A working class hero was something to be

Thirty years ago tonight John Lennon was murdered by a mentally ill fan. By a simple twist of fate the story was broken by sportscaster Howard Cosell during a ABC Monday Night Football telecast. After the shooting police responding to the scene took Lennon to a nearby emergency room, where an ABC employee was being treated for a broken leg. The employee overheard the police discussing the shooting, then witnessed Yoko Ono’s grief-stricken disbelief when told minutes later that her husband was dead (Ono had been with him when he was shot). The employee hobbled to a pay phone, and called in the story. MNF producer Roone Arledge was instructed to tell the announcing crew to break the news on the air. The crew were given the news during a commercial break, and had less than a minute to figure out how to handle the situation. Cosell, who knew Lennon personally and indeed had interviewed him on MNF six years earlier, didn’t want to do it. Frank Gifford insisted he had to, and Cosell gave the horrible news the memorable treatment linked above.

I was watching the telecast in my dorm room in Ann Arbor. The Youtube video brought the shock of that moment back as if it had all happened yesterday. (Today of course something like this would have been tweeted almost before the shots had stopped echoing).

Besides being a great musician, John Lennon was an interesting political figure. His politics were of course not “serious” in the sense that Very Serious People give that word — they reflected a kind of utopian radicalism that found its expression in absurdist performance art, such as the infamous Bed-Ins for Peace he undertook with Ono in 1969. Lennon paid a real personal price for his opposition to the Vietnam War: the basic story is told well if a bit simplistically in the documentary The U.S. v. John Lennon.

I dislike “if X were alive today” speculations on principle, since such musings invariably conclude that the departed’s hypothetical present opinions would be identical to the author’s current views. Nevertheless I very much wish John Lennon were alive today for all sorts of reasons — not the least of which is the desire to still have his voice advocating, through art and activism, for that most feared and despised thing, a world of free and equal human beings.