Death is the great equalizer. Only the most horrific character is not mourned in some small way. Indeed, this may be bourgeois sentimentalism, but in contemporary society any sense of loss in the face of brutality is truly more radical than the self-righteous detachment of the politics of objectivity. In fact, detachment admits to a compliance with, and affirmation of, that brutality against which another brutality is being waged in the name of peace and freedom. John Lennon has become a victim of that brutality which announces itself in objective newscasts on the one hand, and in the overt pseudo-emotionalism of intervening advertisements on the other. John apparently saw things-as-they-will-always-be all to clearly in the late sixties. “Give peace a chance” itself pays witness to the formidable odds against realization of peace. A symptom of the culture industry, he attempted to turn his master against itself. But selling peace only turned into a repressive desublimation, just as today the selling of war becomes repressive resublimation. Peace cannot be realized in the market place of Ideas. Yet, on the other hand, John found no identification with the orthodox dreams, if even for unconscious reasons. One sentence from many in his music is crucial: “you say that its an institution [the constitution], you better free your mind instead.” The freeing of the individual from instrumentalized rationality was not overcome by the music of John Lennon. Ironically, his last work saw a return to the family and love, the possible haven in a heartless world and that radical moment of resistance, the vindication of the irrational, Eros. John lost his heart tonight, as did much of what survives of humanity.
Written December 8, 1980
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