London Evening Standard, "More Popular Than Jesus" 3/4/1966

Reporter Maureen Cleave, a good friend of John Lennon's, wrote a personality article about him that would be published in the March 4th 1966 edition of the London Evening Standard. Cleave's piece was intended to present a portrait of the behind-the-scenes Lennon, and was entitled 'How Does A Beatle Live? John Lennon Lives Like This.' The article contained a number of Lennon musings, remarks and random thoughts from a recent conversation she had with him at his home in Weybridge, including John's personal view of the current state of religion: "Christianity will go. It will vanish and shrink. I needn't argue about that; I'm right and I will be proved right. We're more popular than Jesus now. I don't know which will go first, rock 'n' roll or Christianity. Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. It's them twisting it that ruins it for me."

A separate article with different content, including portions of the Jesus quote out of context from the original article, was published in the American teen fanzine 'Datebook' just before the Beatles' 1966 American tour.

Word-of-mouth rumors in America about John Lennon's Jesus quote spread quickly among anti-Beatle factions, even further out of context, as the ridiculous egocentric headline: 'John says Beatles are bigger than Jesus.' The outrage and reaction mostly seemed to be coming from the 'bible belt' in America.

John would later remark during a press conference in Chicago on August 12th during the Beatles' 1966 North American tour, "We could've just sort of hidden in England and said, 'We're not going, we're not going!' You know, that occured to me when I heard it all. I couldn't remember saying it. I couldn't remember the article. I was panicking, saying, 'I'm not going at all,' you know. But if they sort of straighten it out, it will be worth it, and good."

Lennon continued, "When it came out in England it was a bit of a blab-mouthed saying anyway... A few people wrote into the papers, and a few wrote back saying, 'So what, he said that. Who is he anyway,' or they said, 'So, he can have his own opinion.' And then it just vanished. It was very small. But... you know, when it gets over here and then it's put into a kid's magazine, and just parts of it or whatever was put in, it just loses its meaning or its context immediately... and everybody starts making their own versions of it." John would be asked many times during the 1966 tour to clarify what he had intended to say. Lennon explained in Chicago: "My views are only from what I've read or observed of christianity and what it was, and what it has been, or what it could be. It just seems to me to be shrinking. I'm not knocking it or saying it's bad. I'm just saying it seems to be shrinking and losing contact."

In some cities, reporters would ask Lennon to explain the Jesus comment repeatedly -- even multple times within a single press conference -- baiting him to become upset or to say something even further inflammatory. Knowing their game, John kept his cool.

The public outcry against Lennon had been coming from a rather small minority of the population, but once the national media fanned the flames as much as they were able, reports of negative public reaction made it appear more widespread than it really was. For the minority of Americans who had been moved from religious outrage to action, the fallout did involve Beatle record burnings arranged by christian radio stations, Ku Klux Klan protests, and anonymous death threats. It also gave the older generation a sense of vindication that the Beatles were somehow bad role models for the youth of America.

With some hindsight perspective, John clarified the remark perhaps best during his December 1966 Look magazine interview: "I said we were more popular than Jesus, which is a fact. I believe Jesus was right, Buddha was right, and all of those people like that are right. They're all saying the same thing, and I believe it. I believe what Jesus actually said -- the basic things he laid down about love and goodness -- and not what people say he said."

John's then-wife Cynthia would state years later in her 1978 book, A Twist Of Lennon: "His views were totally misconstrued. John was very bewildered and frightened by the reaction that his words created in the States. Beatle albums were burnt in a mass orgy of self-righteous indignation. Letters arrived at the house full of threats, hate and venom."

The original London Evening Standard article is presented below in its entirety, featuring the quote in its original context.

The photographer for the article was Graeme Robertson.

                                          - Jay Spangler, www.beatlesinterviews.org

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Article Copyright © 1966 London Evening Standard

HOW DOES A BEATLE LIVE?
JOHN LENNON LIVES LIKE THIS
by Maureen Cleave

On a hill in Surrey... a young man famous, loaded and waiting for something

It was this time three years ago that The Beatles first grew famous. Ever since then, observers have anxiously tried to gauge whether their fame was on the wax or on the wane; they foretold the fall of the old Beatles, they searched diligently for the new Beatles (which was as pointless as looking for the new Big Ben).

At last they have given up; The Beatles' fame is beyond question. It has nothing to do with whether they are rude or polite, married or unmarried, 25 or 45; whether they appear on Top of the Pops or do not appear on Top of the Pops. They are well above any position even a Rolling Stone might jostle for. They are famous in the way the Queen is famous. When John Lennon's Rolls-Royce, with its black wheels and its black windows, goes past, people say: 'It's the Queen,' or 'It's The Beatles.' With her they share the security of a stable life at the top. They all tick over in the public esteem-she in Buckingham Palace, they in the Weybridge-Esher area. Only Paul remains in London.

The Weybridge community consists of the three married Beatles; they live there among the wooded hills and the stockbrokers. They have not worked since Christmas and their existence is secluded and curiously timeless. "What day is it?" John Lennon asks with interest when you ring up with news from outside. The fans are still at the gates but The Beatles see only each other. They are better friends than ever before.

Ringo and his wife, Maureen, may drop in on John and Cyn; John may drop in on Ringo; George and Pattie may drop in on John and Cyn and they might all go round to Ringo's, by car of course. Outdoors is for holidays.

They watch films, they play rowdy games of Buccaneer; they watch television till it goes off, often playing records at the same time. They while away the small hours of the morning making mad tapes. Bedtimes and mealtimes have no meaning as such. "We've never had time before to do anything but just be Beatles," John Lennon said.

He is much the same as he was before. He still peers down his nose, arrogant as an eagle, although contact lenses have righted the short sight that originally caused the expression. He looks more like Henry VIII than ever now that his face has filled out-he is just as imperious, just as unpredictable, indolent, disorganised, childish, vague, charming and quick-witted. He is still easy-going, still tough as hell. "You never asked after Fred Lennon," he said, disappointed. (Fred is his father; he emerged after they got famous.) "He was here a few weeks ago. It was only the second time in my life I'd seen him -- I showed him the door." He went on cheerfully: "I wasn't having him in the house."

His enthusiasm is undiminished and he insists on its being shared. George has put him on to this Indian music. "You're not listening, are you?" he shouts after 20 minutes of the record. "It's amazing this -- so cool. Don't the Indians appear cool to you? Are you listening? This music is thousands of years old; it makes me laugh, the British going over there and telling them what to do. Quite amazing." And he switched on the television set.

Experience has sown few seeds of doubt in him: not that his mind is closed, but it's closed round whatever he believes at the time. "Christianity will go," he said. "It will vanish and shrink. I needn't argue about that; I'm right and I will be proved right. We're more popular than Jesus now; I don't know which will go first -- rock 'n' roll or Christianity. Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. It's them twisting it that ruins it for me." He is reading extensively about religion.

He shops in lightning swoops on Asprey's these days and there is some fine wine in his cellar, but he is still quite unselfconscious. He is far too lazy to keep up appearances, even if he had worked out what the appearances should be-which he has not.

He is now 25. He lives in a large, heavily panelled, heavily carpeted, mock Tudor house set on a hill with his wife Cynthia and his son Julian. There is a cat called after his aunt Mimi, and a purple dining room. Julian is three; he may be sent to the Lycde in London. "Seems the only place for him in his position," said his father, surveying him dispassionately. "I feel sorry for him, though. I couldn't stand ugly people even when I was five. Lots of the ugly ones are foreign, aren't they?"

We did a speedy tour of the house, Julian panting along behind, clutching a large porcelain Siamese cat. John swept past the objects in which he had lost interest: "That's Sidney" (a suit of armour); "That's a hobby I had for a week" (a room full of model racing cars); "Cyn won't let me get rid of that" (a fruit machine). In the sitting room are eight little green boxes with winking red lights; he bought them as Christmas presents but never got round to giving them away. They wink for a year; one imagines him sitting there till next Christmas, surrounded by the little winking boxes.

He paused over objects he still fancies; a huge altar crucifix of a Roman Catholic nature with IHS on it; a pair of crutches, a present from George; an enormous Bible he bought in Chester; his gorilla suit.

"I thought I might need a gorilla suit," he said; he seemed sad about it. "I've only worn it twice. I thought I might pop it on in the summer and drive round in the Ferrari. We were all going to get them and drive round in them but I was the only one who did. I've been thinking about it and if I didn't wear the head it would make an amazing fur coat-with legs, you see. I would like a fur coat but I've never run into any."

One feels that his possessions -- to which he adds daily-have got the upper hand; all the tape recorders, the five television sets, the cars, the telephones of which he knows not a single number. The moment he approaches a switch it fuses; six of the winking boxes, guaranteed to last till next Christmas, have gone funny already. His cars-the Rolls, the Mini-Cooper (black wheels, black windows), the Ferrari (being painted black) -- puzzle him. 

Then there's the swimming pool, the trees sloping away beneath it. "Nothing like what I ordered," he said resignedly. He wanted the bottom to be a mirror. "It's an amazing household," he said. "None of my gadgets really work except the gorilla suit -- that's the only suit that fits me."

He is very keen on books, will always ask what is good to read. He buys quantities of books and these are kept tidily in a special room. He has Swift, Tennyson, Huxley, Orwell, costly leather-bound editions of Tolstoy, Oscar Wilde. Then there's Little Women, all the William books from his childhood; and some unexpected volumes such as Forty-One Years In India, by Field Marshal Lord Roberts, and Curiosities of Natural History, by Francis T. Buckland. This last-with its chapter headings 'Ear-less Cats', 'Wooden-Legged People,' 'The Immortal Harvey's Mother' is right up his street.

He approaches reading with a lively interest untempered by too much formal education. "I've read millions of books," he said, "that's why I seem to know things." He is obsessed by Celts. "I have decided I am a Celt," he said. "I am on Boadicea's side -- all those bloody blue-eyed blondes chopping people up. I have an awful feeling wishing I was there -- not there with scabs and sores but there through reading about it. The books don't give you more than a paragraph about how they lived; I have to imagine that."

He can sleep almost indefinitely, is probably the laziest person in England. "Physically lazy," he said. "I don't mind writing or reading or watching or speaking, but sex is the only physical thing I can be bothered with any more." Occasionally he is driven to London in the Rolls by an ex-Welsh guardsman called Anthony; Anthony has a moustache that intrigues him.

The day I visited him he had been invited to lunch in London, about which he was rather excited. "Do you know how long lunch lasts?" he asked. "I've never been to lunch before. I went to a Lyons the other day and had egg and chips and a cup of tea. The waiters kept looking and saying: 'No, it isn't him, it can't be him'."

He settled himself into the car and demonstrated the television, the folding bed, the refrigerator, the writing desk, the telephone. He has spent many fruitless hours on that telephone. "I only once got through to a person," he said, "and they were out."

Anthony had spent the weekend in Wales. John asked if they'd kept a welcome for him in the hillside and Anthony said they had. They discussed the possibility of an extension for the telephone. We had to call at the doctor's because John had a bit of sea urchin in his toe. "Don't want to be like Dorothy Dandridge," he said, "dying of a splinter 50 years later." He added reassuringly that he had washed the foot in question.

We bowled along in a costly fashion through the countryside. "Famous and loaded" is how he describes himself now. "They keep telling me I'm all right for money but then I think I may have spent it all by the time I'm 40 so I keep going. That's why I started selling my cars; then I changed my mind and got them all back and a new one too.

"I want the money just to be rich. The only other way of getting it is to be born rich. If you have money, that's power without having to be powerful. I often think that it's all a big conspiracy, that the winners are the Government and people like us who've got the money. That joke about keeping the workers ignorant is still true; that's what they said about the Tories and the landowners and that; then Labour were meant to educate the workers but they don't seem to be doing that any more."

He has a morbid horror of stupid people: "Famous and loaded as I am, I still have to meet soft people. It often comes into my mind that I'm not really rich. There are really rich people but I don't know where they are."

He finds being famous quite easy, confirming one's suspicion that The Beatles had been leading up to this all their lives. "Everybody thinks they would have been famous if only they'd had the Latin and that. So when it happens it comes naturally. You remember your old grannie saying soft things like: 'You'll make it with that voice.'" Not, he added, that he had any old grannies.

He got to the doctor 2 3/4 hours early and to lunch on time but in the wrong place. He bought a giant compendium of games from Asprey's but having opened it he could not, of course, shut it again. He wondered what else he should buy. He went to Brian Epstein's office. "Any presents?" he asked eagerly; he observed that there was nothing like getting things free. He tried on the attractive Miss Hanson's spectacles.

The rumour came through that a Beatle had been sighted walking down Oxford Street! He brightened. "One of the others must be out," he said, as though speaking of an escaped bear. "We only let them out one at a time," said the attractive Miss Hanson firmly.

He said that to live and have a laugh were the things to do; but was that enough for the restless spirit?

"Weybridge," he said, "won't do at all. I'm just stopping at it, like a bus stop. Bankers and stockbrokers live there; they can add figures and Weybridge is what they live in and they think it's the end, they really do. I think of it every day -- me in my Hansel and Gretel house. I'll take my time; I'll get my real house when I know what I want."

"You see, there's something else I'm going to do, something I must do -- only I don't know what it is. That's why I go round painting and taping and drawing and writing and that, because it may be one of them. All I know is, this isn't it for me."

Anthony got him and the compendium into the car and drove him home with the television flickering in the soothing darkness while the Londoners outside rushed home from work.

'Imagine' by John Lennon

Many members of the World Socialist Movement have considered John Lennon's song Imagine an anthem of universal hope. In few other songs, and perhaps in no song that reached as wide an audience as that one, is the socialist vision so accurately and movingly conveyed. It was originally featured on the 1971 album "Imagine," and made the top of the charts in England no less than 3 times (its first release as a single, 1975; in 1981 following Lennon's death in 1980 (when it shot up to number 1 for several weeks); and again during the Christmas season in 1999, after it had been voted the nation's favorite song lyric and second favorite all-time song in a large best-music-of-the-millennium poll.

Imagine is a humanistic song par excellence, denying humans the place they often accord themselves in the spiritual universe, and instead relegating them to their material and exquisitely beautiful home of Earth. This Lennon does to urge his fellow men and women to unite in creating a world fit to live upon, one without countries, war, religion, or private property. Sharing this world together as a true "brotherhood of man," some in the World Socialist Movement have wondered if he wrote this song after reading a copy of the Socialist Standard, which is not impossible considering his extensive reading of radical journals following the demise of the Beatles, although it is not known if he actually read the Standard, a journal that has also been advocating a nationless, classless, moneyless society of common ownership since 1904.

The Beatles, a band he not only founded (along with Paul McCartney) but also named, was a group whose fame and meaning he often felt uncomfortable about. It was after all Lennon who also brought the Beatles to a close by telling the other members he was planning to leave, prior to the release of his "Instant Karma" single.

The story of John Lennon is one much closer in spirit to what would be termed punk rock than to traditional pop. First of all, the way John Lennon and thousands of other youth embraced skiffle in England, is reminiscent of the way punk bands exploded in the 1970s often similarly without knowing how to play an instrument! Secondly, John Lennon's famous antics on the stage while the Beatles played in Germany included mocking the Nazis' salute and wearing a toilet seat around his neck. Such attempts to shock are often associated with the later punk era. Indeed, one of John Lennon's youthful pranks had been to urinate from the rooftop of a Liverpool church upon nuns passing below. Thirdly, the early Beatles' scruffy Teddy Boy leather and T-shirt look was also much closer to the attire of the rebellious and radical punk musicians of the 1970s than their later cleaner moptop image dressed in capitalist business attire.

John Lennon's anger and sense of the absurd was of course expressed in his acerbic lyrics. Interestingly, his later political self only appears as a logical extension of his former pre-Beatles and early Beatles self if we do not consider his brief 9 years as a famous Beatle. It is true that traces of his rebelliousness were often found in his Beatles interviews, and his statement that the Beatles had become more famous than Christ was a rare albeit unwitting use of his fame to upset the status quo that would probably not be rivaled until the Sex Pistols starting swearing on British national television a dozen years later.

One could argue, then, rather successfully, that John Lennon's Beatles spell, while it of course contributed enormously in melody and marketing to pop music in the 20th Century, was a sort of "selling out" and a turning away from his enormously creative potential and in particular from his genuine, political and critical nature. Beatles fans might take exception to that statement. But imagine if a contemporary grunge band like Nirvana of the 1990s for example had abandoned their aggressive look and musical style in favor of suits and short hair and singing pretty love songs guaranteed to win them a larger if not international audience, as well as to earn them favor with the royal family, in short, a similar "cuddly" look as the Beatles opted for in 1962?

The first time you hear John Lennon on a Beatles album ("Please Please Me," their first) in 1963 is interestingly titled "Misery," and begins "The world is treating me bad." Indeed, Lennon often threw these little lyrical bombs from his true self into otherwise pop-perfect gems that echoed the musical sensibilities of American pop (Beach Boys, Buddy Holly, Motown). Perhaps Lennon enjoyed using his songs, as he had the world around him, as an opportunity to put a foot in, or, as a title of a book he was to write a few years later suggests, a spanner in the works (in a pun that ended up actually being "Spaniard In The Works").

Those lyrical contributions contrasted sharply with the oftentimes drippier McCartney lyrics, in which love songs (as the Beatles mostly sung) were more banal expositions of the heart. While all Beatles songs were attributed to the Lennon-McCartney partnership, such a thesis is supported by how after the Beatles split, the Lennon songs immediately (beginning that very year of 1970) began exploring profoundly political, psychological and existential themes, while McCartney's solo work has mainly continued to delve into the nostalgic and romantic, and is for the most part either far less interesting to analyze and far too boring to listen to, with the possible exceptions of such few lone political statements as "Give Ireland Back To The Irish." On the LP "Please Please Me," "Misery" contrasted with "Love Me Do" and "P.S. I Love You" on the very same album. Even on the more traditional love song, "Ask Me Why," Lennon sings: "If I cry, it's not because I'm sad, but you're the only love I've ever had. I can't believe it's happened to me, I can't conceive of any more misery." Thus even on that song in which the object of his affection has been won over, Lennon sings from his dark side as the Everyman who is amazed that he found love, or is himself loved, while an uncertain cloud of doubt and pain hangs over the lover.

The common perception that Lennon sang the more biting lyrics is generally borne out by analyzing them, and since it is apparently true that McCartney and Lennon each tended to sing the songs they contributed to the most as writers, one can only assume that Lennon's struggling spirit was largely responsible for investing that struggle and discomfort more profusely into his own lyrical creations, and hence into the Beatles repertoire itself.

The songs Lennon crafted for "With The Beatles" (1963) were all love songs, and this was generally true on all the early LPs. In the 1964 album "Hard Days Night," (hands down the classic early Beatles album) John states in the title song that he has been "working like a dog," an all too brief reference in a Beatles song to our working lives, although in this song the woman's love makes him "feel okay." In the song "Help!" from the 1965 album of the same name, John appears to be describing his own pain in the Beatles, with his independence lost and his insecurity mounting, and his need for someone to soothe him and point him in a different direction (interestingly, as Yoko Ono was apparently to have precisely that positive effect he was seeking in a relationship).

"Nowhere Man" on "Rubber Soul" (1965) is similarly a song about alienation, although it does not place it in the world of work or power, yet admonishes those who allow themselves to be so invisible for losing themselves thus and for their passivity, and urges them (and indeed all of us, "isn't he a lot like you and me?") to take more control of the world around them. In "I'm Only Sleeping" from "Revolver" (1966), Lennon again discusses our rushed lives and his unashamed laziness (and socialists do promote the "right to be lazy," in contradistinction with the capitalist "right to work"). On the albums "Sgt. Pepper" and "Magical Mystery Tour" (both 1967), John Lennon's lyrics began to turn increasingly surreal ("I Am The Walrus"), as they are influenced by drugs, Eastern culture, and an obvious personal liberation reflected in the liberation of his artistic expression. "Revolution" on the "White Album" (1968) is the first overtly political Lennon song, often misunderstood as being either apolitical or conservative, but rather a critique of the especially Maoist and other fringe leftist groups of his time who advocated a revolution that only "talks about destruction." Successful revolution, after all, is not only about destroying an old order, but also about building a new one.

Already, Yoko Ono's influence is felt in his music and in his actions. While Yoko Ono is often portrayed as a negative influence upon his life, a study of that period would seem to suggest the opposite, that indeed she provided the intellectual, political and aesthetic influence and permission he needed to flower to the fullness of his creative potential. After he met her, his songs began to really take on the inner world of his painful feelings that he endured as a child who lost his mother, and as a genius perhaps hampered by the Beatles, and the outer world we must all endure. Indeed, even while the Beatles were still together, he had released with Yoko Ono three experimental albums (the two "Unfinished Music" albums, and the "Wedding Album," all from 1968 and 1969).

As soon as the Beatles were history, John Lennon began to make history with his painfully honest and political songs. The 1970 "John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band" album was a case in point. Besides the two songs exploring the loss of his mother, and one of the two most beautiful melodies to be found on any Beatles or non-Beatles record, "Love" (the other was "Oh My Love" on "Imagine"), this album began to explore humanistic and political themes big time. Lennon's understanding that he dwells in a godless universe is revealed in different places. For example, in "I Found Out," he stated: "There ain't no Jesus gonna come from the sky," and in the song "God" he goes one further: "God is a concept by which we measure our pain," a Feuerbachian and Marxian rooting of God in human psychology and material culture. The song "Working Class Hero" is a classic exposition of the humiliation of being a worker in such settings as home, school, and work. John Lennon, though himself a millionaire many times over, has nonetheless here identified with the plight of working masses and himself arrived at full class consciousness when he sings that: "There's room at the top they are telling you still, but first you must learn how to smile as you kill, if you want to be like the folks on the hill."

It was the "Imagine" album from 1971 that contained the title song, selected by Citizens of the World as its official anthem. Other political songs of note were "I Don't Want To Be A Soldier" ("I don't wanna die"), and "Give Me Some Truth" ("I've had enough of reading things by neurotic, psychotic, pig-headed politicians, all I want is the truth now").

John Lennon's most overtly political album was side one of the 1972 "Some Time In New York City" (side two was extracts from a concert with Frank Zappa). On this album, John penned the famous feminist statement "Woman Is The Nigger Of The World" ("We make her bear and raise our children, and then we leave her flat for being a fat old mother hen. We tell her home is the only place she should be, then we complain that she's too unworldly to be our friend"). Lennon asks us to "think about it, do something about it." The next song "Sisters O Sisters" by Yoko Ono is another feminist song calling on her human sisters to build a new world because "we lost our green land, we lost our clean air." Song three, "Attica State," is an anti-prison, pro-freedom song urging us to "free the prisoners, jail the judges, free all prisoners everywhere, all they want is truth and justice, all they need is love and care." "Sunday Bloody Sunday" and "The Luck Of The Irish" deride British rule ("You should have the luck of the Irish, and you'd wish you was English instead!"). Finally, John and Yoko both contributed songs about prisoners John Sinclair (sentenced to 10 years for selling marijuana to an undercover police officer) and Angela Davis, black activist. This was not a musically strong album for the man who had once penned the melody of "Strawberry Fields Forever," but it allowed Lennon to devote an album to the news of the day.

Speculations have abounded as to why John Lennon was assassinated. Klint Finley (as reported on the website www.technocult.net in February 2002) quoted Lennon's son Sean as stating: "Anybody who thinks that Mark Chapman was just some crazy guy who killed my dad for his personal interests, is insane. Or very naive. Or hasn't thought about it clearly. It was in the best interests of the United States to have my dad killed. Definitely." Several conspiracy as well as "lone nut" theories are advanced. The conspiracy theories advance the hypotheses that John Lennon was viewed as a national security threat on several occasions, for Nixon and later for the new president Reagan. Several documented FBI instances of surveillance of John Lennon and trumped up arrests in the 1970s are used to back up the theory. It is of course true that John Lennon was a major national figure who was involved publically in diverse radical political causes, including supporting the IRA, a Trotskyist group, and the causes of various prisoners, at different times. There is also considerable support for the "lone nut" theory as Mark Chapman had been receiving treatment for paranoid schizophrenia for his entire life since childhood, as well as had entertained numerous delusions about John Lennon and Todd Rundgren as well.

So what if Mark Chapman had not actually been a "Manchurian Candidate" for a secret group of governmental officials? The greater likelihood is that John Lennon and the other Beatles came on the heels of the post-war and Cold War spectacle begun by Kennedy of Camelot, in which Americans stood unified behind a President mystically and mythically conceived as from the ranks, facing the glorious future he promised rife with social programs. The Beatles arrived as the nation was mourning the loss of more than a man but of his and now their dreams, and indeed one might say helped to soothe their loss, divert from them as only the power of the Spectacle can.

Following Kennedy's assassination, it was John Lennon in particular who stood as the most visible and most vocal opponent of this unified land. He had been the archangel of the new society and now had become the archenemy, whose records were being burned by Christians for his statement about Christ and later who supported the various forces of opposition and apparent destruction. For a young man (Chapman) already suffering from paranoid delusions, John Lennon may have presented himself as the obvious symbol of the historical split within his world, and of course it may be that all paranoid delusions represent projections of the split within the sufferer's mind, projections of anger about vulnerability that is externalized upon evil others, and so kept from personal accountability.

There is truth in all paranoid delusions. For example, John Lennon was in fact both the prime creator of pop music and its greatest critic. He elevated it to dimensions that even dwarfed Elvis and helped to tear it apart. He became a public figure with whom millions identified, yet he also alienated millions. He turned the rock star into a figure that expressed the words and feelings of a generation and so became at once its figurehead and target, its liberator and its curse. Once he had entered into the homes of a hundred million young people, as the very symbol of the spectacle of the new media, he also dragged in with him in the parents' heretofore safe houses the generation gap, the antiwar movement, and the "communist menace." John Lennon embodied more than anybody the very dialectic of the 1960s—the tension between liberalism and freedom to exploit on the one hand, and anti-capitalism and freedom from exploitation on the other, between America's pleasure principle (exemplified by the Beatles) and its reality principle (the world of false information, impossible wealth, and even more impossible power), between music as entertainment and music as the chorus for the revolution.

It is surely no coincidence that at the advent of the Reagan era, that was perhaps more than any other to silence its massacres abroad and its perceived aesthetic and political excesses at home, liberties were to be taken with the hand that had helped to send its house of cards tumbling down. It often takes the mad to see the madness around them with acute hypervigilance. Yes, Mark Chapman was most probably mad, but his assassination of John Lennon expressed unwittingly a social wish for the assassination of others like Lennon (some successful, others only in fantasy). It is therefore easy to fall prey to a (often false) conspiracy theory these days, as the ruling class conspires daily to protect its domain, and the working class does not yet conspire in numbers greater than a few thousands here and there to undermine it. John Lennon was the perfect target, in many ways, even if his murder was not a concerted effort by the powers to be to be rid of him.

What he left behind was the utopian imagination we all share that still exists in a million brains refusing to be silenced.

"Imagine," the song, was unquestionably Lennon's finest moment. Its lyrical and conceptual clarity shone sunlight of vision upon our dark and violent world. It urged us to imagine a world without property, without religion, without nations, living in peace. It postulated an economic order in which both greed and hunger would be impossible. Socialists also share this vision. They support the cause that approaches humanity towards the goal of a classless economic order in which wage labor, money and buying and selling have been replaced by free people working together to meet their needs without the constraints imposed by the market system, in short a world of peace, equality, abundance and ecological sustainability. You may think that we are dreamers, but we are not the only ones. I hope some day you'll join us. And the world will live as one.