All we are saying ...

So I was driving around this afternoon, doing nothing as usual and listening to Christmas songs on WLIT. WLIT’s 24-hour Christmas play-list has taken on decidedly more religious tone this year. I get sick of listening to Amy Grant belting “Hark the Herald Angels Sing” and really don’t know why I listen to this 24-hour station of saccharine horseshit every holiday season.

I was wondering why WLIT wasn’t playing John Lennon’s “Happy Christmas (War Is Over)” this year when it suddenly came on the radio. If I recall correctly, seemed like the ‘LITE played Lennon’s 1971 anti-war holiday anthem every three seconds last year, which usually prompted me to call one of my friends on my cell phone and do my famous Yoko Ono imitation – which isn’t hard to do because all you have to do is sing really badly – and belt the chorus “A Velly Melly Cwistmas” on their office voice mail. (If you’re thinking that I have way too much time on my hands, you’re right.)

I pumped up the volume and rolled down the windows and was happily warbling “War is over, if you want it” to other confused drivers. Then suddenly it dawned on me: today is the 25th anniversary of John Lennon’s death.

What an incredible ass-fuck that was 25 years ago. I remember my friend Karol calling me around 10:30 in the evening to tell me that Howard Cosell had just announced during "Monday Night Football" that John Lennon had been shot. I immediately turned on WXRT in Chicago and Johnny Mraz was breaking the terrible news that Lennon had just died. I was 23 years old and devastated. I had just graduated from college and was living at home in a chaotic, highly dysfunctional household with an alcoholic brother and crazy parents, with no job and no real prospects, wishing I was back in Iowa City so I could get drunk and mourn with other like-minded freaks.

My father was enraged when the phone started ringing late at night with friends calling and crying. John Lennon was a huge hero of mine since I was seven and watched the Beatles’ debut on Ed Sullivan along with the rest of the country. My life inextricably changed at that moment and I was never the same. I shared Lennon’s dark humor as a teenager even before I read in the Hunter Davies’ Beatle biography about how Lennon once drew a cartoon of Jesus on the cross with a pair of bedroom slippers sitting at the bottom while in art school. I was like, “Man, this guy is just like me,” as I was starting a Patty Hearst Fan Club for my high school friends, or drawing cartoons of people with really large lips and teeth. When I was in college, I once called the door man at the Dakota in New York who told me that John and Yoko never went out.

The next morning I was angry, and am still angry to this day. I think anyone who gets killed by a gun in this country – Jack and Bobby Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., some poor schmuck just doing his job at 7-Eleven, the students at Columbine, some innocent 9-year-old playing in her front yard on the West Side of Chicago, John Lennon – dies in vain, and will continue to die in vain because this country is just fucking hopeless when it comes to guns or anything else that’s intelligent or makes sense.

We always kill the peacemakers because it seems no one can stand a society that actually puts the interests of people first, before money, oil and corporate conglomerates. Just when things start to get better, something comes along to fuck it up.

“Happy Christmas (War is Over)” is just as relevant today as it was in 1971. Yeah, it’s queer and idealistic, but at least Lennon tried to change hearts and minds, even if it the results were embarrassing. In 2005 they’re still singing “Give Peace A Chance” at anti-war demonstrations and his anti-war songs will continue to outlive us all. I mean, try singing “Silly Love Songs” when you’re shutting down Lake Shore Drive and the police are running toward you in riot gear.

We could sure use John Lennon today. I can just picture him at 65, sitting on a panel on Bill Maher’s “Real Time,” making us wet our pants with hilarious cracks about George Bush and organizing the global village into something livable for us all.

So here’s to John Lennon. Hard to believe it has been 25 years since he’s been gone because it seems like two days. (And sorry about that stupid Broadway musical that Yoko produced about your life.)