IT is that time of year when radio stations start to play the second worst pop record in history – over and over again.
I refer, of course, to John’s Lennon’s dirge ‘Happy Christmas (War is Over)’.
This woeful Crimbo offering would be the very worst pop record in history – if that shameful spot hadn’t already been bagged by Lennon’s even more naïve, political whinge-a-thon, the execrable ‘Imagine’.
Only someone as fundamentally twisted as Lennon could have cynically conflated the joy of the Christmas message with suffering and war – in one song.
In his Christmas song Lennon asks everyone ‘what have you done?’ for this special time, adding, miserably ‘the world is so wrong’. Ah, diddums.
Then he tells us: ‘War is over, if you want it. War is over now.’
Er, yeah, John – if you can read this from your toasty corner of Hell – if we want war to be over, it will be, won’t it? Just like that! It’s that simple. Except, I don’t think so!
Human beings fight because they have to. Sometimes, they go to war precisely to establish peace and love on Earth.
That’s what everyone who fought against the Nazis in World War Two did, actually.
If they had suddenly decided ‘war is over’ – because they personally wanted that – and then selfishly laid down their weapons, then we would all be slaves to totalitarianism now and the shadow of Satan would be stalking the Earth.
The fact is that all those who’ve paid the price of death on the battlefield, all through the centuries of human existence, are much nearer to the heart of the God than the aggressive, sarky-gobbed, absent father, drug abuser and wife beater who was John Lennon. The man who wanted to ‘give peace a chance’ indeed.
Lennon was – like all egomaniacs, from Lucifer onwards – in rebellion against God.
One of the many things I don’t like about ‘Imagine’ is that Lennon holds up – as an ideal! – the concept of a society where there’s no religion.
He asks us to imagine that there is ‘above us only sky’. How much more hopeful is the lyric from Roddy Frame which states: ‘At my best I do believe in love. I can’t conceive of only skies above.’
Exactly. There has to be more to our existence and to the majesty of creation than … nothingness.
And since I’ve drifted onto the subject of God, how surprising it is that Tony Blair, only now, in retirement from Government, will admit publicly that his Christianity was ‘hugely important’ to him during his tenure as Prime Minister.
Blair has admitted that he previously felt unable to come clean about his Christian beliefs because ‘Frankly, people do think you’re a nutter’.
Sadly, I think it’s true that people in this country do think people who bang on about Christianity are ‘nutters’.
Though quite why that should be, baffles me. After all, the Christian faith is, overwhelmingly, the bedrock on which our civilisation is built.
And our deep-rooted ideas of equality and human dignity in the West come from the Biblical concept of humankind being made in the image of the creator, our great ineffable God.
So it actually very sad that the former Prime Minister, when in office, felt unable to state unambiguously that he subscribed to the faith that effectively built our nation, and all the other nations of the West.
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Alberre wrote...
If you receive this email from the deepest darkest depths of Dubai, then thank God because some of my blogs have been getting lost in cyber space recently.
Tony Blair would not dare make comments about his religion and beliefs when in power because it might have upset upset the Muslim voters.
You certainly know how to whip up a storm of controversey with these comments. On a lighter note, altogether now "SO HERE IT IS MERRY CHRISTMAS, EVERYBODIES HAVING FUN" Got to be the number one crimbo tune of all time, well in my opinion anyway.
New Brighton Massive (Middle East Branch)
REGAN REPLIED: Glad w are receiving you loud and clear now, Alberre. I will raise a glass of cheer to you next time I am in Tallulah's bar (probably tonight, hic!).
Posted by: Alberre | November 26, 2007 5:08 PM