Gimme Some Truth

"Do you hold any grudge against Strom Thurmond and (then U.S. Attorney General) John Mitchell and other people for doing this to you?'

"No, I don't, I mean... time wounds all heels..."

-John Lennon, 1976

I have always been fascinated with the post-Beatles life of John Lennon. At the height of a celebrity unlike the world had seen before, and because of the splintering of our cultural landscape, will never see again; in the dawning of an age when celebrity is valued to a ridiculous degree; Lennon decided to put all that at risk, to use all of his capital to send a simple message across the world: one of peace. The release of The US Versus John Lennon will undoubtedly spawn many words about the greatness of the man, and more about the historical parallels of a man speaking out against an absurd war and suffering the consequences. All of these tributes and discourses are noble and worthy. And I would like to add to this record by saying a few other words.

First, on the film. The difficulty of anything on the subject of Lennon is to find a story to tell that is not redundant. I think I've seen just about every documentary source ever committed to videotape or celluloid about John Lennon, voluminous though they are. And yet the filmmakers managed to find some new ones, at least to me. They provide even more from the Mike Douglas Show interview where he brings Jerry Rubin and Bobby Seale on the show. They provide several pieces of television footage during Lennon's prolonged battle with the INS, the centerpiece of the picture. There's lots of footage from the 12-hour concert for John Sinclair in Ann Arbor, Michigan, which resulted in Sinclair's release on drug charges after 2 1/2 years. And they produce the oft-quoted but little-seen piece of video referred to at the top, Lennon's pithy rebuke to those in the government who tried to silence him. The film also features a familiar but important series of interviews with everyone you would want in telling this story. By focusing on the government's concern with John Lennon, a concern borne out in the movie to be not only real but probably viable considering the power and vitality of his message, the documentary is not just the celebration of a great man's life but a narrative tale with peaks and valleys, an ongoing conflict that pitted the marshaled forces of the federal government against the wiles of an artist with the people on his side. The FBI tapped Lennon's phone, had him followed, spearheaded the efforts to have him deported, and was ultimately in many ways successful in dminishing his impact in the 1972 elections. Lennon came out on top, of course, but the fear he felt from speaking out did in some way work, as he retreated inward to the tropes of love and family. His victory of staying in the country is Pyrrhic and joyful all at once, his life far more complex than you would imagine on the surface. It's almost unbelievable that you could get a new story out of this life, but they did. And they didn't have to use a lot of family consigliere Elliot Mintz to do it, which in my mind is a positive. :)

My favorite sequence, however, even though I've seen it before (in 1988's Imagine) and in a much longer form, is the discussion between Lennon and New York Times reporter Gloria Emerson in 1969, at a studio in London, after John and Yoko's "Bed-In" for peace in Montreal. This interview is actually stripped of the context; at issue was Lennon's return of his Member of the British Empire medal, for the reasons of ''in protest of the Nigeria-Biafra thing, against our support of America in Vietnam, and against 'Cold Turkey' slipping down the charts.''

It's a good thing that it's taken out of the specific context and made to stand in as a metaphor for the central question of this period of Lennon's life. Emerson, a foreign correspondent who actually wrote scores of stories about the incompetence and lunacy of the Vietnam War (here's a tribute), was a woman who obviously believed there was a system in this country within which you needed to work to spread truth and provide Americans with the knowledge they needed to make decisions. This is the journalistic establishment that has been degraded over the years into predictable he-said she-said stories of process and horse race. But Emerson had an upper-crust sensibility of a "right way" and a "wrong way" to put the message across, a holier-than-thou attitude that determined those who pushed the envelope, who discussed REAL change and different modes of thought, were both naive and dangerous, as surely as Richard Nixon considered the same ideas dangerous.

The interview between Lennon and Emerson is intense, with Emerson declaring that Lennon's performance-art stunts add nothing to the marketplace of ideas, that they ought to be looked upon with contempt by sensible people like herself. Lennon asserts the right of the artist to use his own particular expertise, that of art, to bring about social and political change. Real change, not change on the margins, stopping the war and retaining the war machine, for example. I wish I could find the quotes, but Andrew O'Hehir, writing in Salon, gives a pretty good blow-by-blow.

There's none of the starfucking or ego-fellation that today characterizes celebrity interviews. Emerson and Lennon are both angry, and getting angrier. She finds the Lennon-Ono publicity stunts and peacenik ballads naive and simplistic, and she's letting him know that. Eyes boring into her, Lennon says he doesn't care about that, that his only goal is to end the Vietnam War and save lives. "You can't possibly believe that you've saved a single life!" Emerson says in her exaggerated upper-crust drawl. "Dear boy, you're living in a dream world." Lennon flicks her away like an insect, pointing out that "Give Peace a Chance" had become both a pop hit and the unofficial anthem of the antiwar movement.

As for O'Hehir's reaction to the scene, it's important, but I didn't see in in quite the same light:

As most viewers probably will, I instinctively sided with the working-class Liverpudlian rock star against the Upper East Side WASP lady with the ludicrous accent. But the scene stuck with me and wouldn't go away, and eventually I came to grips with it. First I realized that Lennon and Emerson were engaged in an important cultural debate, and neither of them was exactly wrong. Viewed in hindsight, Lennon and Ono's political theater of the early '70s had a Zen-meets-Dada brilliance and clarity that thrilled and engaged an entire generation. It may well have helped shorten the war and save lives. But Emerson isn't entirely the creep she at first seems to be; she saw their work leading toward an intellectual and political cul-de-sac, and she was right.

I don't know that she was entirely right. You can only see Lennon's message of peace and truth as ultimately limited if you cannot imagine the capacity for it to really ignite people's thoughts and awaken them from the intellectual prison to which we confine ourselves, where change is incremental and snail-paced and works like a man taking 20 years to force open a door. Lennon was after a much larger and more direct form of communication, to see that allowing the world the opportunity to think about their own circumstance was a far more revolutionary act than conceived in recent history. To the extent that it failed is dictated in many ways BY Emerson's brand of sense and sensibility, the poverty of imagination that refuses to take a look at why our political structures demand one reality and yet our people so often demand another. John Lennon had the center stage and the intellectual power to make this argument like few others, and he was cowed into silence because the very attempt at making this argument was seen as folly.

I had an amazing conversation this past week with a young man from Missouri, an apprentice to a pastor who wanted to know my thoughts, as someone unconnected to organized religion, on my own sense of purpose. I gave the secular humanist argument which focused the common good, of the social responsibility of every individual on this planet to ensure our own stability and work at whatever level we can to provide everyone with the same opportunity, the same potential for personal happiness, of the power of people to create a lever for change together that we cannot do alone. His reply was a little astonishing. He said that I had a lot more faith in humanity than he did. He said that only his conception of a higher power could save him. I think the same thing that drove this very curious and respectable student to religion drove the very respectable and knowledgeable Gloria Emerson to dismiss John Lennon as naive, and indeed drives the current ideology running our country. They have no belief in humanity. John Lennon and I do. And to fully evolve as human beings we must believe that the essential truth of humanity can be recognized, not by underestimating or being oblivious to the perverted and hate-filled ideologies in competition, but by offering the world something better, something more pure, and to me something more real.

I talk incessantly of politics here, but every so often I have to step outside of it and understand what lies beneath, what's at the heart of this obsession. John Lennon knew exactly what that was, and he had the audacity to say it. He knew that telling the truth was a political act, and he would ultimately be responsible for it. We should all take on that burden, reject the safe and acceptable modes of discourse, not ask for change on the margins but work together with a distinct vision.

So go see the movie and stuff. (steps off of soapbox)