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RedditJohn 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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A Wink and a Leer
Jess Harvell: Nick Cave's self-lacerating sense of humor helps him avoid being just another pretentious old rocker.
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Sweet Martin's Badass Song
Scott Saul: Several new books on Martin Luther King take a closer look at the rhetoric and economic politics of the civil rights icon.
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Dreaming Obama in North Carolina
Tom Hayden: Conversations with historian John Hope Franklin and civil rights heroes about race, memory and the possibility of change.
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Back Talk: Nicholson Baker
Christine Smallwood: In the debut of a new biweekly series, the author of Human Smoke discusses pacifism and World War II.
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Her Good Thing
Nathaniel Friedman: The versatile vocalist Mable John, now a novelist and minister, has come a long way since the 1960s soul era that made her (almost) famous.
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Iraq's Ruined Library Soldiers On
R.H. Lossin: Five years ago this week, US troops stood by as mobs sacked Iraq's revered National Library and Archives. Despite little outside help, a cultural treasure soldiers on.
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Suffragist City
Mary Beth Norton: Two new books examine the history of the first women's rights campaign.
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Noted.
Jeff Madrick on Clintonomics; John Nichols on the Ron Paul revolt; Ari Berman on superdelegate fence-sitters
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Burma's Desperate Hour
The crisis in Burma justifies humanitarian intervention--but it should be carried out by the UN and limited to emergency relief.
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Noted.
Longshoremen protest the war, Ken Livingstone loses London, Zephyr Teachout blogs The Nation.
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Trust the Voters
Finally, the Democratic campaign can begin to focus on what really matters--healthcare, the economy and leaving Iraq.
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Noted.
Nasty political advertising in Mississippi and your bloated grocery bill.
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Our Lapdog Media
What should we do when Big Media fails democracy? First, don't let it get any bigger.
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Noted.
A fractured death penalty ruling, the Pentagon's pimping pundits, campus antisweatshop campaigns and Guggenheims for Nation poets.
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.
