Saturday, October 30, 2010

John Lennon's hymn to original sin


Every once in a while Mark Shea gets something so right that you have to notice. As the person who called this piece to my attention said, "His take on John Lennon is finger-to-the-trigger accurate." Indeed. Mark P. Shea, "Thinking, Not Imagining" (InsideCatholic, October 27, 2010), writes:
Sometime back, I wrote a little piece about John Lennon's hymn to original sin (aka "Imagine"), expressing my bafflement at the fact that people (including Catholics who ought to know better) regard this as a hope-filled anthem of the Coming Great Rosy Dawn and not as what it is: Music to Accompany the Machine Gunning of the Counter-Revolutionaries.
The article is substantial and through-provoking, about those who love this stuff, the kids who came of age in the 60's and are now the majority at the levers of power in Congress. Well ... at least until Nov. 2. But when those who love this stuff are large enough in number to elect Bill and Barack, you know you're in deep dodo. Read it and think.

[Hat tip to J.M.]

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

Die Gedanken sind frei - Dr. Blosser this is Art - freedom of expression - imagine that

Roger said...

The family is the root of society and this generation of idiots who actually believed in the song lyrics, “If you’re not with the one you love, love the one you’re with” helped to destroy the sacredness of marriage and family life. Is it any wonder why our society is so @%#$&* up?

Anonymous said...

I was at a Catholic mass when the priest gave a homily on the holy family and said a family could really mean a lot of things, like a man and his dog. For real!

Pertinacious Papist said...

Anonymous,

Ja, aber einege freie Gedanken sind Mist, und einige Kunst ist auch. Stellen Sie sich vor. (i.e., some "free thought" is crap, and so is some "art." Imagine that.)

JM said...

As a fan reviewer of pop music, I'd agree it is freedom of expression, but art? LOL. About as much so as the Piss Christ piece. Both are propaganda more than art. Lennon--and the Stones, for that matter-- are about as over-rated as they come. And "Imagine" is at the bottom of his canon. It is the musical equiv. of a "COEXIST" bumpersticker. Both are artistic flatlines, but they might make the already converted feel that much more certain. But I forgot, it is the Fundamentalists who live in a little bubble...

Anonymous said...

As you know Dr. Blosser Lennon expressed strong sentiments of your generation - while he was not at all a religious person he certainly was able to express succinctly feelings of quite a few people - even religious ones.
not surprisingly you and Shea are not fans - oh well the world will go on.
As you can imagine personally I view
"Imagine" not as Mist but as an honest artistic expression of a very real sentiment. This is a free society - the large majority in this fine society is just not into the kind of thing that tickles you these days - you are pretty negative these days - as the father of a young daughter you should be more upbeat IMHO. Do you really thing it will make a difference for the creator of the universe if we for example celebrate mass facing this way or the other? Ironically the kind of religious bean counting that you are into these days was well understood and tagged even 2000 years ago. It was pretty annoying back than for Jesus Christ - IMHO it has not aged well. As far as I am concerned it might well be that Mr. Lennon with his in your view naive desire for peace is faring quite well in the eyes of the Lord.

Pertinacious Papist said...

Ha-ha-ha !!!

Grega!! At first I thought to myself, this sounds like Grega, but there aren't enough typos and grammatical infelicities. I kept reading. Why, it's you, Grega!!

Same sappy sentiments about the lovely old 70s. You're as charming as ever, my friend. Ha-ha! Can't believe it's YOU!

So it takes your idol, Lennon's song, Imagine, to pull you back in?? Wow!

I liked the Beatles when they were still young and relatively ideologically innocent, when their songs were about the thrill of holding hands and such. But then things went from bad to worse and John met Yoko and became quite simply obnoxious. I'm very sorry he was assassinated. I'm sorrier still for the shape he must have been in spiritually when he went to his Maker.

But your reasoning hasn't changed much, such as it is. The fact that Lennon, like Obama, could express well the feelings of a vast number of people doesn't make those feelings good or his ideas right. As Chesterton used to say, only a dead fish drifts with the current: a live one can swim upstream against the current.

If nice feelings and good wishes could open the gates of heaven, we would all be in very good shape, including pedophile priests who know all about good feelings. But then what happens to justice?

I know you don't like anything that sounds negative, but then why be so negative toward my sentiments in this post. Isn't that a bit negative? I'm afraid you haven't a clue about my outlook and disposition. To listen to you, I go about my day with my head hung in depression, a scowl on my face, looking rather grim. Ha-ha! You're really funny.

Welcome back, Grega.

Ralph Roister-Doister said...

No one cares about John Lennon any more, except for a handful of forlorn idiots whose minds were destroyed by the Sixties, and those Entertainment Tonight types who make money off of the canonization of trashy celebrity. He was a pretentious fool, typical of his generation, whose life and death were equally meaningless. We spend way too much time and attention on such individuals.