I Can’t Imagine a Dumber Song

“John Lennon’s ‘Imagine’ quickly became the soundtrack of hope in the wake of Sept. 11,” reported The New York Times in 2001. Some hope.

Rolling Stone recently informed us what the “500 Greatest Songs of All Time” are. Of course, in a culture with the historical memory of a fruit fly, Rolling Stone meant “rock songs” and not, for instance, ancient ballads like “Greensleeves” or ancient hymns like “Adeste Fideles,” which predate immortal works like “Muskrat Love” by some time. Rock culture is preternaturally concerned with the Now, and therefore sees the ’60s as Pleistocene antiquity before which all the ages were formless and void.

I like rock as much as the next guy. But let’s face it: Rock specializes in the big, the loud, the grotesquely Dionysian and the strongly felt, not the small, nuanced, proportional or considered. Consequently, in the world of rock, a ballad is often thought to be “deep” when it is really just “not blaring.” It’s a sort of Pavlovian acoustic response that conflates mere noise reduction with contemplation.

That is why, I’m convinced, a song as stupid as “Imagine” by John Lennon can still be regarded by millions as both profound and moving to the degree that it is the No. 3 greatest song ever, according to Rolling Stone.

You can see imbeciles swaying to this tune, eyes closed in beatific bliss, at everything from school assemblies to soccer matches to Sept. 11 commemorations.

How does it honor the dead to “imagine there’s no heaven”? How does it honor the firefighters who sacrificed their lives to mewl about “nothing to … die for”? Indeed, it is sung by earnest churchgoers, even at Catholic Masses, who seem to perceive no particular contradiction between the liberating wonder of imagining there’s no heaven and the prayer that begins, “Our Father, who art in heaven.” It seems to be because the words of the song are more or less treated as sonorous replacements for singing “la la” to its pleasant tune.

Me, I pay attention to words. That is why I have always thought of it as a sort of anthem to original sin: fallen man’s infinite capacity to believe he can create heaven on earth if he’s just permitted one more chance to get it right.

Everything the song advocates and hopes for as a supreme good was the fountainhead of all the horrors of the 20th century.

“Imagine there are no countries.” Hitler dreamt of a world without borders.

“Imagine there’s no heaven … no religion too.” Stalin and Mao sought to free us from religion and the burden of hoping for something more than this life.

“Imagine no possessions.” Communism was all about freeing us from possessions (though multi-zillionaire Lennon seems to have honored this dream more in the breach than the observance).

“Imagine all the people living for today.” You got it! A culture of brain-dead MTV-educated “fornicate-today-and-abort-tomorrow” zombies has accomplished the mission.

Yet people still talk as though “Imagine” is some sort of inspiring hymn. I cannot, for the life of me, see why.

The atheist’s common complaint is that religion is “escapism.” Eminent theologian Peter Kreeft replies that the people most concerned with stamping out escapism are jailers. It’s no coincidence that “Imagine” similarly dreams of a prison planet of contented cows where there is “above us only sky.”
For me, it’s one of the agitprop songs they play over the concentration camp speakers non-stop in order to keep the inmates’ minds off both heaven and hope.

Here’s the real deal: This world is a furnace of suffering. Always has been and always will be. Christian hope tells us that the suffering is not wasted and will issue in glory through Christ. “Imagine” tells us that we are trapped here under a blank void of nitrogen and oxygen, surrounded by trillions of miles of vacuum, blankly indifferent to our birth or death. It counsels us to anesthetize ourselves with the pursuit of bourgeois comfort, with the goal of turning human beings into cattle. (“Nothing to kill or die for” — not even freedom, honor, love or truth.)

“Imagine” solves the problem of suffering by euthanizing the soul. Like Homer Simpson, it concludes that the lesson to be learned from humanity’s long struggle with transcendent hope is “Don’t hope.” It counsels us to abandon dreams of heaven and even the schoolyard impulse to defend the weak from a bully.

It is the song of H.G. Wells’ Eloi, who populate the future in The Time Machine, the national anthem of the bureaucratic world state where the herd are all comfortably numb, having been lobotomized of those troubling transcendent desires that have, for too long, made Caesar’s job of conditioning the masses so problematic.

As we move closer to finally domesticating the human animal and training him to keep his mind entirely on the bread and circuses of this world, I, for one, hope that someday you will not join them, and the world (which lieth in the power of the Evil One) will not be one.

Mark Shea is senior content editor of www.CatholicExchange.com.