|
Newspaper Exert from The New York Times: The Life and Death of John Lennon
The news arrived like fragment of some forgotten ritual.
First a flash on television, interrupting the tail end of a football game. Then
the telephones ringing, back and forth across the city, and then another
bulletin, with more details, and then more phone calls from around the country,
from friends, from kids with stunned voices, and then the dials being flipped
from channel to channel while WINS played on the radio. And yes: It was true.
Yes: Somebody had murdered John Lennon.
And because it was John Lennon, and because it was a man with a gun, we fell
back into the ritual. If you were there for the sixties, the ritual was part of
your life. You went through it for John F. Kennedy and for Martin Luther King,
for Malcolm X and for Robert Kennedy. The earth shook, and then grief was slowly
handled by plunging into newspapers and television shows. We knew there would be
days of cliché-ridden expressions of shock from the politicians; tearful shots
of mourning crowds; obscene invasions of the privacy of The Widow; calls for gun
control; apocalyptic declarations about the sickness of America; and then,
finally, the orgy over, everybody would go on with their lives.
Except . . . this time there was a difference. Somebody murdered John
Lennon. Not a politician. Not a man whose abstract ideas could send people
to wars, or bring them home; not someone who could marshal millions of human
beings in the name of justice; not some actor on the stage of history. This
time, someone had crawled out of a dark place, lifted a gun, and killed an
artist. This was something new. The ritual was the same, the liturgy as stale as
ever, but the object of attack was a man who had made art. This time the ruined
body belonged to someone who had made us laugh, who had taught young people how
to feel, who had helped change and shape an entire generation, from inside out.
This time someone had murdered a song.
And it had happened in a city to which that artist had come in order to be
private, in order to be safe. It had happened in New York.