Was the defining message of the era just stupid?

Lennon turned his doodle into one of the crown jewels of the Beatles’ entire repertoire, one that stands as a defining message of the era: “All You Need Is Love.”

Fifty years ago today apparently.

It was very much the defining message of the era. It hardly originated with John Lennon though. A year before the song was written a now-deservedly-forgotten writer named Jospeh Fletcher published a book called Situation Ethics whose message was all you need is love to make moral decisions. Fletcher was one of the lesser products of a school of Protestant theology that placed a lot of emphasis on the notion that "God is love".

The message travelled from liberal Protestant theology into the general culture of the time and then was reflected back at people in lyrics that, even by John Lennon standards, are a banal series of non sequiturs. And people ate it up so we can hardly blame John Lennon. The culture was awash in this trite optimism.

My mother told me that she and my father got all of their children out of bed to watch the television broadcast when the song was unveiled. She believed it was an historic occasion. The writers at the Los Angeles Times still do.

In the end it amounted to ...

This bird has flown

We had a very pleasant time here last night. It was our end-of-summer street party. All five blocks of the street were closed off and parties of various types were happening. At the far end they had a sit down dinner right down the middle of the street. The folks in the middle had a stand up wine and food meal in which people stood around and discussed golf and politics.

Our end of the street was where the wildest party took place. At one point, musical instruments came out and a group of maybe twelve us were singing and playing. Singing and playing songs that everyone knew. These days that means either Christmas songs or baby boomer songs. So we sang baby boomer songs.

One of the songs we sang was Norwegian Wood. In the quiet between songs after that one was over I asked the guy who started it, "How do you feel about that one morally?" He and three others closest to me, just looked at me. They couldn't figure out the point of the question. I went on, "Well, the guy doesn't get anywhere with this girl so he torches her place."

The reaction was beautiful. The looks on their faces as it dawned on them that that was indeed what the song described was priceless. It had apparently never occurred to any of them to wonder what the lyrics meant.

Which ought to give us pause as one of the things John Lennon fans say the really like about the guy are his lyrics.

Anyway, there was a weird sort of scramble as it suddenly hit these guys that the song they loved was really about an arrogant pop star fantasizing about violence against women because a woman he met didn't put out. A thought that ought to disturb us all the more when we consider that there is reason to at least worry that Lennon had a  history of violence against women. "I didn't mean to hurt you" (from Jealous guy by John Lennon)

And then, just when things seemed darkest, one of the guys said, "I just sing the songs." As if to say, it doesn't really have anything to do with me.

And I thought, how easily we tolerate this sort of stuff. Here is a song with attitudes that every guy on my street affects to hate but wrap it up in a nice melody and associate it with "THE BEATLES" and everything is okay.