Dr. Faustroll Writes the Wrongs

I’m guessing that idea doesn’t evoke much irony these days, after eight years of idiotic unimaginative malignancy that some people in the NOMPH™ will no doubt miss. I’m sure they are still assholes around who wet dream about a Palin/Gingrich ticket in 2012. John would probably welcome that prospect and do another version of Scumbag to celebrate the lunacy implicit in the American political process. Maybe Dweezil would provide accompaniment.

Imagining a world where there was no John Lennon is inconceivable. Jesus I didn’t have to know about. Marx, Hitler, McCarthy, Pol Pot, Nixon, Mohammed, the Bush family, Harry Truman — all of them I could have done without — but I’m guessing that John Lennon didn’t mind having walked the same earth as those phucktards.

I remember precisely where I was the night John Lennon was killed, just as I remember the fight that broke out in the gym at William Cullen Bryant High School the day that John Kennedy died. Or watching the Space Shuttle spew the remains of the first teacher in space. Or watching the footage of New Orleans after Katrina. To me, September 11, 2001 was no big deal. It was pay back for a national life of crime, which included the willful execution of John Lennon.

I was sitting in Troll’s in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, watching the Miami Dolphins play the New England Patriots on Monday Night Football on December 8, 1980, when Howard Cosell broke the news. Imagine that. Howard Cosell was the voice I heard when I learned that someone had just shot John Lennon. I can’t remember who the other members of the crew were that night, but it seems like it was Kathy Griffith’s hubby Frank and either Dandy Don Meredith or Fran Tarkentin. My impression at first was that Cosell’s booth mates thought he was joking, but I knew as soon as I heard him say that a tragedy had occurred involving John Lennon that the world had truly changed.

To me, this was an attempt to snuff out the dream, and the nearly 30 years since seem to indicate that Mark Chapman’s cruel and inhuman act against a man who once wore a tampax on his head to embarrass Harry Nilsson, a man who wrote the better parts of most of the Beatles’ songs, a man who had the balls to be funny and irreverent and stare down the Nixon administration — the slow dismal slog of 30 years seems to indicate that George Bush should give Mark Chapman a medal of honor. He did every bit a good job as Brownie.

Imagine no religions. Imagine no politicians. Imagine the opening lyrics of the song that got him killed:

Imagine there’s no Heaven
It’s easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky
Imagine all the people
Living for today

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