John Lennon: Capitalist Hero

Griping into the void. I watched the McCartney documentary, “Man on the Run” about the Wings years. It was good. Wingspan from 2003 was also good as I recall. Prime recommends a Lennon documentary. 

 Can we get a Lennon documentary that isn’t a sycophantic homage to an image these people have created in their minds? And I’m a huge Lennon fan. But he was more than the relatively brief 1971-72 mythical Lennon. He’d agree with me! When I quote from Lennon’s late 70s book, “Skywriting by Word of Mouth,” they can’t handle it. I think he’d hate these docs too. 

The one I’m watching is praising him for his “calculated” statement about Jesus. It was an off-hand remark to a journalist that got blown out of proportion. Looking back, maybe he was glad it came out, but it wasn’t some brilliant remark based on some well-planned strategy as some commentary on America 

Have these people listened to his last 4 studio albums (I’m including Milk & Honey)? If McCartney released those LPs, they’d crucify him for the “domesticity.” 

And I haven’t even touched the fortune John and Yoko made on a cattle-breeding investment and their eventual charge of tax evasion. Good Socialists trying to skirt “paying their fair share!”

You might ask yourself why all the Beatles moved much of their economic empires to the US (hint: it had something to do with English tax rates). They didn’t go live on an Ashram in India. They could live anywhere on the planet, and they chose to either live in or have their business dealings in (or both) in the greatest capitalist nation in history.

In a scene out of Spongebob, the sycophants sit at the bottom of an ocean trench and the phenomenally wealthy Beatles cruise by above  in their world class cars and billionaire mansions. I don’t fault the Beatles for doing what they’ve all done. Smart moves. But to constantly pretend that John Lennon was still the revolutionary he was in 1971 by even 1973 (let alone by 1980) is laughable.

The man who said that if he could vote in 1980 he’d vote for Reagan has been reduced to a caricature that he’d probably despise. I’m sure John stayed on the Left on a lot of issues, but to deify and sanitize a bride period in his life to justify one’s own radical politics is something, in my opinion, John would reject.