'Hello, Goodbye' is now just goodbye.
AP Images
John Lennon and his wife Yoko Ono raise their fists as they join a protest, Feb. 5, 1972.
John Lennon was born in 1940, when the bombs were general all over England. War was a commonplace of his childhood, and when we try to sort out what he brought to the generation that mourns him so deeply, we naturally think first of his music, and then of the ways in which he and the Beatles tied that music to the peace movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s.
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Noted.
Morton Mintz on what Rehnquist would have thought of Citizens United; John Nichols on net neutrality.
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Howard Zinn, 1922-2010
Remembering the pragmatic radical.
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Bring on the Filibuster
Let the Republicans actually filibuster something, hour after excrutiating hour, in real time. The public won't like it.
Elsewhere in this issue, Dorothy Day, a pacifist who spoke for an earlier generation, is memorialized. Like Day, Lennon believed that there were many potential recruits for the peace reserves--they only needed calling up. "You may say I'm a dreamer," he wrote, "but I'm not the only one."
Lennon had all the most alluring qualities of the 1960s: innocence, spontaneity, seditious humor, belief. In an interview on the day of his murder, he expressed the hope that the 1980s, like the 1960s, would be a decade of positive action. Now, with Moscow and the West activating their military reserves, it would be a far better remembrance of John Lennon to work for the peace movement he believed in than to long nostalgically for the decade he symbolized.
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