December 4, 2008
"We're no better than anyone else. Nobody is. Everyone is the same inside. You need the desire and right circumstances, but it's nothing to do with talent, or with training or education." John Lennon, THE BEATLES by Hunter Davies
I came across this quote while browsing in a bookstore. On Thanksgiving morning I sped through as many Lennon interviews as I could google to find it again. An effort almost divinely calculated to scatter the low clouds of envy during this bare, ruined season. Lennon's rants, put downs, contradictions, meanness, betrayal, and egotism as displayed in interviews from Playboy to Rolling Stone to England's small culture and sex-personal-ad rags of the 60s and 70s produced an image of a man to be pitied.
But sitting at this iBook in a cold flat on Thanksgiving, the sour and cumulative impression was mostly of a man ungrateful for his talent and energy and friends. The cascade of false modesity, tinny philosophizing, insecurity, and denial of gifts explained in part why Lennon had, by 1970, his best work in racks marked "Beatles". Whatever artistic judgements he once had, his last album had the slick, sticky shine of late 70s and early 80s lip gloss smeared over too much of the music product of the time. George Martin and Chris Thomas were no longer there to restrain indulgence and repetition or flesh out songs with professional and inspired musicality.
I also came across a Christianity Today article from a few years ago that told the story of Lennon's brief infatuation with Christianity -- unfortunately channeled through one Oral Roberts to whom my mother sent more than one money order equivalent of a bag of groceries. Lennon had the money to indulge himself -- unlike my desperately unhappy mother -- and possibly missed the opportunity for true religion if he had bothered to read some of England's own best apologists. Lewis, Chesterton, Newman. While Lennon corresponded with Mr. Roberts, Yoko flew to Peru and paid a "witch" 60 thousand dollars of Beatle money to bestow on the self-appointed "artist" great "powers."
Lennon's life had smashed up into farce.
I hope he was happy just before he was looned into a place sure to be more generous and forgiving than his wife.
If he had stayed the course, applied the energy of ambition to the desire for grace, it might have been different.
Many may disagree, but only God inspires gratitude. You shouldn't have to be a pioneer or colonizer; visa holder or immigrant to appreciate the inevitability and uniqueness of Thanksgiving in an America founded by the devout. Canada followed suit, but today is too demoralized, too uncomfortable in its blessings to be grateful. Around the world, five million Americans -- students, business persons, missionaries, soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines -- celebrate Thanksgiving. An exhausted Britain left behind the Oxford University Press and, paradoxically, the least snobbish language in history. Perhaps Thanksgiving will be our global legacy when America has moved on.
Sam Macomb
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