Buzzflash
del.icio.us
Digg
Facebook
Newsvine
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.
-
The Last Angry Man
Jeff Kisseloff: Eliot Asinof, blacklisted author of Eight Men Out, created a lifetime of work celebrating rebels and victims of injustice.
-
City of Fear
Jon Wiener: A new book explores the historical ties between African-American and Japanese-American communities in Los Angeles.
-
Back Talk: Billy Bragg
Christine Smallwood: British punk rocker and activist Billy Bragg talks about his new album and the politics and economics of free online music.
-
The Reminder-General
Stefan Collini: Tony Judt fears the twenty-first century has spawned a culture hell- bent on forgetting the past.
-
A Wink and a Leer
Jess Harvell: Nick Cave's self-lacerating sense of humor helps him avoid being just another pretentious old rocker.
-
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.
-
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.
-
The Nation Sues the Government
The Nation joins the ACLU and several other organizations and attorneys in a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the FISA act.
-
Noted.
Ari Melber tracks the continuing fight over FISA; Stuart Klawans remembers Thomas Disch.
-
Obama and Iraq
His plan to exit Iraq falls far short of the complete withdrawal most Americans want. But it's a place to start.
-
Noted.
Civil liberties, at home and abroad; saving Jeff Wood from Texas's death row.
-
Supreme Politics
The Supreme Court's final rulings remind us that civil rights and a sane vision of the Constitution rest with the next President's judicial appointments.
-
Fizzling on FISA
Obama and other Senate Democrats should not let a lame-duck Administration compromise our liberties in the name of pursuing terrorists.
-
Noted.
George Carlin knew words could never be as obscene as wars; Barack Obama goes for the money, but at what cost?
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.
- Get The Nation at home (and online!) for 75 cents a week!
- If you like this article, consider making a donation to The Nation.
