On Dec. 10 (?) 1980, our English teacher (a Catholic nun, by the way) announced that Lennon had just been killed. She looked visibly upset (which too seems strange). I, of course, though she was going mad; I knew only too well about the body in the mausoleum. Art is power. :))
( Visions of disaster came to me a little later, on one of the A-bomb anniversaries, when I read a survivor's account. Later I found out that it, too, was fictionalized. Art _is_ power!! )
Strangely, I see nothing unusual in a catholic nun's reaction like one described by you. To many people, and even to my own less critical part, it all sounded like preaching of love.
It was only much later that I came to associate that preaching with cultural decay etc.; but, as the example of my subconscious (mis)perception of Imagine reiterates, art is power - one beyond the artist's effective control :)
My teacher's behaviour didn't seem at all strange at the time, exactly because of love and all that. A couple of years later, though, a classmate wrote an essay in praise of Imagine for her, and it became obvious that she really despised both the song's militant atheism ("Imagine there's no heaven... Above us, only sky") and, by extension, its author as well. This is, in rectrospect, why I don't quite understand her shock at the time of the murder. But of course I'm not a Catholic nun... Perhaps she also saw the cultural decay -- although she was very, very careful never to talk about it in class.
Quoting the song to explain the French riots seems utterly wrong. Or did this person use it as an example of what the (immie, Muslim) rioters were rioting against?
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( Visions of disaster came to me a little later, on one of the A-bomb anniversaries, when I read a survivor's account. Later I found out that it, too, was fictionalized. Art _is_ power!! )
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It was only much later that I came to associate that preaching with cultural decay etc.; but, as the example of my subconscious (mis)perception of Imagine reiterates, art is power - one beyond the artist's effective control :)
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Quoting the song to explain the French riots seems utterly wrong. Or did this person use it as an example of what the (immie, Muslim) rioters were rioting against?
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http://www.novpol.ru/index.php?id=200
I was wrong about the connection with France in the article; in fact it was drawn in a blog that quoted it.
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