HOLIDAYS IN HELL: So This Is Christmas — and What Have Celebrities Actually Done?

As French authors would later conclude in their magnificent clean-up book on 20th-century communism, The Black Book of Communism, in 1999, nearly 100 million people died worldwide as a result of Marxist atheists.

To be sure, faith is no guarantee of a refuge from the evil that men do. Evil is also committed in the name of faith and by those who think they were/are on a mission from God. The Islamic Republic of Iran has been doing this since 1979, as one modern example.

However, it’s an analytical stretch that requires undue faith in the innate goodness of the religiously naked ape to believe atheism and atheist states will be any different from others who have complete power in a state. It’s an error to think that atheism will somehow thus serve as a peaceful refuge from humanity’s worst impulses. To believe this is to assume that religion — and not concentrated power — is the main problem in human affairs.

See China’s Xi Jinping today as the latest atheist incarnation of John Lennon’s imagined state and its consequences: a man on a mission for himself, who will run roughshod over his own population and others who want nothing to do with his view of how we should live. Xi’s repression is already obvious in China and in Hong Kong, and if he ever gets the chance, in Taiwan.

The same vapidity is evident in “Happy Xmas.” Its most famous line opens the song, and lodges in my cranium without asking permission: “And so this is Christmas/And what have you done?” Those ten words have enough hubris to inflate the Hindenburg. It’s as if ordinary folk somehow should justify themselves to a 1960s–1970s rock star consumed by self and by error, as in his musical worship of anti-religious belief and consequences.

The easy response from normal people to two celebrities who, by 1971, had been writing songs and giving interviews from their bedroom decked out in pajamas can be imagined as follows, perhaps from a single mom: “Oh, I don’t know, John — I’ve been raising three kids, caring for my aged Mom, and working double-shifts at the coffee shop to pay the bills. You?”

Other responses to imagine: From a Second World War veteran: “I fought my way on to Omaha Beach and survived D-Day — and the rest of the war, but many of my friends did not. We beat the Nazis, which is what mattered even more despite the sacrifices.”

Or imagine the response from a steelworker, miner, or farmer: “Endured another grinding day at the foundry/shaft/farm, this to afford the mortgage and Christmas presents.”

As Ian MacDonald wrote in Revolution in the Head: The Beatles’ Records and the Sixties, a trenchant analysis of the Beatles’ changing worldviews and how they fed their lyric writing, focusing on “The Ballad of John and Yoko,” an earlier attempt by Lennon to shift away from writing universal anthems to focusing on his day to day celebrity life:

Behaving as if they had personally invented peace, they jetted round the world in first-class seats selling it at third-rate media-events. This was arrogant as well as silly, and the news media’s derision, of which THE BALLAD OF JOHN AND YOKO self-righteously complains, was not only inevitable but, in the main, justified.

Of all the dangerous ideas Ono unloaded on her spouse around this time, the most damaging was her belief that all art is about the artist and no one else. Serving to confirm Lennon’s self-absorption, this also torpedoed his universalism, and it was as a man struggling to resolve this exacerbation of his lifelong emotional contradictions that he reeled from heroin to Primal Therapy to Maoism and finally to drink during the next three years. Otherwise scathingly honest, he unwittingly put himself into a position in which he was obliged to defend things that, deep down, he cared nothing about. Uncompromising as ever, he threw himself into this trap with total commitment, not only refusing to draw a line between his public and private life but going out of his way to personalise everything that happened in his vicinity, a self-centredness which could hardly avoid occasionally degenerating into paranoia, as THE BALLAD OF JOHN AND YOKO demonstrates. Indeed, so outrageously egocentric is this song that it’s difficult to know whether to deplore its vanity or admire its chutzpah in so candidly promoting Self to artistic central place.

In one of his last interviews, Lennon would finally admit, “I dabbled in politics in the late 1960s and 1970s, more out of guilt than anything. Guilt for being rich and guilt thinking that perhaps love and peace isn’t enough and you have to go and get shot or something, or get punched in the face to prove I’m one of the people. I was doing it against my instincts.”

His fans, though, cottoned on much more quickly: “The crowd I first saw the original [Let It Be before being Disney-fied by Peter Jackson] with weren’t interested in a happier spin on the Beatles. They were there to render judgment, to be the choric voice of the Beatles’ community declaring their disapproval. In other words, they were there to boo. They were there to boo Yoko Ono. If I remember the film correctly, the opening credits were barely done when we see John Lennon, and there is Yoko, sitting right beside him. ‘Boooo.’ Then, there is Yoko, knitting right beside him. ‘Boooo.’ For the length of the movie, every time Yoko was on camera, the crowd booed, as if to say, ‘Take that, Yoko, for breaking up the Beatles.’”