* Man is a product of evolution. When pacifism arises among us, it’s often killed off by non-pacifists. So it doesn’t get passed on much. It’s still very much a man-shoot-man world.
Having read a lot about the Beatles, I know that Lennon was by far the biggest jerk among them. He did not behave like someone who believed in most of the things he wrote about in that song.
* Imagine as an elegy.
An elegy for nations, for peoples, for distinct cultures, for race, for family, for particularism.
It is almost certainly not what the musicians intended.
But it works.
Do we really want to live in a world in which there is “nothing to kill or die for”?
* Lennon was simply expressing a sadness about the state of the human spirit; he wasn’t naively suggesting that all of our troubles could be easily erased. On the contrary. And this idea that “we’ve tried and it hasn’t worked” is complete nonsense. Neoliberal globalization/financialization of the world in which the elite destroy the middle class through policies of war and third-worlding manufacturing is hardly what Lennon was advocating. To put his name on this crap is disgraceful. Lastly, Lennon was the first person to wind up saying that he was very much a work in progress throughout his life and he wasn’t asking people to model their lives on his.
