There is some noise these days about making John Lennon’s iconic song our national anthem. Imagine atheist anarchists succeeding in this effort. For their consideration, not to dishonor the original or ruffle devout Beatles fans (like me), but as a matter of poetic license and creative free speech I offer this unmasked, re-imagined version.
Imagine there’s no meaning
In all we do and say
No one and nothing matters
We’re just matter anyway
Imagine all the people
One big worm buffet
Imagine there’s no morals
Except the ones we choose
No God, no flags or quarrels
All living our own truths
Imagine all the sheeple
Shining all our shoes
You–hoo-oo-oo-oo,
You may say I’m a schemer,
But I’m not the only one
I hope someday you’ll join us
At the top, the Darwin Strong
Imagine no tomorrow
No history we can’t change
No words to upset no one
Might making right thru pain
Imagine there are people
More equal and meant to reign
You–hoo-oo-oo-oo,
You may say I’m a schemer,
But I’m not the only one
I hope someday you’ll join us
At the top, the Darwin Strong
I’m a huge Beatles fan. So, even though I understand why, it pains me that John’s beautiful, haunting anthem, lamenting why we can’t all get along, painting a world with no conflict or unmet need, has become the siren song of the current chaos. A chaos dressed in anarchy, intent on tyranny.
(BTW, I am not lumping in peaceful protestors, airing real grievances, with violent anarchists. The two are vastly different.)
I suppose as a rally cry expressing sincere longing for world peace, sung against a backdrop of burning cities, churches, Bibles, flags and assault, mayhem and murder, Imagine presents slightly less irony than wreaking havoc accompanied by another John Lennon iconic anthem, All You Need Is Love. But not by much.
Maybe irony isn’t the right term. What do you call would-be tyrants torching cities who also want to make John’s calm, dreamy song about world peace our national anthem? Expedient duplicity? Cognitive dissonance? Orwell called it “Doublethink,” the act of simultaneously accepting two mutually contradictory beliefs as correct and acceptable. That sounds more like it. Peace thru Chaos.
I understand why atheist anarchists would lay claim to Imagine. John’s solution was to imagine away the things that divide us most - religion, after-life, ultimate judgment and justice, borders, the haves and the have less, too much zeal for any cause, discontent on any level, fear of the future, no killing and dying for any reason.
In lovely music John cast a vision of everybody “sharing” the planet, “a brotherhood of man,” with no memory of Yesterday (that Beatles classic would not survive). And no thought of tomorrow in John’s “living for today” world. Doesn’t that resemble dementia? Most teenage boys’ myopic mindset? Or just a sincere poetic longing for equality and tranquility - aided by THC? Just imagine it all away. “It’s easy if you try,” John sang.
Turns out it’s not so easy. You gotta break a few eggs, poach or eliminate resistance, if you want to make a utopia.
Imagine this music video: Lawless throngs waging street warfare nationwide accompanied by this re-imagined theme song, painting “Darwin Strong” everywhere, destroying city after city in pursuit of world peace and free stuff. Imagine them unimpeded and, in fact, joined and cheered on by like-minded and cowed mayors, commissioners, professors, “journalists,” some billionaires (for irony), governors, lawmakers (for more irony), super-rich athletes and actors and presidential candidates all sporting SBLMM T-shirts (Some Black Lives Matter More) printed and provided by Planned Parenthood, who has aborted more than 20 MILLION Black lives that didn’t matter - the saddest and darkest irony.
“Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.”
Voltaire
History shows that the Pied Pipers selling utopia in this world always use chaos, carnage, culling the resistance and contorting language and history (looting = reparations; George Washington = white supremist) to create instead, a ruthless dystopia. Invariably, in the new regime the Pied Pipers are in charge and the only ones living large while the masses suffer. This brutal, authoritarian scenario is vilified in countless movies by actors and filmmakers who in real life currently cheerlead anarchy. More irony? Doublethink? Or just plain lunacy.
Rewriting the past (deconstructionism progressive academics call it) is one of the ways anarchists keep an accurate history from being taught to the next generations. They need sheeple, “useful idiots” (a term attributed to a different Lenin, Vladimir) to go along, break windows, burn capitalistic livelihoods, loot other people’s stuff, bash skulls, censor opposing voices, topple history and sing along.
Anarchists and tyrants need an army of souls with historical Alzheimer’s. They need pliable, ignorant mobs eager to please as long as room and board (and other “entitlements,” including free college, healthcare, cell phones and stipends for rioting) are provided and there’s a promise of world peace over the next hill. Or the next. Or maybe in the next generation. And in the meantime - a place in the ruling class for all who break enough eggs.
As a way to make the masses compliant and complicit, in Huxley’s Brave New World, the iron-fisted “World State” required every person to take a drug daily. Huxley called it “soma.” It mellowed and muted the passions. Imagine (combined with whatever John Lennon was smoking) is the musical soma of the current anarchists to unite a wave of sheeple, useful idiots.
For full disclosure, I have a little experience being sheeple. Around 1969 I followed along when a couple of buddies decided we should spray paint peace signs on a John Birch Society billboard in the middle of the night. It made the local paper, which called us “vandals.” I remember enjoying the smug feeling of anonymity reading the article and hearing others talk about it. But the article was right. We were cowardly vandals. And not even useful idiots. We were just idiots.
Apparently, Imagine and THC are not working as well as Huxley’s soma. The current anarchists are not pacified into a calm, non-violent unity to advance the former Beatle’s vision of world peace. Instead, they find plenty “to kill and die for” in pursuit of the world they want, a world of revised history, looted of possessions, commandeered by mob policies, vicious to dissenters and purged of racism, except their own ruthless brand of it. (more Doublethink)
True to the topsy-turvy tactics of anarchists, Karl Marx indicted religion as the opiate, or soma, of the masses. He preached that religion was a false hope that blinded the masses to reality and reason, that it was invented by those wanting to pacify fears and uncertainty by offering other-worldly rewards instead of focusing on the inequities of this life. Stalin took Marx to heart, imagined a country without religion and enforced his vision by the slaughter of millions. Mao and others have done the same.
Marx’s warped view of religion, that it keeps the masses blind and drugged, could not be further from the truth. Again, an honest history shows that true, self-less, life-transforming, compassionate religion, predominantly Christianity, has led the way in addressing the inequities of this world, the hopes of the next and the tyranny of death itself. The vast measure of suffering and institutionalized inequities in the world has been at the hands of malevolent anarchists, dictators and their bully enforcers.
The current anarchists are no exception.
No doubt, as a rebuttal, someone always trots out the abuses of the Christian church in the middle ages, the Crusades, the often brutal subjugation of tribes and territories, the vicious doctrinal purges and infighting. Their point is justified. But only because the accused is the same target - Tyranny. None of that unholy carnage was the result of true, selfless, life-transforming, compassionate religion. It is only more proof that any tyrannical misuse of power and perversion of truth harms people and sabotages the course toward a better world.
Newsflash: The deep root cause of tyranny is not out there in global conflicting philosophies. It’s in the mirror: there is a tyrant, an anarchist in us all, opposed to all authority but our own. In fact, we all start out as little tyrants, toddler emperors. Many just never grow out of it. Some try to take it global.
Case in point: An episode of The Twilight Zone from 1961 is sardonically titled, “It’s a Good Life.” Rod Serling adapted it from a short story by Jerome Bixby from 1953. It centers around Anthony, a six-year-old boy in a small town who has unlimited power. Whatever he thinks, he can make happen. People live in dread of him. No one can cross or oppose him in anything for fear of immediate annihilation and burial in the cornfield. Anthony even turns a man upset with him into a giant Jack-in-the-Box with his head bouncing on a spring.
The boy is the picture of a person in complete and diabolical control. He is the opposite of a selfless, compassionate soul transformed by a love much stronger than hate. He is lethal cancel culture.
Admit it. If you or I had that kind of power right now, like Jim Carey tasted in the movie Bruce Almighty, we might do some good things, but no traffic light would turn red on us and worse, cornfields might be full of those who in our view are part of the problem. Justice in less than divine, or divinely guided hands easily sours into vengeance. Witness the French Revolution and more currently the ongoing brutal murders of white farmers in South Africa.
Anthony is a snapshot of tyranny run amuck, which the world has faced more than once on a large scale - and defeated - at great cost.
Like I said, I’m a big fan of John Lennon’s music. His longing for world peace and brotherhood still resonates around the world for a good reason. Over seven billion people on our planet long for that. But it takes more than imagining to heal and transform a world tearing itself to pieces. It takes more than revolution. It requires redemption.
At great cost, The Prince of Peace, Jesus, came to convict, conquer and transform the tyrant in us all - not by coercion, but through self-sacrifice powered by grace and mercy.
Christ’s love and truth are not Karl Marx’s “opiate of the masses” or Huxley’s “soma” that pacifies souls into being so heavenly minded they are no earthly good. Quite the opposite, the love of Christ and the truth he brings resuscitate the walking dead and are the antidote to the wily and wicked ways of the rebel in us all.
The outcomes of true redemption stand in stark contrast to those of tyrants demanding a bent knee or raised fist. “Compelled by the love of Christ,” as the Apostle Paul put it, Christians have brought more relief to the suffering and more remedy for the ills of this world than any other force in history.
These days there’s a lot of noise being made about kneeling to the anarchists. Many are submitting. Kneeling to tyrants has never turned out well. Not kneeling to them has its hazards, too.
But kneeling to Christ, the bearer of true peace, is the first step in true “wokeness,” healing and freedom – awakening from blindness to our own fractured condition and the immeasurable value and beauty of all lives, healing from the damage and scars of our wounding ways, and freedom from the hate that drives tyranny, racism and many other ills that torment and divide us.
Kneeling to Christ is why a former ruthless captain of a slave ship, John Newton, composed lines in 1772 that are still sung all around the world, “I once was lost but now I’m found / was blind but now I see.”
Maybe John, Paul, George and Ringo were onto something. Maybe what we all need is love.
Want to imagine something truly profound and world-changing? Let’s kneel in awe, humility, repentance and gratitude to Christ, and imagine...
Imagine a revival
Moving across the land
Hard rebel hearts returning
Waking by faith again
Imagine all God’s children
Standing hand in hand
You–hoo-oo-oo-oo,
You may say I’m a believer
But I’m not the only one
I hope someday you’ll join us
As we sing "Thy will be done..."
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