My problem with Lennon's "Imagine"
Remember what I was telling you guys about that damn song? Well, someone else said it better before me:
War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself.
John Stuart Mill (1806 - 1873)
War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself.
John Stuart Mill (1806 - 1873)
4 Comments:
Massive Kudos!
I also believe that when John Lennon sings "nothing to kill or die for" he has created a world in which there is conversly nothing to live for. That JS Mill quote is great. Is it going in the novel?
Here's another quote along the same lines.
"The true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him." - GKC
And another oft quoted statement.
"We make war that we may live in peace" - Aristotle
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To paraphrase C.S. Lewis, "Sometimes the only way to stop a man from killing me (or someone else) is to kill him." The Law calls this self-defense; it is an age-old doctrine and hardly needs rehashing. There are some who argue that it is better to just be killed, just let him kill you. It must follow that it is also better to just let everyone else be killed too without defending them. Does this make sense? I think not.
I like Lennon, but that song is one of his worst. It is muddy thinking set to music that sounds like a tire stuck in the mud.
I really, really like the quote, but it doesn't really fit with the themes of the book. Most of the quotes I pick, as applied to the section of the book written after them, could mean one of two things. I like that sense of ambiguity. The Mill quote doesn't really fit any particular section, or the whole of the book, although I wish I could find some excuse to include it.
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