Light On Dark Water

Imagine No Delusions

NOTE: EXPLICIT CONSERVATIVE CONTENT
I include this warning for the sake of certain friends and
relatives unhappy with some of my conservative views.

Pop music fans may have noticed a recent bit of fanfare about
Rolling Stone’s list of

500 Greatest Songs of All Time, as determined by a poll of critics.
(This means rock-and-roll songs, of course, the kind of music Rolling Stone
covers; no Cole Porter or Johnny Mercer here.)
I went off
at the first opportunity to check it against my own opinions, and
naturally found myself in at least as much disagreement as
agreement: “Hmm, yes, that deserves its ranking, but how
did that get in there, much less near the top?” This
is all a sort of parlor game, of course; it’s fun, and not
to be taken too seriously. (I must add: how serious can such a
project be if it includes Foreigner but not Leonard Cohen, Nick
Drake, or Tom Waits? If the answer is that the work of these
artists is not rock and roll, one is entitled to ask why Joni
Mitchell is on the list—three times.)

So it would be silly, except insofar as one finds it
entertaining, to argue with the selection and the rankings. But
there is one entry on it that really caught my eye: John
Lennon’s “Imagine” is at Number Three.

Over the years I’ve noticed that this song seems to have
a significance for some people that it never has for me, but I
hadn’t given it much thought till now. I remember thinking
when I heard it on the radio for the first time that it was a
pretty tune with a silly lyric. I didn’t pay much
attention to it, having decided that low expectations were in
order as regards the former Beatles in their new careers as
separate artists; in fact I think I had some such thought as
“not bad for an ex-Beatle.” I was already moving away
from my collegiate leftism, but I think that even at my most
radical I would have thought the words of the song ridiculous as
a political manifesto. (Of course I was never really on board
with the serious socialist ideal in the first place, being more
a sort of mystical nihilist than a utopian.)

All right, then, it’s a nice song, but: the
third-greatest ever? I could probably pick a song at random from
almost any Beatles album and rank it higher than
“Imagine.” I know there’s no accounting for
tastes, but mine are not so eccentric as all that; there’s
something else going on here. And that something, as the

unattributed Rolling Stone comment on the song, makes clear, is
the utopian lyric:

Imagine there’s no heaven…
Imagine there’s no countries…
And no religion, too…[this grammatical
fingernail-on-chalkboard has always bothered me]
Imagine no possessions…

Lennon was honest in describing this as “virtually
the
Communist Manifesto.” And the Rolling Stone commentator,
quoting Lennon, does not seem to see it as a problem; noting
explicitly that the song envisions “an absolute equality
created by the dissolution of governments, borders, organized
religion and economic class,” he or she nevertheless goes
on to describe it as “an enduring hymn of solace and
promise.” The question presents itself: does anyone
actually pay much attention to these words? William Ruhlmann,

reviewing the song for the All Music Guide, thinks not: he
describes the song as having “…a sugarcoating. That
coating seems to be what people have always heard, rather than
the song’s radical intent.” That’s probably true for
most people. I asked my sixteen-year-old daughter about it while
I was writing this, and her answer made it clear that she takes
it only as a wish for a perfect world, and hasn’t taken
seriously the implications of “no countries,”
“no religion,” “no possessions.”

I have to suppose that the Rolling Stone voters are more
attentive than this, and that they know exactly what the song is
talking about. The commentator certainly does. So I’m left
to assume that after all the horrors of the 20th
century they still believe Communism is a good thing, flawed
perhaps in the implementations that have actually been attempted,
but still in essence the proper and correct aspiration for people
of good will.

Now, I read enough left-wing commentary that I ought not be
surprised at this, but I am. Has the Rolling Stone writer and
others like him actually read

the Communist Manifesto? No one
today could read a call for “racial purity” without
thinking at once of the Holocaust and viewing the author as at
least hovering around the moral territory of its perpetrators.
Can the Rolling Stone writer read proposals such as
“abolition of private property” and
“centralisation of the means of communication and transport
in the hands of the State” without thinking of the millions
dead in Stalin’s terror, in the Gulag, in Mao’s
Cultural Revolution? Can he or she read “Equal liability of
all to labour. Establishment of industrial armies, especially
for agriculture” followed by “gradual abolition of
the distinction between town and country” without
thinking of Cambodia’s killing fields?

Either the people who take seriously the message of this song
and view it as “an enduring hymn of solace and
promise,” of “faith in the power of a world, united
in imagination and purpose, to repair and change itself”
are culpably—and I think it would be fair to say
willingly, in that a certain conscious aversion of the
gaze is required—soft-headed, or they are well aware of its
implications. If the first is true, it constitutes grounds for
not taking them very seriously on the subject of
politics. If the second, then they must be taken all too
seriously, as being people for whom the necessity of murder on a
grand scale is held to be no serious impediment to the
realization of their cherished fantasy.

I believe and hope it’s the first. I’m obliged to
suppose that there is a large number of people who believe the
“dissolution” to which the Rolling Stone commentator
refers can (or will?) be achieved voluntarily, by what they would
no doubt call evolution. At any rate I know how foolish a
“five-star jury of singers, musicians, producers, industry
figures, critics and, of course, songwriters” assembled by
one of the flagship publications of the cultural left can be—to
say nothing of ex-Beatles.

Whether the utopia proposed by the song is even desirable is
another question altogether.