Listening to Lennon #4: Mind Games

Mind Games is usually seen as Lennon backing away from the direct, seemingly (but in actual fact almost never truly) spontaneous engagement with radical and counter-cultural politics and street life that characterized Some Time in New York City, and there's clearly a lot of truth to that take. If nothing else, it fits with Lennon's trajectory in early 1973. He was fighting efforts to deport him from the United States, and thus found it necessary to make himself less of an anti-American lightning rod, and Richard Nixon's re-election to the presidency in 1972--Lennon had strongly affirmed his support for George McGovern--had left him thoroughly depressed and falling back into sexual and chemical addiction and dissolution (not that he'd ever really escaped such, anyway). By the summer of 1973, Lennon and Ono had formally (if not officially) separated, and Lennon was spending most of his time in Los Angeles--the beginning of his infamous "Lost Weekend." But before he left New York, however temporarily, he poured out thoughts and ideas into a new album, writing all the songs in a week's time (though some of the basic tunes he's worked on here and there for years), getting the recording and mixing done--he produced the album himself--in a little less than two months. After more than a year of benefit concerts and political appearances and no new music, this was in some sense a return to form for Lennon, though his "form" was far from at its best. 

Mind Games, while it has its defenders, is also often seen as an aimless, unfocused album, and there's truth to that as well. I actually think it's helpful to think of the album in terms of its original vinyl: the album's A side is actually pretty strong, while the B side is mostly perfunctory at best. I really love the sumptuous, Phil Spector-inspired arrangement for the album's lead single, "Mind Games"; its lyrical substance is slight and hippy-dippy (Lennon was busy pursuing another guru, this time the psychologists Robert Masters and Jean Houston, two key players in the quasi-mystical "human potential movement"), but the resulting recording is wonderfully dreamy, and Lennon's vocal is terrific. "Tight A$," by contrast, is a solid, fun rockabilly song. And the album's stand-out, I think, is "Bring on the Lucie (Freda People)," a rambunctious yet melodic tune whose sharp lyrics and clever political allusions really ought to put it on the same level of Lennon's much more famous "Power to the People" or "Give Peace a Chance." ("Lucie," by the way, is apparently "Lucifer," if you're wondering.) Put those along with "Intuition"--the first song on the B side, a surprisingly McCartney-style pop tune, with its infectious rhythm, its upbeat lyrics, and its jaunty, half-baked vibe--and you have an impressive musical collection, especially coming from someone struggling through depression and an admittedly justified paranoia. Why none of them were released as radio singles besides "Mind Games" I don't understand.

I'm not sure anything else on the album is worth more than an occasional listen, though. "Aisumasen (I'm Sorry)" is a sincere, self-confessional ballad, but whatever the value of continually repenting for one's faults may be, as a musician Lennon is repeating his processing of emotions here in a way that he'd already done much better on Imagine. "One Day (At A Time)" has its fans, and I admit Lennon's high-register vocal is kind of distinctive, but the same could be said for the mellow, steel guitar sound of "You Are Here," the hand-claps of "Only People," or the fine guitar work on "I Know (I Know)"--all are solid but not particularly captivating introspective tunes about love. I'll give credit to "Out the Blue," though--the lyrics there are occasionally bonkers, but maybe that's reflective of Lennon really trying to be original in expressing his conflicted yet enduring feelings for Yoko, similarly running through multiple styles in putting together this genuinely moving and fun ballad. And the aggressive boogie of "Meat City," the album's concluding track, can really get your head bopping, even if it veers into the same "just-jamming" problem that afflicted so much of Some Time in New York City.

So even with Lennon messed up and aimless, his artistry shone through, sufficient to put together on short notice a pretty decent rock and roll album. I give it a B-. Nowhere near his best work, but the greatness is still there, sometimes. 

Listening to Lennon #3: Some Time in New York City

In August of 1971, John Lennon and Yoko Ono moved to New York City, according to them to help Yoko obtain custody of her daughter Kyoko (which was a failure; Kyoko's father Anthony Cox, who had been awarded custody of Kyoko in his divorce from Yoko, kept Kyoko hidden from Yoko for more than 20 years), and also to escape the tabloid attention they attracted everywhere they went (though considering how effectively they cultivated and made use of that attention, that explanation seems questionable). In any case, they never left, with Lennon himself existing in legal limbo, fighting attempts to deport him for five years before finally achieving his green card and permanent residency in 1976. Lennon had been to America before, but only with the Beatles; now, he was living in what he considered to be the finest, freest, most fun city in the world, and artistically he was all on his own. And with the release of "Happy Xmas (War is Over)" in December of that year, he was the toast of the city's radical chic establishment. What was he going to do?

Unfortunately, what he decided to--with an excitement that is audible on every track of the album--is knock out a bunch of loose, rough recordings with Yoko, titled Some Time in New York City. It's probably the worst reviewed single album that John and Yoko ever worked on together. Most of the songs on it were written and recorded hurriedly (the whole album was finished by March 1972), with the divided aim to appeal to the hippie counter-culture audience that, ever since "Give Peace a Chance" in 1969, John had ingratiated himself to, as well as to present Yoko's artistic perspective, something that sometimes seems identical to that counter-culture, but other times presents itself as somehow above and condescending to it. For a backing band, Lennon chose a short-lived, hard-partying bar band, Elephant's Memory, which had been playing around Greenwich Village for a while (they provided two tracks to 1969's Midnight Cowboy), but did last very long beyond their collaboration with John and Yoko.

One thing you can say for Elephant's Memory, though: they could jam, and for several singles on this album, aimless jamming is all Lennon had in mind."Attica State" and "John Sinclair" both have the lyrical seeds of decent protest folk or rock songs, but the music goes nowhere (despite some really great blues licks and slide guitar on the latter tune). The solo Ono compositions--"Sisters, O Sisters," "Born in a Prison," and "We're all Water"--all have a slightly better musical structure; there's a fun, girl-group energy to the first of those, and an off-kilter rollicking quality to the last. If their lyrics--and Ono's wailing vocals--hadn't alternated between being pretentious and ridiculous, I could imagine either becoming a slumber-party anthem or bus-trip favorite. No such luck though. (As for "Born in a Prison,"the less said about that the better.)

The Bloody Sunday massacre in Derry, Ireland, on January 30, 1972, inspired two songs: "Sunday Bloody Sunday" and "The Luck of the Irish." The first is rambunctious and angry, and works well enough, except for Ono's dirge-like singing of the chorus. The second is smarter, reflecting both Lennon's dark, sarcastic sensibility as well as his winking smirk; the lyrics include both the vicious "Why the hell are the English there anyway? / As they kill with God on their side!" and the giggling "Let's walk over rainbows like leprechauns / The world would be one big Blarney Stone." And Ono's vocals are actually pretty well controlled on that track. They both lack any kind of overall unity, though; they definitely aren't the equal, at least as far as their musical production is concerned, to McCartney's own response to Bloody Sunday, "Give Ireland Back to the Irish" from Wild Life, and that's admittedly kind of a low bar.

What's left? "Angela," a quiet duet and tribute to Angela Davis that has a nice enough tune, but whose lyrics and vocal are just cloying. "New York City," by contrast, is an open-ended and overflowing celebration of Lennon's new home. The only song on the album attributed solely to himself, it weaves together terrific electric guitar work and a pulsing saxophone sound. It's the album's one unqualified success; when Lennon shouts "The Statue of Liberty said 'Come!'," you can feel it. "Woman is the Nigger of the World" is actually even better musically; it has a great melody and polished, forceful rock beat. But the subject matter and lyrics are just utterly mis-matched to the music. Lennon was apparently off hard drugs at this time, so you just have to solely credit his immense arrogance and obliviousness when sings, as part of a thundering, raving, enthusiastic, heartfelt chorus "Woman is the slave to the slaves!" I mean, full points for your feminist strivings, John (Ono actually came up with the title of the song), but honestly, what were you thinking?

Some Time in New York City gets a D+; "New York City," and the overall energy of the backing band, prevents me from giving it a D. Hope John will do better--and keep Yoko away from the mic--next time out the gate. 

Defending Superman's Sentimentality

[Note: Spoilers follow.]

I’ve seen James Gunn’s Superman, and I’ve written up my take on it on social media: I thought it was absolutely wonderful, one of the very best super-hero movies I’ve ever seen, on the same level as—or maybe exceeding—such movies as Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man 2, Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther, Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins, Jon Favreau’s Iron Man, even Richard Donner’s Superman: The Movie. Some disagree with that assessment, which is fine; there are all sorts of ways, both stylistic and substantive, to judge big pop entertainments like these, and I’m not inclined to argue (much) with folks whose takes differ from mine.

But a politico-theological argument? That I can absolutely get into.

Given that Superman, no matter how one tells his story, is by definition a hero of the underdog, someone who saves lives, stops disasters, and fights those who oppress and terrorize, it’s always going to be easy to fit him into a particular political narrative, and certainly there’s been plenty of that in the wake of the visuals and narrative choices which Gunn employed in making Superman. (As one of my friends said regarding Vasil Ghurkos, the evil ruler of Boravia who is central to Lex Luthor’s scheme to destroy Superman, Gunn made him look like Benjamin Netanyahu, but sound like Vladimir Putin.) From what I can tell, the lazy political attack on the movie—that it’s “woke” and therefore nothing but progressive propaganda—doesn’t seem to have legs; multiple conservative, Trump-supporting friends of mine have loved the movie, loved the humor and action and heroism the film contains. Another, slightly different attack caught my eye, though, and I want to say why I think it’s completely wrong.

It's an attack made by Daniel McCarthy, the editor of Modern Age, a rather idiosyncratic conservative journal. In a column titled “What Trump Knows About ‘Superman’ That Hollywood Can’t Comprehend,” McCarthy writes that attempts to hate on Superman because of its presumed (and I think actually quite obvious and accurate) messages regarding immigration and respect for civil rights and the rule of law are side issues, at best; the real problem with Superman is its “bland and demoralizing vision” of an America without values. He describes the film’s Jonathan and Martha Kent at “ludicrously folksy stereotypes”; he condemns the fact that this Superman “doesn’t utter a word about ‘the American way,’” but instead “when he confronts Luthor at the film’s climax…insists his failings are what makes him human”; and that Superman’s core replaces patriotism with sentimentality: “Superman hasn’t assimilated to America, but to an unplaceable idea of niceness and self-affirmation.”

Well, as Jules Winnfield once said, allow me to retort.

I called this a politico-theological argument, because it is: it is an argument which is built out of assumptions about the moral importance, perhaps even the moral centrality, of being a part of a national community, a community that itself posits its own character—its own “way”—as reflecting, perhaps even instantiating, something unique and higher. Without being attached to a people and place, moral positions become bland: “niceness” is a characteristic which anyone can possess, and it betokens no sense of strength or specialness. Superman is, McCarthy is saying, just this guy with powers; he does not inspire, unlike Trump, who understands that the point of national leadership is to never be humiliated, to be “so strong” he doesn’t need to engage in violence (unless he chooses to, of course).

Thankfully there are at least some conservative Christians who still haven’t forgotten that the theology which actually emerged from the stories of the Bible, both the Old and New Testament, and in contrast to the idolatry which motivates so much of the MAGA cult, isn’t at all about strength but rather is all about acceptance: acceptance of individual choice and accountability, acceptance of one’s common and flawed mortality, acceptance of the equal dignity of all persons, good or bad, weak or strong, journeying through this earthly life. On that reading, Gunn’s Superman is a deeply religious film, telling the story of the struggles and the triumph—for the moment!—of a tremendously gifted man who cares deeply about his fellow beings (regarding Krypto: “He’s not even a very good dog—but he’s out there alone, and he’s probably scared”), despite his own many limitations (his final words in the movie, after Mr. Terrific leaves Superman in a huff: “I am such a jerk sometimes”). But I think we can go even deeper than that.

Long ago, back when the Blogosphere was a name that was actually recognized by many, I was part of a long discussion over what some scholars of religious belief and practice had terms “Moral Therapeutic Deism.” My engagement in that debate touched on Barak Obama, Rod Dreher, civil religion, and more, but I’d like to draw out just one element of it: the thought of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. And actually, I wouldn’t be surprised if McCarthy had been actually subtly signaling to all the Rousseau-haters out there when he described the “sentimentality” of Gunn’s Superman as consisting of “niceness and self-affirmation,” because that’s just a step or two away from one of Rousseau’s key claims: that modern morality is built, first, upon pity or compassion for others, and second, upon amour de soi, a concept usually translated as “self-love,” but which really connotes a positive sense of dignity, self-care, and accountability.

In any case, for Rousseau, modernity has robbed us of the possibility of a genuinely organic connection to a national community, or really any community identity at all; to take its place, there is the need to educate people in a religious sensibility that arguably is a direct ancestor of MTD. “The Creed of the Savoyard Priest” is a central text here; its ideas were foundational for much 19^th-century liberal Christian theology, and frankly, that theology is as American as apple pie: God loves you. God has given you an inner sense of decency; don’t allow learned rationalizations to distract you from it. On the contrary, God wants you to follow your conscience, as that will allow you to best respect and serve and build community with others. As the Priest writes: “Feeling precedes knowledge. Since we do not learn to seek what is good for us and avoid what is bad for us, but get this desire from nature, in the same way the love of good and the hatred of evil are as natural to us as our amour de soi.”

I don’t deny for a moment that there is a potential for moral individualism here that can be, and in some ways absolutely has been, devastating to the moral conditions of modernity. And yet, modernity means more than just the worst aspects of individualism; it also means (as I wrote in that blog post 16 years ago) “the global regime of human rights, worldwide activism on behalf of the indebted and the poor, volunteerism and service in tens of thousands of places across the globe,” etc., etc., etc. How much are all the undeniably limited but nonetheless still real ways in which the world has improved, at least insofar as slavery, coverture, torture, and genocide, over the past two hundred years the result of “people absorbing anemic liberal doctrines about not shooting people who just want to get a better job or to express themselves, about recognizing the need to actually sit down and speak with and learn from those whom you had previously oppressed”? To connect this back to Superman, our hero’s defense of his involvement in the Boravian attack on Jarhanpur ultimately comes down to—and his contentious interview with Lois Lane makes this clear—one simple moral reality: “People were going to die!” Using super-powers to stop (again, for the moment!) a conflict because you don’t want people to die is, surely, pretty simplistic, pretty basic. It is also, well, compassionate; it is sentimental, it is nice.

And this, really, takes us back to the people, the community, that Gunn’s Superman does belong to: his parents in Smallville. As has been noted, past comic and cinematic incarnations of Jonathan and Martha Kent have tended to present them as “paragons of a certain kind of Americana nobility; strong, proud farmers from the heartland,” teaching their adopted son “all the right values and the responsibilities that come with his incredible abilities.” But Gunn makes them “normies” (by the way, this was something, as a Kansan, I recognized from the very first trailer; far from the stereotypical red barn with windmill and grain elevator, miles and miles from town, these are two far more typical rural residents of small-town Kansas in 2025, where the grain fields are overwhelmingly owned by large corporate actors: the Kents have a suburban ranch home and run cattle, and probably both have jobs in town on the side). Are they church-goers? One would guess. But churchgoing in small-town Kansas in the 21^st-century isn’t and can’t be imagined as being what it was when Glenn Ford’s Jonathan Kent clapped young Clark on the shoulder just before dying of a heart attack in Donner’s 1978 Superman: The Movie. For better and for worse, that stoic, American Gothic image of the heartland has now all but disappeared. What’s in its place? A lot of good people (even if they are Trump votes, as Jonathan and Martha Kent almost certainly are), who go to church and embrace a message of Christian decency and sentiment—the sort of message that would lead Pa Kent to say, it what was clearly the moral center of the Superman, whatever anyone else might say later:

Parents aren’t for telling their children who they’re supposed to be. We are here to give y’all tools to help you make fools of yourselves all on your own. Your choices, Clark. Your actions. That’s what makes you who you are. Let me tell you something, son, I couldn’t be more proud of you.

Right there, we have parental love, we have tolerance, we have individual responsibility, we have dignity and respect. Perhaps theologically those virtues are “bland” enough, in McCarthy’s words, to not provide a foundation for strength; on the level of philosophy, I’m open to that argument. But insofar as actually lived lives are concerned—particularly the lived lives of Kansans that I know, including many whose politics I think are appalling, but whose support for families and friends and civic work are rock solid—I think this kind of morality, Superman’s morality, a morality that saves dogs and squirrels, a morality that refuses to cause harm to others, fails to prevent all possible harm, but then keeps on trying again and again anyway, is a damn good one. Sentimental yes, but inspiring too, I think. (And from all the memes that are apparently out there celebrating the wonderful, stupid, absolutely Superman-ish line "Kindness, maybe that's the new punk rock," maybe there are more people out there who agree with me, rather than McCarthy.)

Stella, My Dear

Martha my dear, / Though I spend my days in conversation, / Please remember me.

At roughly 12:30am this morning, the fog and pain and confusion and frustration that Stella, our pet for over 9 ½ years, has been moving through since at least last October was taken away. She’s gone.

I have an old and dear friend, who is both far more adept at all things technological than I (I mean, he builds robots for a living), but also far more adept at connecting with the flora and fauna of God’s creation than I am as well (despite my pretension to being an actually skilled gardener). Not long ago, he and his family lost a beloved family pet to cancer, an English Sheepdog named Mieka. (Martha, the nominal inspiration for Paul McCartney’s composition “Martha My Dear,” was also an English Sheepdog, who lived to the ripe old age of 15.) Mieka, my friend wrote, despite her pain and weakness in her final days, would still try to lick the hands of those who sat beside her, “reaching across vast distances of brain architecture and genetic selection to make a direct emotional connection.” Mieka, my friend wrote, “is teaching me how to die....We were created to leave our mark on the hearts of others and for them to leave their marks on us....When my time comes, I hope I'll be strong enough to follow her example.”

Stella, unfortunately, was not blessed with a death that allowed her the cognitive power to follow through on whatever buried instinct, the fruit of perhaps 40,000 years of social selection and evolution, had previous impelled her to love and want to connect with her humans. She was a rescue dog, so we never knew for certain how old she was; when we brought her home on December 4, 2015, her handlers put her age at 2 or 3 years old. So when her end came very early this morning, she was perhaps around 12 years old. She’d been slowing down some for a few years; she couldn’t jump up on our bed any longer, and her hearing may have been far enough gone that the summer fireworks no longer terrified her as they had every year before. But she was still mostly the same animal we’d known and made part of our lives for most of a decade. 

But then came her first seizure last September, which terrified us. Then came another, and then came the anti-seizure medication (phenobarbital) which dulled her senses even further and completely changed her personality. She became a dog that slept frequently, didn’t respond well, and wandered the house, following the same circular path over and over; she still ate, but she couldn’t control her bowels very well any longer, and when we’d get her to take walks outside–once her favorite thing, but increasingly harder as the months went by–she’d often be listless, leaning to one side and going in circles if we didn’t pull her along. The last walk of her life, last Sunday, she moved so slowly, her hindquarters often giving out underneath her, with even stepping up on a curb posing a challenge. And then yesterday afternoon, when I helped her outside to do her business after work, it was almost impossible to get her to move; she seemed to have no sense of her location, and she tumbled down steps and walked into walls as though she could no longer see. In a single evening, she had three seizures, and her breathing was labored. She struggled to stand, and couldn’t; she had no interest in food. We decided it was time, and called the emergency hospital after 10pm. We waited until Kristen returned from work, and then off we went, after first allowing our other children, in Wisconsin and New Mexico, to Facetime with her; I hope she could at least hear their voices. In the end, at the hospital, she lifted her head and turned toward us as we hugged her goodbye; I want to believe she knew we were there.

She was, from the beginning, a hyper-territorial and defensive dog. We didn’t know what breed she was until one day when she–after I foolishly left the backyard gate unrepaired and capable to being pushed open by a strong 60lb. animal–heard a lawnmower in the field behind our house, jumped against the gate barking furiously (her barking was always furious!), pushed through to the field, and attacked (though, I suspect, never actually broke the skin of) the man on the mower, which resulted in a visit from animal control and Stella having to spend a week in the city pound, during which she got a genetic test. A Pointer and Australian Cattle Dog mix, it turns out, which explains some of the aggressiveness. What a hysterical, overflowing creature she often was back then! Her licks, her insistence on getting the right number of pets, her ability to go completely still and focus entirely on whatever squirrels or bicyclists or dangers lurked right outside our living room window, ready to explode in deafening barks if any human being or rabbit or loud car or, sometimes, anything, came into her sight. Having guests over to the house was all but impossible for years. 

Perhaps in retrospect we should have always suspected that something just wasn’t quite right with the poor creature’s brain. We would laugh at and take delight in her strange way of thinking (or unthinking, as the case may often have been). If we had been a different family–a wealthier one, perhaps, or a more disciplined one, or one that managed our time better, or a dozen other things–maybe our too often desultory efforts at discipline and training in her early years with us might have stuck better. But then again, perhaps not. She quickly figured out a job–protecting the house from intruders, meaning everyone who wasn’t us–and sometimes including us, as Caitlyn, who slept in the downstairs bedroom during these years, discovered; she was convinced Stella forgot who she was overnight and accordingly responded defensively whenever she came upstairs in the morning. When we’d load her in the car to take her on walks or expeditions elsewhere–Buffalo Park, Swanson Park, Pawnee Prairie Park, even El Dorado Lake–she’d calm down slightly, but only slightly. Holding on to her leash tightly, to prevent her from leaping out at passing cars or charging other dogs (or, of course, any other small mammals) became necessary, both for her own safety and to save us from lawsuits. When we first brought her home and Kristen was the one who most often held her leash, there were times when Stella would win out, and nine-year-old Kristen would be dragged along behind her.

Stella was always, first and foremost, Kristen’s dog. She had begged for some sort of pet for years; it really almost didn’t matter what (at different times, she was infatuated with gerbils, rats, ferrets, and more). Once Megan had moved out, Melissa and I became a lot more receptive to the idea that the family had passed its peak in size, and as it shrank the youngest, Kristen, would always be tagging along behind her older sisters. So one December, despite our resistance–mostly because of the expense–we finally responded to her pleas; we would get a dog. And Kristen was (mostly) great as Stella’s companion; she was responsible for her food, and she and I would walk her together around the neighborhood, twice a day, so regular that on a couple of occasions folks whom we didn’t know would call us out while driving by the house or seeing us walking home from church, complementing us on how good we treated Stella. Kristen attempted to teach Stella tricks, with very moderate success (she would put together obstacle courses for Stella to navigate in the backyard; with the appropriate treat incentives, she would). She stayed in Kristen's room for years, frequently joining her on her bed (in some ways a frustrating choice, since Stella, when she spread out, could take up a lot of space, and Kristen got used to sleeping curled up in a ball).

Time changes everything, of course. The Covid-19 pandemic upended our household, and then changes in daily schedules–Melissa working full-time, Kristen in high school and then working herself–upended them further. In later years, it was far more common that she’s sleep on our bed, especially if there were a storm or people blowing off fireworks or anything else that made her nervous or concerned or scared. Stella truly became a family dog, one more of our children, rather than, as she had been originally, something of an appendage to our youngest. Melissa had always been the Alpha, the one most capable of getting Stella to respond and obey, particularly when her behavior got really egregious. Stella mostly respected that (though getting her to stay behind an invisible line and not enter the kitchen or dining area until we were finished eating was a constant struggle, one that, for some years, resulted in a successful detente between Melissa and our garbage dog, though even then her waiting behind the line or beneath the table, staring at us, waiting for permission–or for us to waver in our attention, which was really the same thing–to start eating any scraps she could find on the floor or, when we weren’t looking, on the table or counters themselves, was a constant as well.

Over the last few years, it was basically I that was walking Stella once a day, feeding her, taking her to the vet. I actually don’t think I was ever her favorite, assuming she even had one, but we got along well. I was the goofy male in the household–well, the only male, actually, which I guess allowed me to be ridiculous with her whenever I could. She was relaxed around me. When we walked, she no longer pulled at the leash to chase squirrels or threaten to leap into traffic to confront some noisy garbage truck or innocent cyclist; instead we would just walk together, wandering all around our neighborhood, following the Cowskin Creek runoff or intruding on the Rolling Hills County Club’s golf course. It came to be an important part of my routine, in humid summer heat and bitter winter cold. Like I did with the cows I milked long ago, I would talk to Stella, run through whole conversations with her as we walked. I could never tell if she was listening, but the whole arrangement felt agreeable to me. I hope she felt the same.

Sitting here, writing this, almost exactly 12 hours after we’d decided that the time had come to ease her out of her misery, I’m sad, as I think everyone in the family is, but also content knowing that her life, which had been irreparably changed by a tumor or synapse or congenital defect that could only be controlled by medication that could calm her mind, but not prevent the continued deterioration of her body, had run its course. It was terribly, terribly hard last night, as anyone who has ever put a pet down knows. But this morning, after waking with a headache, and feeling drained from our late night, I wandered the neighborhood, following some of the same paths that Stella and I (and Kristen, and Melissa, and at one point or another everyone in the family) had walked hundreds of times before. I was listening to some somber music, when to my surprise Chuck Mangione’s “Feels So Good” came on, with its long, slow, mellow sax intro. And though the songs have nothing to do with each other, I thought of McCartney’s simple ode: 

Hold your hand out, / You silly girl, / See what you've done. / When you find yourself in the thick of it, / Help yourself to a bit of what is all around you, silly girl. 

Stella was a silly girl, a dog who, when she was in the thick of her life, would happily, aggressively, determinedly, with a complete lack of guile or reservation, leap in to help herself of some of it. For nearly 10 years, we were able to give her a home to live that life in. She may not have been as brave or kind or wise as some dogs, like Mieka, have been. But she was ours, and we were hers, and for a good long time, that arrangement felt just great. Everyone needs a silly dog; thank God we had this one. I hope somewhere, while chasing a squirrel, she agrees.

 

Listening to Lennon #2: Imagine

By the spring of 1971, Lennon's confused mess of anger, resentment, and frustration had a focus: his oldest and truest friend, Paul McCartney. Macca's own frustrations had led him to sue the Beatles as an organization in order to force a break-up of the legal entanglements that were, in his view, preventing any of them from moving forward either artistically or financially. This had, obviously, infuriated the other Beatles, with his formal announcement that The Beatles were no more--something that Lennon had made clear nearly a year and half earlier but which the band had agreed to keep quiet--compounding the (not inaccurate) controlling image they'd developed of Paul. And then there was the release of McCartney's second solo album, Ram which (deservedly) enjoyed much more commercial success than did his first, and which (undeservedly) generated immense ire on the part of John, mostly due to "Too Many People," a song with a couple of Lennon-aimed snarks that was, as I wrote before about this slight but enjoyable album, "probably about as close as McCartney can ever get to building up righteous indignation." So as Lennon went into the studio, similarly determined to make his second solo album less artistic and more accessible, he did so with at least one additional goal--give it to Paul McCartney but good. But he didn't get around to that until most of the way through the album.

Imagine is most famous, of course, for its masterful title track, which opens the album. Some people will go to their deathbeds insisting that they hate "Imagine" or at least find it vapid or saccharine or somehow quasi-totalitarian, but I think these people are being driven political hang-ups, whether they acknowledge them or not. Yes, lyrically the song is ponderous and self-important--and this is where the Yoko Ono haters note her influence on the song--but its melody is sweet, its piano gorgeous, and its overall vibe, weighted by over a half-century of invocations, is exactly what album producer Phil Spector aimed for it to be: anthemic. Steve Martin has gotten 15 years worth of laughs out of his gag number "Atheists Don't Have No Songs," but of course Lennon proved him wrong decades before. "Imagine" is a damn hymn, a reverent paean to a worldview that has moved tens of millions, and must be respected as such.

It's not, I think, the best or most beautiful song on the album though. For that, I would nominate "Jealous Guy," which is just an astonishing gem, one I'd never really listened to over all the decades (the decision not to release it as a single was a crime). I can see the argument that the song's lush, haunting arrangement is overproduced, but to my ear the strings and percussion are properly placed in the background of Lennon's vocal, which is, in my opinion, equal to any of his best Beatles ballads, like "Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)" or "Dear Prudence." And lyrically it's fascinating: obviously autobiographical, yet also open-ended. Ian Leslie, writing in John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs, is convinced (mostly by the whistling break in the song; he sees that as a give-away) that while Lennon was, thanks to the intensive therapy he'd subjected himself to, plainly thinking about Yoko, he was probably also thinking about Paul. McCartney himself agrees, or at least did at one time; Leslie quotes him in his book: "In the end, I think John had some tough breaks. He used to say 'Everyone is on the McCartney bandwagon.' He wrote 'I'm Just a Jealous Guy,' and he said that the song was about me." I don't know if I believe that, but I want to.

So two absolutely great, and eminently listenable songs on this album; what else? "Crippled Inside," another obvious product of Lennon's therapy, is to my mind a spiritual cousin to McCartney's "Maxwell's Silver Hammer," a song with lyrics spelling out interior ugliness while being accompanied by a delightfully jaunty--in this case rockabilly rather than musical hall--tune. "It's So Hard" is a short, solid blues song, perhaps a little too prettified by the album's production, but worth listening to a time or three. The propulsive beat of  "I Don't Wanna Be a Soldier Mama I Don't Want to Die" hides the fact that the song is as underdeveloped as any of Macca's lazier tunes; Lennon's just vamping here. The same can be said for "Gimme Some Truth." "How" is a perfectly fine love ballad, though after listening to it over and over, I'm convinced McCartney stole from it for "So Bad" on Pipes of Peace. By contrast "Oh My Love," which Lennon co-wrote with Yoko (he actually acknowledged her contribution on this song, unlike on others), is a genuinely searching and loving song, with George Harrison's gentle guitar accenting Lennon's voice wonderfully. And the final track, "Oh Yoko!," is a head-popping, hand-clapping charmer, a bright and hopeful tune with a harmonica finale that finishes off the album excellently.

What did I skip? "How Do You Sleep?," of course. What do say about this musically compelling, lyrically embarrassing song? It's a huge, burning, sweeping number, funky and intense in its groove; with a better subject matter it might have been one of Lennon's greatest recordings. But as it is, this awesome musical set-up just perversely provides listeners with a bunch of cheap shots. Some of the lines are admittedly quite sharp ("The sound you make is Muzak to my ears / You must have learned something in all those years"), but mostly what Lennon spilled out about his former songwriting partner was childish and mean. (It's not to George Harrison's credit that he got into the recording with such gusto; one the other hand, it is to Ringo Starr's credit that, when he stopped by the studio, he was nonplussed by it all, and told John it was time to stop.) John later dismissed the song, and apparently Paul was able to get past it as well. Again, Leslie situates the song in John and Paul's long, complicated relationship, quoting Lennon as simply stating that "How Do You Sleep?" actually "isn't about Paul. It's about me."

How to rank Imagine? It's better than Plastic Ono Band, though not by leaps and bounds. The best stuff on it is some truly world-class pop music; the worst stuff on it drags it down. I give it an A-; a genuinely great album, but not quite as great as it could have been.

Listening to Lennon #1: Plastic Ono Band

So, as promised, my review of Lennon's solo albums begins.

By January of 1970, the last time the Beatles ever worked together as "The Beatles" was more than four months in the past. Lennon had been divorced from his first wife Cynthia for over a year, and he'd been married to Yoko for nearly one; he'd also recorded and released two big solo hit records, "Give Peace a Chance" and "Cold Turkey," and was working on a third, "Instant Karma," which would do even better on the charts than either of the previous two. He'd cut his hair short, he and Yoko had (for the moment) quit heroin, and he'd long since privately told his fellow Beatles that the band was over, though they'd all agreed not to make any public announcement. Through all this, it's not clear what the end of the Beatles meant for John; in interviews while he and Yoko were traveling Europe and then again when "Instant Karma" came out, he'd talk about how what was ending wasn't so much a band as an "image," and that the current confusion as to the direction of the band might easily be a "rebirth." Lennon seemed happy--which was always a difficult thing to determine with him, but the signs were there.

But then the spring of 1970 brought Paul's release of his first solo album, McCartney (honestly, I don't think it's very good), triggering John's defensive, jealous spirit; Paul's incredibly ill-conceived (however frustratingly justified) promotional interview which was taken as a public declaration that the Beatles were finished, which John saw as a presumptuous betrayal; the release of both Let It Be the album and Let It Be the documentary film, with its (incorrectly!) depressing take on the "Get Back" sessions that produced both of the above, and the latter of which reduced John to tears when he saw it; and, finally, John's discovery, in March, of the psychotherapist and wanna-be guru Arthur Janov, whose book The Primal Scream convinced Lennon--a man who, as Rob Sheffield put in in Dreaming the Beatles, had always been "deeply attracted to conversion experiences and renunciation scenes"--that he desperately needed to scream his way out of his problems, his frustrations, his abiding and confusing hates and regrets. He and Ono spent four months, in London and Los Angeles, going through Janov's therapy. In the meantime, Yoko miscarried, Lennon turned 30, and had a terrible row with the father who had abandoned him as a child, whom he never saw again after his birthday. I'm hardly the first to say that you can't make sense of Lennon's first solo album, Plastic Ono Band (his name for the floating line-up of musicians that played with him and Yoko) without considering all of this.

So the entire album is a work of therapy? Not quite; there are a couple of songs on it that could have been developed in any context. "Love" is a sweet, stripped-down tune, with Lennon's voice stretching to sing lyrics as sappy as anything Macca ever wrote (I mean, "Love is asking / To be loved"?), while "Look at Me" is a polished if rather plain ditty that had its roots in something Lennon was working on way back in India in 1968. But besides those, every song on Plastic Ono Band, to one degree or another, is an explicit expression or a reflection of John's resentments, his immaturities, his angers, his fears. "Working Class Hero" is a masterful political statement, a perfectly tight bit of quiet, controlled folky fury, which Lennon apparently obsessed over more than any other song on the album. "Hold On" is more an idea than a fleshed out song, but his use of tremolo, complemented by Ringo's superb drumming, makes it seem like genuine moment of hope in the midst of comprehensive despair. "I Found Out" and "Well Well Well" are both darkly bitter, pulsing, insistent songs of righteous indignation and John's shouting, all about making do and living life despite the betrayal of others. "Remember" and "Isolation" are both full of dissonances and rhythmic shifts; they're worth pairing together, though the sadness of the first is staccato and accusatory, and on the second its bluesy and reflective. I think they're all pretty solid tunes, however inseparable they are from the album's overall vibe.

That just leaves Plastic Ono Band's bookends, "Mother" and "God" (leaving aside the creepy, brief, monotone "My Mummy's Dead" ditty at the album's conclusion). "Mother" is the fullest artistic work on Plastic Ono Band, I think, and really is kind of a masterpiece of raw, musically expressed pain; his repeated, increasing hoarse cries at the end--"Mama don't go; Daddy come home!"--deepen and propel the song towards its conclusion. "God," though, is odd. It's an artfully arranged but sing-songy incantation, a kind of anti-mantra; if it wasn't for the tremendous combination of Billy Preston's gorgeous piano and Ringo's furiously controlled drumming, the whole thing would sound kind of petulant. Or at least I think that--but then, I've never been famous, and there's basically no chance I or anyone else who reads this will ever be remotely as famous as Lennon was. So maybe I've no place to say that his plaintive concluding lines--"I don't believe in Beatles....I was the walrus / but now I'm John. / And so, dear friends, / you'll just have to carry on. / The dream is over."--don't deserve the ponderousness he delivered them with. Like I said before, the end of the Beatles was huge--and to the extent that John was considered by many the Beatles' wounded artistic muse--thanks in no small part to John spending the first years after the break-up constantly telling himself and everyone else that--his pronouncements in "God" perhaps deserve all the respect they received. (As far as I'm concerned, though, the best thing about "God" is that it inspired Bono to write "God Part II," a mostly forgotten track from Rattle and Hum which is, I think, the best rock tune U2 ever recorded.)

I give Plastic Ono Band a solid B, maybe even a B+; it's better as a personal artistic document than as an album of popular music, but it's not entirely lacking in the latter. It'll be interesting to see if I decide that Lennon ever did better than this dark but mostly compelling first solo album of his.

Thoughts on MacIntyre

Via Alan Jacobs, I’ve learned that Alasdair MacIntyre passed away on Thursday, at the age of 96. Unlike other philosophers, theologians, and political theorists I’ve written memorials to on my blog over the years, MacIntyre’s work—which engaged deeply with issues of ethics, Aristoteliansim, and rationality—never had a major impact on my own. Still, I don’t see how any English-speaking student of politics or philosophy from the past half-century could have avoided being shaped by After Virtue, his short and explosive argument against the then-prevailing assumptions of Enlightenment liberalism, which was published in 1981; I was, like everyone else, and in that sense I owe him as much a debt as any other thinker I linked to above.

For a long time, my understanding of that debt was inextricable from the liberal-communitarian debates which academic philosophers and political theorists (including folks like me who were trained to become such, and for whom even if it didn’t quite work out that way, still can’t get that debate off my mind) who are today in their 50s were inundated with in graduate school. MacIntyre always denied being a communitarian, though he was lumped in with them anyway, and I think not inappropriately so. Beyond all the sturm und drang which attend any kind of intellectual argument over the drawing of disciplinary and ideological lines, there remains the simple fact that MacIntyre self-professed “revolutionary Aristotelianism” ultimately pointed to the local community, to the centrality of tradition, and to the continuity of stories and language—in other words, to things and phenomena very much beyond the ambit of the sovereign, rights-bearing individual—as the starting point to any of kind rationally defensible moral philosophy, to say nothing of any kind of actual civic health. By making the—I still think highly persuasive—argument that liberal individualism leaves us with what he called a mere “emotivism” as a basis for understanding, interpreting, and judging our own and others’ actions, he absolutely add significantly to a broad set of communitarian ideas which are still valid today.

Of course, today it is the postliberals who are most interested in claiming the communitarian MacIntyre for themselves. As bizarre that MacIntyre himself apparently found the prospect that his writings had somehow inspired people like Rod Dreher, Patrick Deneen, and others to embrace the goal of a retreat from and an overturning of the current liberal order, MacIntyre’s contempt for the conservative acceptance of capitalist inequality (when asked in 1996 what he still retained from his pre-Aristotelian Marxist phase, MacIntyre simply stated “I would still like to see every rich person hanged from the nearest lamp post”) probably isn’t enough to prevent that appropriation. Fred Dallmayr—who, as I’ve written, understood what it means to move beyond liberalism much better than most of those who parade that label—noted in a chapter from his book Post-Liberalism: Recovering a Shared World that MacIntyre’s thinking, which he called “stellar,” nonetheless evinces a certain “metaphysical realism” and “functionalism,” thereby undermining ways of thinking about our situation which call for a more immanent, more attendant, more patient approach. MacIntyre’s revolutionary Aristotelianism absolutely does not call for a revolutionary communitarian imposition, but it’s possible the way in which he formulated those ideas opened up an interpretation of them that he firmly disagreed with.*

But it would be wrong to make any set of reflections of MacIntyre’s immense philosophical achievements to rest entirely upon the political contestation over his prioritization of community. Far better, I think, would be to say something about how MacIntyre defined the communities of tradition, locality, and story in question. Because that can take us in an interesting direction.

In a book of MacIntyre’s that doesn’t appear to me to get much critical praise, but which was very important to me once upon a time (maybe even more so than After Virtue), he explored a fundamental, philosophical challenge to communitarian ideas, though he didn’t use that language to set up the problem. Essentially: if you’re not going to employ universalist concepts whose rationality are available to all individuals equally, and rather are going to insist upon the priority of concepts that have some communal, historical, or cultural particularity, then how can you avoid relativism? In short (and as the title of the book in questions asked): if you’re going to tie the possibility of rational, moral judgment to particular communities, then Whose Justice? Whose Rationality? should we employ? MacIntyre’s answer to these questions is dense and rewarding, and pretty much impossible to briefly summarize. But the first step is recognizing how forthright he is in accepting the puzzle. There is no attempt to sideline what it means accept that Aristotelian phronesis, or practical judgment, cannot be made logically universal:

But since practical reasoning, as Aristotle understands it, involves the capacity to bring the relevant premises concerning good and virtues to bear on particular situations and since this capacity is inseparable from, is indeed a part of, the virtues, including justice, it is also the case that one cannot be practically rational without being just. And for reasons which are in essentials the same as those which entailed the conclusion that one cannot be just apart from membership in some particular polis, one cannot be practically rational apart from membership in some particular polis. That one’s rationality should be not merely supported by but partly constituted by one’s membership in and integration into a social institution of some particular type is a contention very much at odds with characteristically modern views of rationality (p. 123).

Philosophical liberals will, of course, tear their hair out at that conclusion, but the rigor with which he makes this argument has stood the test of time: we are not self-constructing, but rather socially constituted beings, and thus mostly think, and judge, by and through those institutions and histories and forms which characterized our constitution. Okay—but does that mean all of them? Obviously not; some communal phenomena and constructions are far more relevant to questions of justice and rationality than others. For MacIntyre, the primary one—obviously so, given the importance he attaches to stories—is language, and the structural forms by which language is conveyed. On his reading of history, the boundaries of any shared, spoken, written language are what give us linguistic communities, which in turn provide our social communities. He never quotes Herder or Gadamer in Whose Justice? Whose Rationality?, but he’s plainly working in the same vein as them: trying to articulate, in Aristotelian terms, a philosophical hermeneutics, a way of understanding the constituting power of language over time and through the social bonds and interactions which define us.

The complaint about linguistic communities is, of course, obvious: languages change! They change through translation, through interpretation, through just the generational process by which stories that revealed to one set of listeners one set of references upon which they could reason, end up revealing to another, later, set of listeners an entirely different set of references, because of geographic or technological or cultural change. MacIntyre acknowledges this, insisting the every tradition is open--by definition, as a spoken, written, particular thing—to evolution: “[T]he time and place may come, when and where those who live their lives in and through the language-in-use which gives expression to [their tradition] may encounter another alien tradition with its own very different language-in-use, and may discover that while in some area of greater or lesser importance they cannot comprehend it within the terms of reference set by their own beliefs, their own history, and their own language-in-use, it [nonetheless] provides a standpoint from which, once they have acquired its language-in-use as a second language, the limitations, incoherences, and poverty of resources of their own beliefs can be identified, characterized, and explained in a way not possible from within their own tradition” (pp. 387-388).

That’s a long sentence, and appropriately so, because he’s talking about a long process. (Whether his own articulation of Aristotelianism supported it or not, his work on thinking through the real world process of phronesis absolutely had a patient, immanent character to it.) MacIntyre is telling us that in encountering differences, and as we learn about them and even embrace them, there will always be a constant need to maintain our own received traditions, stories, and language—not to defend them from some kind of pollution, but because it is through working through their interaction with one another that we can see clearly what one story can teach which another story cannot.

It's worth saying in conclusion that, dense as MacIntyre’s work often was, he could be viciously funny (at least in an academic sense). One of my favorite passages from Whose Justice? Which Rationality? has stayed with me for decades, because it’s such a thorough dumping on those who talk blithely about “the Western tradition” or “the Christian tradition” as something to be defended. Building upon his own careful philosophical consideration of linguistic communities and historical traditions, he takes the time castigate the type of teaching every one of us who has ever had to take on a survey course usually fall into, faulting both modernity, but also a flawed conservatism that doesn’t understand what it’s about:

The type of translation characteristic of modernity generates in turn its own misunderstanding of tradition. The original locus of that misunderstanding is the kind of introductory Great Books or Humanities course, so often taught in liberal arts colleges [guilty!], in which, in abstraction from historical context and with all sense of the complexities of linguistic particularity removed by translation, a student moves in rapid succession through Homer, one play of Sophocles, two dialogues of Plato, Virgil, Augustine, the Inferno, Machiavelli, Hamlet, and as much else as is possible if one is to reach Satre by the end of the semester. If one fails to recognize that what this provides is not and cannot be a reintroduction to the culture of past traditions, but is a tour through what is in effect a museum of texts, each rendered contextless and therefore other than its original by being placed on a cultural pedestal, then it is natural enough to suppose that, were we to achieve consensus as to a set of such texts, the reaching of them would reintegrate modern students into what is thought of as our tradition, that unfortunate fictitious amalgam sometimes known as “the Judeo-Christian tradition” and sometimes “Western values.” The writing of self-proclaimed contemporary conservatives, such as William J. Bennett, turn out in fact to be one more stage in modernity’s cultural deformation of our relationship to the past (pp. 385-386).

It’s not surprising that a man who could write a passage like that was the kind of professor who insisted on referring to his students as “Mr.” and “Ms.,” and once handed out a “B minus minus” as a grade. Thinkers like this leave a profound legacy, and even if MacIntyre’s is, I fear, fated to be misappropriated, his own arguments make it clear that, so long as we speak our language and tell our stories, there are always practical possibilities for some St. Benedict, like MacIntyre himself, to come along a remind us of the immense gifts of connection and continuity we possess. Requiescat in pace, sir.

*Update, 5/27/2025: Noah Millman’s tribute to MacIntyre is really superb, and in talking about his piece with our mutual friend Damon Linker, Damon made an observation which clarifies what I was gesturing at in this paragraph very well: “In the end, though, I’m not a MacIntyre admirer. I get my Aristotle from Strauss. And the problem Noah notes early on in his piece — of MacIntyre projecting Aristotelian theory onto the lived reality of the ancient and medieval worlds — is a big problem and the ultimate source of the influence he had on the ‘postliberal’ right. This influence made MacIntyre uncomfortable, but it was his own fault for eliding crucial distinctions in a way that made it sound like he was describing a lost world of moral wholeness and meaning that was banished by the Enlightenment, etc. That’s garden-variety reactionary romanticism, and it’s unfortunate MacIntyre gave it fuel.”