We endured so much during the COVID lockdowns, but perhaps the worst moment just celebrated, as it were, its fifth anniversary.
Earlier this week, PJ's managing editor Paula Bolyard reminded me that booze makers temporarily switched from the sacred and time-honored duty of making booze and started making hand sanitizer, instead. Surely, I thought, that must have been the nadir of the global response to the pandemic.
It's said that nothing is as bad as what you can imagine. Except, of course, for John Lennon's "Imagine." Particularly when it's sung as a series of treacly solos by well-meaning (???) celebrities trying to make us little people feel better about being locked in our homes, and having our jobs, businesses, schools, playgrounds, and access to dying Nana in the nursing home all taken away.
If you need a reminder of the smug self-satisfaction unintentionally on display, here's the video.
The best thing you can say about "Star-Studded Imagine" is "They meant well," which is the non-Dixie version of "Bless their hearts."
The worst thing about that video might be the confusion it inspires. "Do I stab my eyes out with a fork and then take an icepick to my eardrums, or the other way around?" is quite the postmodern dilemma.
But there's more to "Imagine" than celebrities trying to comfort the benighted from the comfort of their Malibu mansions.
Poor Gal Gadot: Her career began its downward trajectory at that moment. Later that year, her repeat starring turn in "Wonder Woman 1984" wowed neither critics nor audiences. It's been nearly eight years since her last critical and commercial success. If Gadot thought her natural likability — and she has oodles of it — would make "Imagine" bearable, she was sadly mistaken.
How bad is "Imagine," really?
Nobody would accuse Walter Becker and Donald Fagen — the brain trust behind Steely Dan — of being anywhere on or even near the Right. Nevertheless, Fagen and Becker took one listen to Lennon's "Imagine" (that part is apocryphal) and wrote "Only A Fool Would Say That" in response.
I heard it was you
Talking 'bout a world where all is free
It just couldn't be
And only a fool would say that
That's a seriously nervy move — two young songwriters taking on John Lennon Himself on their first album — but it's safe to say that "Imagine" had inspired them — just not in the way Lennon intended.
Whether Lennon had anything to say about that, I can only imagine. According to Jack Douglas, who produced Lennon's final album, "Double Fantasy," the former Beatle had soured on President Jimmy Carter by 1980 and admired Ronald Reagan for his communication skills and charisma, if not for his politics. In one of his final interviews — a year or so before his murder in December 1980 — Lennon mocked both conservatives and liberals.
It seems Lennon himself might have grown past "Imagine" just eight years after he released it. If only the rest of the Left had such growth, we might have been spared the most cringeworthy moment from the lockdowns.
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P.S. If you need a little ear bleach, here's "Only A Fool Would Say That."
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