Happy John Lennon Day! (The FBI Is Probably Still Investigating Him)

by Ken Layne

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This is the anniversary of John Lennon being murdered by some creep, and it follows not so far behind what would’ve been Lennon’s 70th birthday — ha ha, and 70 doesn’t feel that old anymore, to us! (Nor does 40, which was Lennon’s age when he was gunned down outside his apartment, while signing stuff for his fans.) Think of all the people who made it all this time since: Keith Richards, Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan, Fidel Castro, even half the Beatles. And think of how much money and manpower the U.S. Government spent harassing and investigating this guitar player, because he was against a mindless, expensive, morally repugnant war just like all the other sane people alive at the time.
We have mentioned the Keith Richards’ autobiography, which is the only “book by a famous musician” we’ve actually read since Chronicles I, by the aforementioned Dylan. And what impresses from the Richards’ book more than anything is the tremendous, tireless efforts the authorities make to put Keef away for drug use — including drugs that were either legal or handed out by the British health care system to addicts until a change of policy in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
With Lennon in the United States, as these many gross pages of documents proudly displayed on the FBI website can attest, the interest was far more political. For years and years, during the long awful decline of the 1970s, many U.S. government employees trusted to uphold the Constitution and provide justice to Americans instead wasted their time (and our tax dollars) idiotically tracking the banal movements and thoughts of a guitar player who rarely left his apartment. Because OMG, what if he meant Revolution, for real?!?! What if the millionaire in Central Park West suddenly called up a guerrilla army of freaks to … we don’t know, ruin America in some way that differed from the way Washington (then and today) intentionally ruined America.
His great crime, as far as anyone can tell, was donating $75,000 to a group that planned to protest the GOP convention in Miami. Gosh! Is that a crime, now? Was it then?