and might hand the presidential 2012 election to the Republicans.

“If John Lennon were alive today,” Norman opined, “he’d write a caustic song about [the NRA’s power]. The world would sing along, only to forget what the song meant by the time it got to the chorus.” Kind of the way those of us who remain interested in global harmony still can only imagine what it would be like were all the people in the world to someday live as one.

Finally, this. One of John Lennon’s most quoted lines, from the song “Beautiful Boy” on his and Yoko Ono’s Double Fantasy LP (released after Lennon’s death), is “Life is what happens while you’re busy making other plans.” It’s not the most profound thought in the world, nor does it even, per a little Internet research I conducted earlier this week, necessarily originate with Lennon. But these are, I think, good words on which to reflect.

We all implicitly know that life is messy, and that if we want to make God or the Universe laugh, we’ll regard it as a chronological series of events and achievements that will and must happen in apple-pie order because we’ve put a lot of thought into it and have carefully placed all our ducks in a row. (Damn, couldn’t I have fit another cliché into that sentence?) But how good are we, really, at dealing the curves we’re thrown? How accepting are we of the unanticipated? How adept are we at truly acknowledging and enjoying the life we’re in, as opposed to the one we may unrealistically envision?

All I’m saying is that these are good questions for any sentient being to contemplate, take to heart and, ideally, seek to meaningfully address. Myself included. As John Lennon would’ve told us as late as early December 1980, we really should try to get the most out of our limited time on this planet, before it’s too late.

Is that a hopeful thought with which to end what’s likely my final pre-Christmas post? I mean it to be. At any rate, here's wishing you the joys of the season.