Ashley Gallando
Staff Writer
College students might not know that the singer of “Strawberry Fields Forever” and “All You Need is Love” had a much deeper passion than entertaining the world with song – he wanted to move it.
“The U.S. vs. John Lennon,” a new documentary film, chronicles the singer’s political activism and his battle against deportation by the U.S. government. While his early career with The Beatles is widely recognized, it was his work with radicals like Jerry Rubin and Bobby Seale of the Black Panthers that attracted the attention of the FBI.
The movie begins by discussing Lennon’s rough childhood in Liverpool. He was known for his slightly rebellious but passionate spirit, as well as his intelligence. It was at Quarry Bank Grammar School that Lennon, inspired by American rock’n’roll, would start a band that would become The Beatles.
We all looked up to John,” fellow Beatle Paul McCartney said in a interview for Playboy magazine following the band’s breakup. “He was older and he was very much the leader; he was the quickest wit and the smartest and all that kind of thing.”
It wasn’t the success of the group or the onslaught of Beatlemania that producers and directors David Leaf and John Scheinfeld wanted to highlight in their documentary, however. Instead it was the “secret war against John Lennon,” the efforts of the U.S. government to have him deported in the late ‘60s.
Lennon, who moved to New York with wife Yoko Ono in 1971, made friends with activists like Abbie Hoffman, placing himself at the center of the FBI’s radar. He wanted to use his influence as a celebrity to help end the war in Vietnam. He and Ono promoted the idea of peaceful protest, staging “bed-in’s” and performing interviews covered in a sheet in an attempt to fight discrimination and promote equality.
“Protest against peace, anyways, but peacefully,” Lennon said in an interview explaining the idea behind the bed-in, “because we think that peace is only got by peaceful methods, and to fight the establishment with their own weapons is no good, because they always win, and they have been winning for thousands of years.”
It wasn’t until Lennon sang his “John Sinclair” at a protest concert and the Michigan court freed Sinclair several days later that the Nixon administration began to seriously consider ways to quiet Lennon. When it was discovered that he was planning a nationwide tour that would end with a giant rally outside of the Republican National Convention, deportation proceedings were initiated.
Lennon would fight against the government for the next four years and he continued his anti-war activism up to the day of his assassination on December 8, 1980. It was this aspect of the famous Beatle that Leaf, graduate of George Washington University and Grammy-nominated director and Scheinfeld, graduate of Oberlin College and Northwestern University, wanted to expose to the world. The pair pitched the project in the mid-1990s but were met with little interest.
“It wasn’t until post-9/11 that people saw the contemporary relevance of this story,” said Scheinfeld in an interview with the New York Times. “Look at the main story points: You have an unpopular war, a lying president, illegal wiretapping. And you’re called unpatriotic if you protest against it.”
The movie shows scenes of John and Yoko at her art shows, singing together with a room full of press during the bed-in in Amsterdam and with their young son before John was shot. It includes interviews with prominent FBI and CIA agents at the time of Lennon’s activism, those who were commissioned by the government to investigate and follow him. It also features interviews with personal friends and close colleagues of Lennon, including Bobby Seale and John Sinclair, as well as Yoko.
Leaf and Scheinfeld chose to leave all parallels with current events out of the movie save for one subtle comment made by Nixon loyalist G. Gordon Liddy, who noted the similarities between the anti-terrorist initiatives of George W. Bush and the techniques used against Lennon and other activists during the Nixon administration.
The similarities, however, were apparent to Austin Maness, Pepperdine junior and head of the Light the Tower movement on campus. He argued that Lennon’s message of peace and nonviolent protest is just as applicable now as it was in the ‘60s.
“Lennon’s message was inspired by that of Ghandi and Martin Luther King Jr. and it is similarly timeless in nature, in that it calls us to peaceful protest of injustice, wherever we may find it.”
Lennon spoke to a country in the midst of war, where the young people formed the majority speaking out against the government and the violence it was supporting. In present times, when the state of the world seems to be fostering similar discontent, the words to Lennon’s “Give Peace a Chance” still speak to many.
“Lennon made an impact if in nothing less than that he affected the minds and the social vocabulary of a generation,” Maness noted. “He gave them a song.”
The documentary, which opened on September 22, is playing at the Laemmle Fallbrook 7 Theatre at 6731 Fallbrook Ave. in West Hills, the Laemmle Monica Theatre at 1332 2nd St. in Santa Monica, and the Laemmle Town Center Theatre at 17200 Ventura Blvd in Encino.
Fact Box:
Bono – the modern day Lennon?
With is message of nonviolence and peaceful reform, U2’s Bono may be the closest thing to a modern-day Lennon. Traveling around the war and singing songs of peace and love, Bono’s music has become the song of the present generation, just as Lennon’s words spoke to the hearts of those tired of war and corruption in the 60’s.
Lennon’s “Imagine”
Imagine there’s no countries
It isn’t hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people
Living in peace
You may say I’m a dreamer
But I’m not the only one
I hope someday you’ll join us
And the world will be one
U2’s “Peace on Earth”
Jesus could you take the time
To throw a drowning man a line
Peace on Earth
Tell the ones who hear no sound
Whose sons are living in the ground
Peace on Earth
No whos or whys
No-one cries like a mother cries
For peace on Earth
She never got to say goodbye
To see the color in his eyes
Now he’s in the dirt
That’s peace on Earth
12-02-2006
