Troubled Fantasies

When I was sixteen years old, a piece appeared in Newsweek magazine announcing the much-anticipated return of John Lennon to the music world. A huge fan, if not flat-out worshipper of the former Beatle, I devoured the article.

Mildly troubled when I learned that Lennon, now a “house-husband,” passed the time watching a lot of TV, especially the commercials, I blinked and read on. Surely the old Lennon would surface soon. Answering the inevitable Beatle-reunion question, an annoyed Lennon retorted, “Look, whether George and Ringo are involved is irrelevant. Because it was Paul and I who wrote the music, okay?”

I remember well my initial shock at my idol’s callous disregard of two men with whom he’d shared so much and often referred to as his brothers. “That’s pretty cold,” I thought. And then I shoved my horror to the side, thinking he must have a good reason for saying what he said. Lennon, I reasoned, always did just kind of spout off without thinking much about the consequences. “He’s opinionated. He lets his feelings fly.”

“He speaks his mind. He shoots from the hip. That’s just what he believed at the time.”

Sound familiar?

I still love Lennon’s music and admire his life-long struggle to improve himself as the world watched. But if I am going to denounce Donald Trump’s legion of followers as an unquestioning cult, I have to acknowledge I too have been susceptible to a similar self-delusion that hoists my idol into a positive light.

Lennon, like Trump, endured a turbulent childhood that, while not as sheltered or opulent as our hospitalized president’s, lacked the warmth and love required to build a decent, empathetic adult. He struggled with that void of parental love, faced it head-on in Primal Therapy, and used it to write the songs that built Plastic Ono Band, a landmark album now 50(!) years old.

Trump, meanwhile, twisted the pain of parental rejection into unwarranted self-confidence, ultimately manufacturing a farcical facade of financial genius, one now exposed as fraudulent. That public image, and the populace’s heated argument over its accuracy, is why he was nominated for and elected to the presidency.

As we approach what would have been his 80th birthday, Lennon’s spell over his fans endures. Even in my fifties, I find myself excusing his behavior — the drug use, the caustic insults cast at former loved ones, the self-pity of the tortured millionaire. It’s an unwritten rock ’n’ roll maxim that geniuses play by a different set of rules, and Lennon — the finest genius of them all — shouldn’t have been subject to any rule that might curb his artistic expression.

I may be seventeen years older than he ever was, but he struck a chord with me at age 13 that still rings resoundingly.

But this is why we are built with a heart and a head. It’s on each of us, before bowing before a public figure, to temper our worship with some critical thinking. This is why I no longer dress like Lennon or wear those little round glasses. I’ll always love his songs, but even though his music was as autobiographical as it gets, it paints only a partial picture of the man. The portrait is completed by more quotidian strokes: how he treated people around him, what kind of father and husband he was, how much he helped those who needed help — the human compassion he called out for in his plaintive 1965 hit song. As it turns out, he helped some, while hurting others. The man, like all people, was complicated and flawed.

Thus my gripe with Trump followers is not so much their sheep-like subjugation to a figure who has no regard for them, but rather an intellectual laziness that prevents them from looking within and trying to grow as human beings. There’s just not a whole lot of introspection here. This is why a non-Trumper cannot criticize Trump to a Trumper without inviting a barrage of seemingly rehearsed political platitudes. You might as well try to talk your neighbor into hating his incessantly-yapping terrier.

Still, haven’t we moved past this kind of worship? Haven’t we seen evidence, again and again, that no one is worthy of blind devotion? It seems absolutely wrong, at this stage of our world’s evolution, to look to one person for all the answers.

I know this because John Lennon himself said the same thing the very day he was murdered.