David Rothkopf: Just imagine what John Lennon would say about the Afghan war
[David Rothkopf is a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and President and CEO of Garten Rothkopf.]
I woke up bleary and disoriented on the morning of December 9, 1980. I was at my girlfriend's apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. It was, like most pre-War Manhattan apartment buildings -- especially those in which students could afford to live -- drafty despite the clattering radiator and pipes that seemed to give the building a life all its own.
The radio spluttered out static and then the report from the night before that John Lennon had been gunned down in the street fifty blocks, about two and a half miles, from where we had been sleeping. Alison was in the bathroom and I called out to her to share the news and for a while we sat on the bed listening and trying to soak it in.
It was one of those news reports that hits you squarely in the equilibrium. In my life, there have been about half a dozen such events, stories that resonated for reasons often involving much more than the circumstances being reported. They tied together years and core thematic threads into emotional knots by which we, like the Fates, marked the passage of our lives. For me, the first was the Cuban Missile Crisis when I was six. The next was the JFK assassination. Then the assassinations of '68, Woodstock, and the moon landing of 1969, all in one great chain of events. Then the Lennon shooting, the Challenger explosion, the fall of the USSR and 9/11. I am sure the list is different for others who have lived through it all, but I suspect there is considerable overlap.
It is strange to me that the death of an entertainer, a singer-songwriter, might rank up there with those other developments that seem on the face of them to have so much more historical heft. But, of course, Lennon represented the spirit of a period of great revolution and change perhaps more than any other figure, certainly up there with Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy and -- from a different arena but atop the list all the same-- Muhammad Ali.
Of all these figures, three of whom died violently, Lennon was the poet, the one who distilled and expressed the aspirations of the period. He did it with plenty of innocence and some naiveté but also with a sardonic edge that forgave and qualified much that might otherwise have been a trifle too wide-eyed to seem tied to reality. (And in so doing he also made the career of Paul McCartney.)
And so his memory lingers and anniversaries of his death, like today, resonate. And they cause us to think back and wonder: what would John Lennon make of today's world? What would his voice be saying about today's issues?..
Read entire article at Foreign Policy
I woke up bleary and disoriented on the morning of December 9, 1980. I was at my girlfriend's apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. It was, like most pre-War Manhattan apartment buildings -- especially those in which students could afford to live -- drafty despite the clattering radiator and pipes that seemed to give the building a life all its own.
The radio spluttered out static and then the report from the night before that John Lennon had been gunned down in the street fifty blocks, about two and a half miles, from where we had been sleeping. Alison was in the bathroom and I called out to her to share the news and for a while we sat on the bed listening and trying to soak it in.
It was one of those news reports that hits you squarely in the equilibrium. In my life, there have been about half a dozen such events, stories that resonated for reasons often involving much more than the circumstances being reported. They tied together years and core thematic threads into emotional knots by which we, like the Fates, marked the passage of our lives. For me, the first was the Cuban Missile Crisis when I was six. The next was the JFK assassination. Then the assassinations of '68, Woodstock, and the moon landing of 1969, all in one great chain of events. Then the Lennon shooting, the Challenger explosion, the fall of the USSR and 9/11. I am sure the list is different for others who have lived through it all, but I suspect there is considerable overlap.
It is strange to me that the death of an entertainer, a singer-songwriter, might rank up there with those other developments that seem on the face of them to have so much more historical heft. But, of course, Lennon represented the spirit of a period of great revolution and change perhaps more than any other figure, certainly up there with Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy and -- from a different arena but atop the list all the same-- Muhammad Ali.
Of all these figures, three of whom died violently, Lennon was the poet, the one who distilled and expressed the aspirations of the period. He did it with plenty of innocence and some naiveté but also with a sardonic edge that forgave and qualified much that might otherwise have been a trifle too wide-eyed to seem tied to reality. (And in so doing he also made the career of Paul McCartney.)
And so his memory lingers and anniversaries of his death, like today, resonate. And they cause us to think back and wonder: what would John Lennon make of today's world? What would his voice be saying about today's issues?..