I Read The News Today Oh Boy: 40 Years Later

I read the news today
oh, boy
About a lucky man
who made the grade...

- "A Day In the Life" The Beatles

I was a wee lad of ten years in 1980, one of those groundbreaking years where a lot of crazy things happened. We had Soviets in Afghanistan, hostages in Tehran, a Presidential election that was about to shift the political landscape ever after, we found out who Luke's father was, a college-level team of amateurs upset the best team in Olympics ice hockey.

My family had recently moved to Florida, so we paid attention to things like the Mariel boatlift turning Miami crazy, we had the Skyway Bridge disaster in the Tampa Bay area, and Disney World suing a lot of local day care centers for unlicensed use of their characters on the buildings (this is when I learned "don't fuck with Disney").

We had Mount Saint Helens erupting in the Northwest, we had a heat wave throughout the summer.

On a personal note, my family went on a long road trip that summer to visit our great-grandmother Kinzer in West Virginia, my first time seeing mountains (my last time seeing fireflies) and finding out about the Hatfields and McCoys. We made side trips to Asheville to see the Vanderbilt estate (my brothers made a game of spotting all the hidden servant doors), and to swing through Alabama to visit more family (finally watched Empire Strikes Back in an Auburn movie theater with my cousins). Poor mom had to do all the driving.

That autumn we had an election that November 4, Reagan winning over Carter. At Palm Harbor Middle, however, we were... one of the students had gone missing. It didn't end happy. Not for her family, not for her friends, not for a school full of traumatized kids. It made things feel colder than they normally would in central Florida that end of the year.

I'm talking about all this because it all builds up to one of the bigger moments at the end of 1980. At the end of an era in popular culture. It was something that cut across everything - Politics, religion, music, gun control, social ills, cults of celebrity - affecting us then and now.

The assassination of John Lennon. 

I saw a film today
oh boy
The English Army had
just won the war
The crowd of people
turned away
But I just had to look
Having read the book
I'd love to turn you on...

We usually call the single death by gunshot a murder. But in Lennon's case, it felt like an assassination. If you understand what an assassination does, it's the death of a key figure of a moment in history, someone who could affect or had affected the flow of events to go in a direction that the forces of darkness would rather not go. 

Lennon was a cultural and political icon. One of the Fab Four - the Beatles! - whose appearance on the world stage defined a decade of the 1960s, during which the band's influence on fashion, youthful ideals, and even political agitation covered everything from UK's economic upheavals to the U.S.'s quagmire of a Vietnam War. Lennon himself had faded from the public view after the breakup of the Beatles in 1970, and had only returned to recording albums that year with Double Fantasy after a five-year retirement, but his messages about world peace along with the possibilities of a Beatles reunion kept him well poised on that stage. He had just done an interview with Playboy magazine (yes, people DID read it for the articles). He was planning a world tour, which by the 1980s for major rock artists was a huge fucking deal. 

And then a madman shot him. (NEVER SAY THE SHOOTER'S NAME)

Global media was still in its infancy in terms of word getting out by radio and television. The shooting happened Monday night, during which another cultural icon - NFL's Monday Night Football - made the announcement live that Beatle John was officially declared dead at the hospital. The impact went global. Peace rallies sprung up everywhere, noticeably in the Central Park area outside of the Dakotas apartment building (there is a memorial there now). For weeks afterward, the rock n roll stations would play nothing but Beatles songs (including John's solo works, as well as Paul McCartney's and George Harrison's and Ringo Starr's).

There was this horrifying sense that something had gone wrong. Even though it was just one man's death in a world full of violence and hate and madness. The kind of things John Lennon preached against. Maybe that was why. Just the senseless of that kind of violence in the world...

So that was me, waking up Tuesday morning to the news that day, about John Lennon's death. On top of what had happened to my school to the loss of Elisa Nelson... and then the following March with a shocking home invasion/murder that took the lives of a mother and daughter in the Spanish Oaks neighborhood near Dunedin... and then President Reagan getting shot later that month... Seriously, by the time the forces of darkness made an attempt on the Pope for God's sake, I had come to the conclusion that there was something fundamentally wrong with humanity. If there was a point where any interest or desire to hold or own a gun was in me, it was gone after John's murder. All my anti-gun sentiment started here.

I read the news today
oh, boy
4,000 holes
in Blackburn, Lancashire
And though the holes
were rather small
They had to count them all
Now they know
       how many holes
            it takes to fill
                the Albert Hall!!!

I'd love to turn you on...

Lennon would be 80 today pending good health. Maybe would have seen a Beatles reunion or two by now (the surviving bandmates were convinced that the Band Aid/Live Aid efforts in 1985 would definitely seen a reunion set). There's entire works of literature and film that posits what the world could have been like if the madman hadn't pulled the trigger.

Elisa Nelson would be 50 today. Like everyone else from our student class, she'd be working somewhere. If she married, had a family... her kid(s) would be getting into college by now.

The five students I never met in Gainesville, that was ten years after all this but still, it all tied into my mindset, my view of the world... I promised I wouldn't be like that...

what if there were no madmen, no rapists, no angry guys with guns? 

I think of them often.

What if Beatle John had survived after all? It wouldn't have ended all the violence and madness, all things considered.

But we would have had a brighter light shining us on to be better than all that.

I'd like to say thank you on behalf of the group and ourselves, and I hope we passed the audition. - Beatle John, having a laugh at the end of the Rooftop Concert