How Come John Lennon Could Shoot Heroin & I Can't?

I am so not down with this shit. Sigh...

So I was amazed how on Facebook yesterday, so many more people my age were lamenting John Lennon’s death than the anniversary of Pearl Harbor. Are the two events even roughly equivalent?

I’ll out myself here: I’m not a John Lennon fan. I like some of the musical stuff he did while he was jostling with McCartney for room under the Beatles umbrella but I think Give Peace A Chance and Imagine are mawkish (to say the least), while the Yoko love ouvre is just embarrassing.

And Lennon’s life as a passion play? C’mon. I mean, I’d like to stay inside for five years and shoot heroin all day too. Who wouldn’t? Heroin is fun stuff. But for some reason if I do it I’m an addict, and a failure, and generally A Bad Human Being (I’m talking “to my peers” here, goes without saying to various authorities), whereas when Lennon did it, he was an inspiration, a veritable demi-urge. How does that work?

I suppose part of this has to do with age. Pearl Harbor happened eleven years before I was born, and it stopped being “a day that will live on in infamy” the first time someone stateside bought a Honda motorcycle. Although WWII ended only five years before I was born, nobody ever talked about it while I was growing up. I suppose the timeline was mentioned in my high school civics classes, but I was mostly so stoned it didn’t penetrate. So I think I was roughly 20 before I realized, Hey! This is not-so-ancient history. And by then we’d gone on to Viet Nam. Which my own children viewed exactly the same way I’d viewed WWII...

There are WWII reenactors, I’m told, but they can only reenact the America vs the Japs scenarios – you’ll never see a Holocaust reenactment (unless you count Schindler’s List.) The Germans, of course, have made swastikas illegal and Holocaust denial a crime – which I, as a Jew who believes strongly in free expression, find reprehensible. Those things aren’t illegal per se in this country, but the growing climate of political correctness would make it impossible to greenlight a show like Hogan’s Heroes today.

I wonder how long till the first 9/11 reenactors? Not the planes, obviously. But staged panic in the streets?