Gerhard L. Weinberg: Review of Dagmar Barnouw's The War in the Empty Air: Victims, Perpetrators, and Postwar Germans (Indiana University Press, 2005)
Source: Written for HNN (12-21-05)

This is a very detailed discussion of the way in which in the opinion of the author the memory of German suffering in World War II has been overlooked and disregarded in Germany, the United States, and elsewhere.
Since the author is unfamiliar with the relevant literature, she asserts that it does not exist. For example, there is a massive set of volumes on the expulsion of Germans from portions of East and Southeast Europe -- presumably to be found in the library of the University of Southern California where she teaches -- but she is unfamiliar with it.
The generally known fact that these expellees had a political party of considerable importance in postwar Germany is unknown to her. Those of its leaders who because of the party’s significance were included in Konrad Adenauer's cabinet, Waldemar Kraft and Theodor Oberlander, cannot be found in her index. Since she is unacquainted with the massive memoir literature of the 1945-1960 era, she similarly asserts that it never appeared. The general reconciliation with Germany both in Europe and in the United States, especially when contrasted with the absence of a similar development in East and Southeast Asia, does not fit into her endless screeds against President George W. Bush, Israel, and Holocaust commemoration and hence is nowhere mentioned.
There are interesting autobiographical materials in the book, but these are sadly marred by dependence on unreliable secondary works like those of David Irving. The lengthy discussion of the former SS officer who rose to be head of Aachen University under another name is marred by the erroneous assertion that Theo Buck was his successor (p. 254), when in fact that position was occupied by Bernhard Sann. The discussion of the actual air war is as bizarre as much of her other review of the war. It is described as Churchill's (p. 130). She is evidently not aware of the fact that when the Germans started bombing cities in Poland in September 1939 -- while the British were dropping leaflets on German cities -- Churchill was First Lord of the Admiralty. The discussion of bombing, like that of the expellees, suffers from the author's unfamiliarity with a literature that in her imagination does not exist. The author's ignorance of the military and geographic realities of World War II is dramatically illustrated by her claim that not only the Russian but also the Allied forces waited on the other side of the Vistula in 1944 while the Germans put down the Warsaw uprising (p. 276, note 11). How British troops in Burma and American forces in Alaska could have helped the Poles in Warsaw will remain the author's secret. She is clearly unfamiliar with the book by Neil Orpen, Airlift to Warsaw, which the University of Oklahoma Press published in 1984 and which covers the subject.
The author has great difficulties with statistics, and these difficulties may provide a clue to the nature of the book as a whole. Just two examples. Professor Barnouw maintains that of the German prisoners of war taken by the Soviet Union only 5% survived (p. 53). The correct figure is about 65%, still a sad figure, but nothing resembling her fantasies. On the other hand, when it comes to Jewish victims, the statistics are altered in the opposite direction. In a notorious scene, the commander of one of the murder squads assigned to the Eastern Front, Otto Ohlendorf, testified at the main trial at Nuernberg that his unit murdered ninety thousand Jews and other victims. In her reference to this, the number somehow shrinks to nine thousand (p. 236).
It will be obvious to any reader of this work that Professor Barnouw has an interesting thesis that may well deserve exploration. That cannot, however, be done in the shoddy way that it is handled here.
The Indiana University Press is rightly known for important contributions to scholarship. This reviewer cannot imagine how it came to be misled into publishing a work as defective as this one.

Response by Dagmar Barnouw
Mr. Weinberg’s highly prejudiced and distorting “reading” of my book and his insulting attack on Indiana University Press that “came to be misled into publishing a work as defective as this one” are hard to answer. He has not engaged with one single argument made in the book he was charged to review but simply rejected all of them as undeserving of all readers’ attention. It is true, in his concluding sentence he refers to the book’s “interesting thesis that may deserve exploration” but immediately adds that this “cannot, however, be done in the shoddy way that it is handled here,” leaving the reader of his “review” without a clue what this thesis might be.
Weinberg’s judgment of the book’s “shoddiness” is backed by a long list of events, persons and scholarly literature of the postwar era that I allegedly did not have knowledge of because I did not mention them. But refusing to engage in any way with my arguments, he did not understand either that the issues that seem so important to him are irrelevant to my arguments or that I have indeed dealt with them (viz. the politics of the Association of Deportees; my discussion of Sebald’s claim that there had been no literature on the air war before his series of lectures on that topic in the late nineties). All he has to say about my “interesting autobiographical materials” (why are they interesting?) is that they are “sadly marred by dependence on unreliable works like those of David Irving.” That generalizing judgment of Irving’s work and of my alleged “dependence” on it reflects Weinberg’s very narrow perspective on the issue of air war. For my discussion of the bombing of Dresden where my family was bombed out (one city among many others discussed) I drew on a variety of materials, including literary and scholarly studies, photographic documentation and eyewitness reports. I included three references to Irving’s classic The Destruction of Dresden (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1964) because they corroborated earlier and later witness accounts. These were my only references to any of Irving’s work. I also pointed out that Irving’s numbers of the Dresden air raid dead tend to be high and the official numbers used during the commemorative year 2005 (criticized by many citizens of Dresden) tend to be low. Instructively, they were considerably lower than they were 10 years ago—a “fact” that does not reflect the result of historical research over the last ten years but political expediency, both American and German. One should mention here that many numbers concerning that still “unbelievable” bloodbath of W.W.II are “soft” and depend on the political, moral, and professional perspective of the person who uses them.
Irving, a gifted archival researcher and a troubled man, has been “fatally” tainted for many academics and public intellectuals because of his later associations with the radical right. In my view, this does not mean that I cannot make use of his good earlier work for fear that this would taint my own arguments in the eyes of believers in Nazi Evil who would reject them anyway. His value as a researcher was shown in 1983 when, at a press conference announcing the German publication of Stern’s acquisition of Hitler’s recently discovered diaries, he asked the crucial question: had the ink been chemically tested to prove the age of the document? It had not; Mr. Weinberg had not thought of that when he authenticated the document for Stern; it turned out to be a fake.
For Weinberg, a book that explores critically the postwar political uses of “Nazi Evil” in America and Germany and argues for more open and rational discussion of these issues needs to be discredited by any means, among them serious distortions and strategic confusions. A good example of Weinberg’s approach is his treatment of the last chapter of my book, “This Side of Good and Evil: A German Story.” It analyzes the irrational reactions of German politicians and public intellectuals to the 1995 revelation of the two lives of an SS officer, an obscure Nazi “theologian” in the SS institution Ahnenerbe under the name of Schneider and, under the name of Schwerte, a well-known liberal academic and social-democratic administrator for the first 50 years of the Bundesrepublik. This long chapter with its wealth of new arguments and information about the Nazi dystopia explores some of the most important moral and political issues of the postwar era, the intricate fallacies of the politics of remorse and of the power of impotence. For Mr. Weinberg it “is marred by the erroneous assertion that Theo Buck was his [Schwerte’s] successor” and therefore deserves no further discussion. This is a truly extraordinary statement given the nature of that chapter, of the book as a whole. Unwilling to engage with my arguments, Weinberg just seeks to discredit them by claiming yet another error I made, another example of the “shoddiness” of my study. The error is Weinberg’s, as in so many other cases. Theo Buck, one of Schwerte’s most vitriolic critics, was not his immediate successor at Aachen university. Schwerte was 85, long since retired, when he “outed” himself in 1995 and started the media feeding frenzy fed by his former colleagues and friends in high political office. But Buck, who contributed mightily to the media war against the “traitor” and” pathological “liar” Schwerte, really the arch-Nazi Schneider, did hold Schwerte’s former position at the time of this attack.
All that remains to say about Mr. Weinberg’s shoddy treatment of a serious study entrusted to him for a serious review on the level of HNN reviews is that it confirms my findings (rather than “thesis”) in this book. The American Manichean vision of W.W.II, pitting the absolute goodness and innocence of the victors against the absolute Evil and guilt of the vanquished would have a profound impact in the postwar era that indeed marred the “reconciliation” with Germany invoked by Mr. Weinberg. Naturally, Germany was received back into the comity of nations on the terms of the victors. But these terms meant upholding “forever” the German anxiety of the memory of their enduringly Bad past. The victors had plenty of help from the Germans, since that anxiety proved so easily exploitable by the politics of remembrance both in Germany and the U.S. These politics created powerful hierarchies of suffering protected from any critical discussion over the last six decades. Arguably, the absence of informed rational discussion of Nazi persecutions has hindered rather than helped to develop a better understanding of the still in many ways unclear historical meanings of W.W.II—the worst war in Western history of which the deeds of the Nazi-regime are one important part.
Posted on Wednesday, December 21, 2005 at 10

The Certainties of Evil and the Politics of Not-Forgetting
By Dagmar Barnouw

Ms. Barnouw is Professor of German and Comparative Literature, University of Southern California, and author of Visible Spaces: Hannah Arendt and the German Jewish Experience, John Hopkins (1990). She lives in Del Mar, California. Her latest book is The War in the Empty Air: Victims, Perpetrators, And Postwar Germans.

"The Holocaust" as a construct of memory stories about the historical events of Nazi rule began its spectacular rise in Western culture with the Eichmann trial that located Jewish identity in the experience of extreme suffering and victimization. Presented on the stage of the world, before hundreds of journalists of the print and electronic media, this trial changed the earlier universalist perspective on Nazi crimes by focusing on individual Holocaust witnesses. The chief prosecutor Gideon Hausner had chosen a large number of witnesses on the basis of their written testimonies and his subsequent interviews with them. His goal was to derive the dramatic structure of Eichmann's trial exclusively from their stories rather than the extensive collection of Nazi documents gathered by the Israeli police.The extreme experience of "the Holocaust"could only become 'real' for the millions of readers, listeners and viewers of the trial, if a large number of carefully coached survivors testified in person and thereby individualized the uniqueness of unimaginably cruel persecution. In the cumulative acts of individual recitation, however, these stories would not draw on collective memories "refreshed," as Hausner had hoped, by the witnesses' recorded testimonies. Rather, the emotions released by the recitations overpowered the witnesses to the point where they became their stories of extreme suffering-an identification that exploded the elaborate choreography of the trial. Screaming with the recalled pain, fainting from the remembered fear, the performance of their past persecution collapsed all temporal and spatial distance between the narrator and the narrated and thereby erased the historicity of their experiences of persecution, that is, the complex relational historical reality of Nazi crimes. Hausner would have been dismayed at first that his elaborate strategy for handling the witnesses' testimonies had not worked as planned. He would not have wanted his audiences to witness this seemingly uncontrollable emotional engulfment in selective individual reenactments of past persecutions that in reality had been shared with many others. But he also had not planned for the representation of Nazi persecution to be negotiated by historical relation and comparison between different witnesses' past experiences based on a rational interrogation protocol. And it was precisely the spontaneous erasure of such rational contextual historical inquiry that communicated to "the whole world" the supra-historical reality of indescribable, unspeakable, incredible suffering. What the world saw, heard, visualized and visceralized watching this trial had to mean the uniqueness, and then unique significance, of Jewish suffering that called for a supra-historical status of the survivor-as-witness and a near-religious postwar hierarchy of victimization and innocence. Observing and reporting the Eichmann trial, Hannah Arendt disliked particularly the witnesses' self-absorbed performances of their extreme suffering that created the illusion of a powerful immediacy of previous persecution and thus drowned out the ostensibly real issue of the trial, the guilt of Eichmann. She was troubled by the result of the show trial's sensationalist and emotionalist use of the witnesses, namely the uncommonly low protocol standards regarding their examination and the evaluation of their testimonies. She also criticized the staging of Jewish collective identity in the experience of Nazi persecutions as "uniquely" Jewish victimization, where in historical reality many other groups were also persecuted as the declared enemies of the Nazi regime. In her correspondence with the philosopher Karl Jaspers about the question of German guilt, Arendt had expressed her fears about the political consequences of the pure victim status of Jews in the postwar era (17 August 1946). More clearly than most of her contemporaries, she foresaw the problems with the American sharply drawn separation between the absolute innocence and goodness of the victors and the absolute guilt and Evil of all the vanquished: none of them politically workable concepts. Her compounded misgivings about the political consequences of the Eichmann trial contributed to her ill-advised choice of the subtitle for the Eichmann book, "The Banality of Evil." It was meant to focus more attention on the guilt of Eichmann, an extraordinary mass-murderer and ordinary man, and less on his extraordinary victims. But linking "banality" and "Evil" was a profound shock to most of her readers since it appeared to question the mysterious substance and significance of (Nazi) Evil, and by association the a priori existential dignity of the victims of that Evil. Arendt, in turn, was shocked by their powerful desire to believe in the profoundness of Evil: her critical questions and reservations signified an amoral violation of religio-political certainties, heresy. Over the decades, the desire to join the community of believers would grow and with it the semi-religious status of "the Holocaust" and the politicization of the memory of W.W.II. The perception of German collective guilt as the combined banality of ordinary men and the Evil of extraordinary murderers had been prefigured in the Allies' Manichean scenario at the end of the war. But Eichmann as he emerged at the trial, a hyper-modern kind of ideological mass murderer, fit neither the religious concept of Evil nor the secular concept of banality. The man's bad (evil) deeds may indeed have seemed to reflect elements of both in that his ideological (utopianist) motivations could be said to have been semi-religious--hence Arendt's definition of him as a "common man and extraordinary murderer." Yet the extreme situation of a total inversion of morality (killing the perceived enemy as the supreme value) at the end-stage of a hyper-modern technological war of heretofore unheard-of dimensions was a new phenomenon for which this explanation was and is too simple. Arendt herself had invoked that extreme situation in her attempts at a better understanding of the nature of Eichmann's deeds and thereby undermined her neat combination of common and extraordinary, the banality of evil. This is precisely the point where the still most controversial, indeed "evil," relation between Nazi criminality and the Victors' war crimes could be helpful for a better rational, and that means partial, understanding of the historical events of W.W.II and its heritage. The Allies' new concept of "total air war" differed in kind from Hitler's and Stalin's brutal warfare on the eastern front in that its equally absolute disregard for human life did not focus on particular population groups, other than "the enemy" (which included civilians); nor did it depend on outlandishly ruthless, psychopathic leaders. The denial of the protective civilian status to all civilian populations at all times in all places was built into the new concept of air war, and it was there to stay. In his recent account of the beleaguered President's plan to shift the "war" in Iraq away from the politically sensitive (physically messy) ground troups to more neutral (less visible) airpower, Seymour Hersh sums up the opinion of military experts: "while the number of American casualties would decrease as ground troups are withdrawn, the over-all level of Iraqi fatalities would increase unless there are stringent controls over who bombs what" ("Up in the Air," The New Yorker, Dec.5, 2005, 43). But who, given the evermore chaotic situation in Iraq, would be in control of such control? The Eichmann trial had been successful in presenting the supra-historical uniqueness of the Jewish victim status; and though it took them some years to act on it, the political value of the moral capital of this status was not lost on American Jewry-hence also the sharp attacks on Arendt's report on the Eichmann trial in the early sixties. In the late sixties, with mounting international criticism of Israel's occupational strategies, Jewish leaders in America found it increasingly useful to draw on the authority of "the Holocaust" to support belief in the unique claims of a "chosen" people with unique victim status-claims that were echoed in the Germans' increasing pre-occupation with their unique collective guilt and "inability to mourn" their victims. Over the next four decades, "the Holocaust" would become a gigantic construct of memory stories of singular Jewish suffering, and May 2005 saw the much lauded inauguration of the hyper-monumental Berlin Mahnmal. Dedicated exclusively to the memory of the murdered Jews of Europe, it promised an enduringly guilty remembrance of Germany's Bad Past that would "forever" control that nation's future. In political reality, the long heated debates over many years about the wisdom of such an exclusive and extravagantly monumental memorial, and the highly politicized process of actually building it, were a microcosm of the notorious German anxiety of memory. German singleminded loyalty over such a long time to a rigid hierarchy of remembrance has produced, to the outsider, often darkly comical malaise, especially where it concerned the by now quite numerous politically and morally charged anniversaries of important events of W.W.II. Maintaining this hierarchy at all cost could not but reflect the vicissitudes of politics and memory, their potentially surprising contingencies and all-too familiar instabilities. Nevertheless, many American Jews and Israelis applauded the Mahnmal as a binding moral-political promise that the Germans "will never forget," affirming the continuation of the power-politics of remembrance in the future. Tony Judt's recent article "From the House of the Dead: On Modern European Memory," (NYRB, October 6, 2005) begins with the acknowledgement that "by the end of the twentieth century the centrality of the Holocaust in Western European identity seemed secure." Surprisingly, given his notorious insistence on the central cultural and political power of Holocaust memory, he now sees some "risks" in this position, a potential "backlash" such as a new German interest in their own war experiences, even to the point of alleging "the crimes of the Allies." At the end of the essay, after lengthy complaints about Eastern European failure to own up to their flawed dealings with Jews past and present, presumably in contrast to Germany, the model child, Judt acknowledges the "partisan" nature of memory. Now more civic minded, he suggests a general necessity of "some measure of neglect and even forgetting," even invoking the power of history over "memory itself" in recalling the painful past. But the question left unanswered in his half-hearted concession is "whose history?" Who defines at what time and in what situation the cultural and political role of history? Instructively, where the issue is the need for a more sober, secular historization of the Nazi-period, partisan memory still clearly trumps for Judt an at least intentionally more objective historiography . Calling for a "professional study of the past," Judt still wants it focused on the "truth" of Nazi "Evil" which, he claims, only the historian can "guard" against forgetting. But what kind of historian would that be? What modern historian would work with religious concepts like immutable "truth," "forever," "Evil," "uniqueness"? The Berlin Mahnmal is for Judt the existential lode of guilt where "Western Europeans--Germans above all--now have ample opportunity to confront the full horror of their recent past." What about all their "confrontations" and demonstrations of remorse over the last 60 years? Not Judt's concern. He praises the German Chancellor's promises at this year's celebration of the liberation of Auschwitz: "the war and the genocide are part of our life. Nothing will change that; these memories are part of our identity." These are oddly provincial assertions for the democratic leader of a technocratic mass demoracy that now includes many different ethnic groups. Among them are many moderate Muslims who might think that unquestioned Nazi Evil has gone a long way to support questionable American and Israeli political and military conduct. But Judt is undeterred, demanding that postwar Europe, arising from the ashes of Auschwitz, will have to "remain forever mortgaged" to its "terrible past." Have there been no important issues besides Auschwitz for Judt? Where have all the years gone? Where are all the problems of the present? Arguably, exclusive not-forgetting of Nazi-Evil has contributed to forgetting them.

Why the Court's Dover Decision Is a Triumph for Religion as well as Science
By Brian W. Ogilvie
Mr. Ogilvie teaches the history of science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and is a writer for the History News Service.
Federal Judge John E. Jones IIIs December 20th verdict in Kitzmiller v. Dover that Intelligent Design is thinly-disguised creationism, and thus cannot be taught in public high schools, is a triumph for science and for the separation of church and state. But Christians should see it as a triumph for religion, too.
Supporters of Intelligent Design do not do science as its done today: designing experiments, collecting data, and submitting papers to peer-reviewed journals. They could try to do that. But if they're serious about their faith, they should have second thoughts. Christians troubled by evolution should not seek solace in Intelligent Design. Why not? Because Christianity is weakened, not strengthened, when it appeals to bad science.
Design arguments once had a respected place in science, though even then, they were motivated by a religious response to the threat of materialism. Seventeenth-century scientists like Galileo Galilei and Rene Descartes argued that the universe was made of particles of matter in constant motion. The daring Descartes claimed that a primal chaos would sort itself out into the cosmos we see now, with stars, planets, plants, and animals. In short, matter was self-organizing except for the human soul, which came from God.
Descartes knew that this idea contradicted the Genesis account of creation, so he posed it as a hypothesis: God, he said, did create the world in six days. But if He had not done so, it would have created itself identically.
Descartes offered an evolutionary theory of the universe, and like biological evolution today, his theory was hotly debated. Many of his followers, like modern Christians who accept evolution, saw no conflict between their science and Christianity. But other scientists, like Robert Boyle, were not so sure: they thought that Descartes's theory promoted atheism. These opponents of Descartes accepted that the world was made of particles in motion, but they denied that matter could organize itself. Like modern opponents of evolution, Boyle feared the moral and social consequences of such radical materialism.
Boyle and his contemporaries revived the ancient tradition of natural theology, the quest for evidence of design in the natural world. They found their evidence in anatomy. In his 1691 book The Wisdom of God Manifested in the Works of Creation, the naturalist John Ray explained that intricate contrivances like the eye or the hand could not have arisen by chance. Instead, they were designed. And their perfection displays the wisdom and benevolence of the Designer.
Intelligent Design proponents today are coy about wisdom, benevolence, and perfection in their supposedly scientific publications. But like John Ray, they seek design that natural science cannot currently explain.
For a time, natural theology triumphed, because no scientist had found a convincing natural explanation for the fit between creatures and their world. But skeptics like the Scottish philosopher David Hume pointed out that the world's design was far from perfect. Meanwhile, design arguments had little effect on how science was actually done. And as naturalists continued to catalogue the world's organisms, it became evident that they were related to one another.
Evolutionary theories had been proposed for decades before Darwin published On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection in 1859. But none had explained convincingly the apparent design in the world. Darwin's theory did just that, thereby undercutting natural theology's best arguments and paving the way to the broad scientific acceptance of evolution.
Natural theology had identified design as the best proof for God's existence. It had an optimistic view of design: this was the best of all possible worlds, the human eye the best of all possible eyes. This argument glossed over some obvious problems. Why do some people get cataracts? Why do our eyes have a blind spot where the optic nerve plunges through the retina? To natural theology, which argued that the Designer is perfect, just, and all-powerful, these flaws were embarrassing. Even before Darwin, they opened up natural theology, and the Christianity it supported, to skeptical attacks.
Darwin explained adaptation, apparent design, as the imperfect result of natural processes, of random genetic variation passed through the sieve of natural selection. To a Darwinian, anatomical flaws arise simply because natural selection selects merely what is good enough for survival. Indeed, many Christians find that evolution helps them reconcile their belief that God is perfect with the evidence of this messy, imperfect world.
Intelligent Design responds to Darwinian evolution the same way that natural theology responded to Descartes's materialism: by desperately seeking evidence of immaterial processes at work in the world. Though it draws on the new sciences of molecular biology and information theory, its goal is to turn back the clock to the days of natural theology. But the clock can't be turned back.
The seventeenth-century debate between materialism and natural theology was a debate within the scientific community of the day. Within the modern scientific community, there is no debate; biologists disagree on the precise mechanisms of evolution, but virtually all of them agree that evolution has occurred.
If, by chance, Intelligent Design develops a real scientific research program and identifies biological adaptations that evolution cannot explain, scientists will not become modern-day natural theologians in droves. Instead, they'll start seeking a better natural explanation. If Intelligent Design is a real science, its proponents should welcome this possibility. If they shudder at the thought, they should stop cheapening their religious beliefs by trying to pass them off as science.
Long ago, Saint Augustine warned Christians that spouting falsehoods about science would only make their faith seem ridiculous. Intelligent Design proves him right.

This piece was distributed for non-exclusive use by the History News Service, an informal syndicate of professional historians who seek to improve the public's understanding of current events by setting these events in their historical contexts. The article may be republished as long as both the author and the History News Service are clearly credited.

Judge bars school district from mentioning 'intelligent design'MARTHA RAFFAELEAssociated Press
HARRISBURG, Pa. - A federal judge has ruled "intelligent design" cannot be mentioned in biology classes in a Pennsylvania school district, concluding that school board members who backed the policy lied about their true motive, which was to promote religion.
In one of the biggest courtroom clashes on evolution since the 1925 Scopes trial, U.S. District Judge John E. Jones ruled Tuesday that the Dover Area School Board violated the Constitution when it ordered that its biology curriculum must include the notion that life on Earth was produced by an unidentified intelligent cause.
The school board policy, adopted in October 2004, was believed to have been the first of its kind in the nation.
"The citizens of the Dover area were poorly served by the members of the Board who voted for the ID Policy," Jones wrote. "It is ironic that several of these individuals, who so staunchly and proudly touted their religious convictions in public, would time and again lie to cover their tracks and disguise the real purpose behind the ID Policy."
The board's attorneys said members sought to improve science education by exposing students to alternatives to Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection causing gradual changes over time; intelligent-design proponents argue that it cannot fully explain the existence of complex life forms.
But Jones agreed with the plaintiffs' argument argued that intelligent design amounts to a secular repackaging of creationism, which the courts have already ruled cannot be taught in public schools.
"We find that the secular purposes claimed by the Board amount to a pretext for the Board's real purpose, which was to promote religion in the public school classroom," he wrote in his 139-page opinion.
The Dover policy required students to hear a statement about intelligent design before ninth-grade biology lessons on evolution. The statement said Charles Darwin's theory is "not a fact," has inexplicable "gaps," and refers students to an intelligent-design textbook, "Of Pandas and People," for more information.
Eric Rothschild, the lead attorney for the families, praised the ruling.
"We know we have a great result and a real vindication for the parents who had the courage to stand up and say there was something wrong in their school district and in their community when this was passed," Rothschild said.
School board president Bernadette Reinking, who was among eight new school board members elected in November, said the new board is turning its attention to removing intelligent design from the science curriculum and placing it in an elective social-studies class.
"As far as I can tell you, there is no intent to appeal," she said.
Richard Thompson, president and chief counsel of the Thomas More Law Center in Ann Arbor, Mich., said he would like to appeal the decision, but it was up to the school board.
"What this really looks like is an ad hominem attack on scientists who happen to believe in God," Thompson said of Jones' ruling.
Jones said advocates of intelligent design "have bona fide and deeply held beliefs which drive their scholarly endeavors" and that he didn't believe the concept shouldn't be studied and discussed.
"Our conclusion today is that it is unconstitutional to teach ID as an alternative to evolution in a public school science classroom," he wrote.
The dispute is the latest chapter in a long-running debate over the teaching of evolution dating back to the Scopes Monkey Trial, in which Tennessee biology teacher John T. Scopes was fined $100 for violating a state law that forbade teaching evolution. The Tennessee Supreme Court reversed his conviction on the narrow ground that only a jury trial could impose a fine exceeding $50, and the law was repealed in 1967.
Jones heard arguments in the fall during a six-week trial in which expert witnesses for each side debated intelligent design's scientific merits. Other witnesses, including current and former school board members, disagreed over whether creationism was discussed in board meetings months before the curriculum change was adopted.
The controversy also divided the community and galvanized voters to oust eight incumbent school board members who supported the policy in the Nov. 8 school board election. They were replaced by a slate of eight opponents who pledged to remove intelligent design from the science curriculum.
The case is among at least a handful that have focused new attention on the teaching of evolution in the nation's schools.
Earlier this month, a federal appeals court in Georgia heard arguments over whether evolution disclaimer stickers placed in a school system's biology textbooks were unconstitutional. A federal judge in January ordered Cobb County school officials to immediately remove the stickers, which called evolution a theory, not a fact.
In November, state education officials in Kansas adopted new classroom science standards that call the theory of evolution into question.
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Martha Raffaele covers education for The Associated Press in Harrisburg.

From the NY Times
'West Wing' Loses Actor and Possible Vice President
By JACQUES STEINBERG
The sudden death of John Spencer on Friday is sure to alter the plotlines of "The West Wing," the NBC show in which he was a star, but its writers do not expect to begin grappling with the creative implications of his loss until early in the new year, one of its executive producers said yesterday.
The producer, Lawrence O'Donnell, a former adviser in the United States Senate who has been with "The West Wing" since its inception, said the writers and actors were stunned by Mr. Spencer's death from a heart attack and would need to grieve before they could address the fate of his character.
This season, the show's seventh, Mr. Spencer's Leo McGarry has been a critical character. McGarry, former chief of staff to the incumbent president, Josiah Bartlet, is the running mate of the Democratic candidate for president, Matt Santos, played by Jimmy Smits.
So far this season, NBC has broadcast nine new episodes of the show. Mr. O'Donnell said five more episodes had been completed, including the next one - to be shown on Jan. 8 - titled "Running Mates," which centers on Mr. Spencer's character. The episode or episodes in which the election takes place have not yet been filmed, Mr. O'Donnell said, nor have producers said when the fictional election would be broadcast.
Mr. O'Donnell said the show's staff had been on hiatus since last Monday and that questions about whether the next episode would need to be edited - to say nothing of the larger question of how to deal with the loss of a vice-presidential candidate in the midst of a campaign - would not be broached until the next scheduled production meeting, in the first week of January.
"We recognize how important this kind of question is to viewers of the show," Mr. O'Donnell said in a telephone interview. "It is very, very, very important to us. But it is a secondary issue and we are not past the primary issue yet."
Mr. Spencer, 58, played Leo since the show's first season. His character was a crusty politician with a soft touch, one who survived a heart attack last season. He was as beloved a fixture backstage as he was on camera.
"He was my brother; that is the most I can say," said Martin Sheen, who plays the president, when reached at home yesterday. "I just adored him. It's too big a hole."
Mr. O'Donnell said that he, Mr. Sheen and other members of the close-knit cast had gathered informally over the weekend and found some solace in reminiscing with one another.
"Nobody could play tough better than John Spencer," Mr. O'Donnell said. "But that was pure acting. He was the sweetest guy on the set, all the time. No matter how difficult a scene we might have to do or whatever problem we would run into shooting, you always knew where to look on the set for someone with a smile. It was John."
Bradley Whitford, who plays Josh Lyman, a colleague of Leo's, said yesterday he considered Mr. Spencer "this dear, big brother."
"Acting saved his life, I think, a couple of times," Mr. Whitford said. "He came from a tough background, and it liberated him early on. It saved him again when he had his struggles with sobriety." Mr. Spencer openly discussed his battle with alcoholism.
Mr. Spencer created a number of memorable supporting roles throughout his career, including as a detective in the 1990 film "Presumed Innocent" and as Tommy Mullaney, a lawyer on the television show "L.A. Law." He won an Emmy Award for best supporting actor in 2002, for his work on "The West Wing."
A network spokesman said that he expected there to be memorial services for Mr. Spencer on both the West and East Coasts (Mr. Spencer was born in New York City and grew up in New Jersey) but that those plans had not yet been completed

Letter of caution from Ayn Rand Institute

Dear Editor:Mohamed ElBaradei, chairman of the International Atomic Energy Agency(IAEA), said last week that Iran is only a few months away fromproducing a nuclear bomb--and suggested that the way to prevent thisis "to go back to the negotiating table" (i.e., cave in to extortion).Following his suggestion would be suicidal.No amount of negotiation will persuade the Iranian theocrats to giveup their longtime quest for nuclear bombs. To ensure Iran will notproduce--or use--nuclear bombs, the United States and its allies mustdestroy Iran's nuclear facilities and wipe out its regime--and must doso without delay.Iran presents a much greater danger to the United States' securitythan did Iraq and Afghanistan combined. Once Iran gets hold of nuclearbombs, the United States will be an easy target for blackmail and alikely target for mass destruction. As one of the principalideological sources of Islamist totalitarianism, Iran is an avowedenemy of the United States and a leading state sponsor of terrorism.It finances, trains, shelters and equips terrorists from organizationslike al-Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad. Iran is currentlywaging a proxy war against the United States in Iraq and killingAmerican soldiers by the dozens (if not by the hundreds). Under thosecircumstances the United States has a moral right--indeed, a moralobligation--to defend its people from Iran's threats and preemptfuture terrorist attacks.The Iranian regime has repeatedly threatened to use itssoon-to-be-produced nuclear weapons to wipe Israel off the map. It hasrepeatedly called for "Death to America." These threats must be takenseriously. We did not take Osama bin Laden's threats seriously, andlost the Twin Towers. We do not want to make the same mistake withIran, and lose all of Manhattan.David HolcbergAyn Rand Institute

This is nuts!

New York Magazine Intelligencer

(Printed without permission)
Bush Threatens U.N. Over Clinton Climate Speech
By Greg Sargent
Bush-administration officials privately threatened organizers of the U.N. Climate Change Conference, telling them that any chance there might’ve been for the United States to sign on to the Kyoto global-warming protocol would be scuttled if they allowed Bill Clinton to speak at the gathering today in Montreal, according to a source involved with the negotiations who spoke to New York Magazine on condition of anonymity.
Bush officials informed organizers of their intention to pull out of the new Kyoto deal late Thursday afternoon, soon after news leaked that Clinton was scheduled to speak, the source said.
The threat set in motion a flurry of frantic back-channel negotiations between conference organizers and aides to Bush and Clinton that lasted into the night on Thursday, and at one point Clinton flatly told his advisers that he was going to pull out and not deliver the speech, the source said.
“It’s just astounding,” the source told New York Magazine. “It came through loud and clear from the Bush people—they wouldn’t sign the deal if Clinton were allowed to speak.” Clinton spokesman Jay Carson confirmed the dustup took place and that the former president had decided not to go out of fear of harming the negotiations, but Carson declined to comment further.
On Friday afternoon, Clinton did end up speaking at the conference, a global audience of diplomats, environmentalists, and others who were in the final hours of a two-week gathering devoted to discussing the future of the protocol, the existing emissions-controls agreement. In 1997, Al Gore, then vice-president, helped negotiate the protocol, but it never passed the Senate. In 2001, it was formally renounced by the Bush administration, which argues that cutting greenhouse-gas emissions would hurt the American economy.
Some delegations at the conference appear ready to move forward and renegotiate the agreement without the Bush administration. But environmentalists and conference organizers are holding out hope that the administration will reconsider and sign on to the treaty or take steps to implement tougher climate-control standards. Both options would be considered an improvement over current U.S. commitments. But the specter of Clinton’s speaking caused the Bush administration to threaten to walk away.
In his Friday speech, Clinton blasted the Bush administration’s opposition as “flat wrong.”
But the speech almost didn’t happen.
The contretemps started late Thursday afternoon, when the Associated Press ran a story saying that Clinton had been added at the last minute to the gathering’s speaking schedule at the request of conference organizers. According to the source, barely minutes after the news leaked, conference organizers called Clinton aides and told them that Bush-administration officials were displeased.
“The organizers said the Bush people were threatening to pull out of the deal,” the source said. After some deliberation between Clinton and his aides, Clinton decided he wouldn’t speak, added the source: “President Clinton immediately said, ‘There’s no way that I’m gonna let petty politics get in the way of the deal. So I’m not gonna come.’ That’s the message [the Clinton people] sent back to the organizers.”
But the organizers of the conference didn’t want to accept a Bush-administration dictum. They asked Clinton that he go ahead with the speech. “The organizers decided to call the administration’s bluff,” the source said. “They said, ‘We’re gonna push [the Bush people] back on this.’”
Several hours went by, and at the Clinton Foundation’s holiday party on Thursday night, the former president and his aides still thought they weren’t going to Montreal. “The staff that was supposed to go with him had canceled their travel plans,” the source said.
At around 8:30 p.m., organizers called Clinton aides and said that they’d successfully called the bluff of Bush officials, adding that Bush’s aides had backed off and indicated that Clinton’s appearance wouldn’t in fact have adverse diplomatic consequences.
Several hours after all these tense negotiations had been resolved, the U.S. delegation’s chief, Paula Dobriansky, issued a statement saying that events such as Clinton’s speaking “are useful opportunities to hear a wide range of views on global climate change.”
“They were trying to clean up the mess,” the source said. Late Friday the U.S. walked out for other reasons.
A White House spokesman couldn’t immediately be reached for comment.

Imagining legacy of enigmatic Beatle

From NY Daily News

Thursday, December 8th, 2005 John Lennon tried on all sorts of personalities during the 40 years of his life, so it's no surprise we're still sorting them out 25 years after his death.
It was 25 years ago tonight - an unusually mild December New York evening during which the biggest event was expected to be the lighting of the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree - that Lennon was shot to death as he entered the Dakota.
He was a fascinating figure then. He remains so. But are we any closer to figuring out what to make of him, or his music?
With the passage of time and the wash of sorrow over his murder, "Some people see Lennon today as St. John," says WFUV and Sirius Satellite Radio deejay Vin Scelsa. "I'm not sure he'd be pleased by that."
On the other hand, the years immediately before and after his death often saw him portrayed at the opposite extreme: as a vain, self-absorbed and yet depressed man who had lost his musical muse and made up a fairy tale about being a househusband to his and Yoko Ono's son, Sean.
"Most of the scandals have disappeared," says Ken Michaels, who hosts the Beatles show "Every Little Thing" on XM Satellite Radio.
"John was as close as any celebrity could come to being an open book. There's almost nothing you can say about him that he didn't say about himself. When [his first wife] Cynthia writes a book saying he could be violent, we already knew that."
Before the opening of the musical "Lennon" on Broadway earlier this year, Ono said the goal of the show was to use his solo music to explore his life.
"He wasn't an angel," she said. "He had demons, and he tried to fight them."
"Lennon" folded quickly, through no fault of the music. Most reviewers suggested the premise was just too ambitious.
What may have changed from the early 1980s, when the late Albert Goldman was writing his sneering biography of Lennon, is that most discussions of Lennon today turn back to his music - what he made and what he never had the chance to make.
"There would have been more," says Meg Griffin, a longtime New York deejay now on Sirius. "And that we never got to hear it is a tragedy, because we needed John Lennon's truth through the Reagan years."
In some ways, the music world has not yet come to a consensus on Lennon's solo career.
"A lot of the solo sides are great," says Michaels. "But almost no one plays them, so most listeners only know the two or three, like 'Imagine,' that are in rotation at classic-rock stations. It's frustrating."
Joe Raiola, who, along with the Actors Theatre Workshop, is presenting the 25th annual Lennon Tribute tomorrow and Saturday nights at Lincoln Center's Clark Studio Theater, says he finds fans appreciate the whole range, as long as it's presented in Lennon's spirit.
"They don't want a kiss-a-- evening," he says. "John was a complex man."
This fall, Dolly Parton filmed a video in Central Park for a new version of "Imagine," whose "Imagine ... no religion" lyric would seem to make it an unlikely Red State anthem.
Parton isn't simply ignoring that line, a technique some singers use when they treat "This Land Is Your Land" as an uncritical ode to America.
She says she thinks Lennon's real meaning is a greater truth: "If we could just stop pointing fingers as to who's not going to heaven, who's definitely going to hell, whose religion is better than whose ... we could at least know a little heaven on Earth. Wouldn't it be wonderful if we could love each other, share the world and live in peace?"
The larger, unanswerable question about John Lennon, of course, is whether the man himself, who would have turned 65 two months ago, would have shed a few more of his younger selves as time went on.
Bill King, editor of the respected magazine Beatlefan, for one, believes that, however Lennon evolved, he would have held to certain basic values.
"I think he'd be pretty appalled by the Patriot Act mentality today," says King. "And I'm sure he would be opposing the current war.
"I figure if he were alive today, he'd be just as controversial."

Recalling the Night He Held Lennon's Still Heart
By COREY KILGANNON
Even now, 25 years later, many John Lennon fans can vividly recall the helplessness and frustration they felt on Dec. 8, 1980, when the singer was shot outside the Dakota.
So can Dr. Stephan G. Lynn, who was running the emergency room at Roosevelt Hospital that night. He felt Lennon's death firsthand: He was the one who grasped Lennon's heart, massaging it to try to force it to pump again. It never did.
"There was just nothing left to pump," Dr. Lynn recalled in an interview. "There was so much damage to the major blood vessels leading from the heart" that his blood just leaked out.
Dr. Lynn, 58, is still an emergency physician at Roosevelt. He stood in the bustling emergency room in his scrubs one recent morning and recalled the night 25 years ago when the police carried in the singer. Lennon's vital signs showed that he was already dead when he arrived at the emergency room, and after a 20-minute battle to resuscitate him, Dr. Lynn and two other doctors officially declared him dead.
"All the nurses broke out in tears, and most of us said, 'What just happened here?' " Dr. Lynn said. "There was a sense we had all just witnessed a major event."
That Dr. Lynn would have a bit part in history was not immediately apparent when he rushed to the emergency room that night. He had been called back to work to treat a man with three gunshot wounds to the chest. The patient had a pierced lung and no pulse. He was not breathing or moving and had lost a lot of blood. He was gaunt, and his hair was a mess. He was not wearing any glasses.
"When someone said it was John Lennon, I thought it was a bad joke," Dr. Lynn said. "But then they found his ID in his pocket, and he had something like $1,000 in cash on him."
Dr. Lynn recalls that he was too busy to let the news sink in. He and two other doctors cut open Lennon's chest to find blood flooding his chest cavity. "The bullets were amazingly well-placed," he said. "All the major blood vessels leaving the heart were a mush, and there was no way to fix it."
Lennon was pronounced dead at 11:15 p.m.
Dr. Lynn was faced with the task of delivering the news to Yoko Ono.
"When I told her, she said: 'You're lying; it can't be true. He's not dead. I don't believe you,' " he recalled. "She threw herself down on the floor and began banging her head on the ground. I was afraid we'd have a second patient. But after two minutes, she accepted it and asked me to delay announcing the news to the media for 20 minutes because her son Sean was home watching the news, and she wanted to tell him first."
The commotion surrounding Lennon's treatment at the hospital caught the attention of another patient, Alan J. Weiss, a producer for WABC-TV who was being treated for a head injury from a motorcycle accident. After seeing Ms. Ono and hearing the police talking about Lennon, Mr. Weiss called the station, which relayed the news to Howard Cosell, to announce during "Monday Night Football." A thicket of reporters and fans gathered outside the hospital. Dr. Lynn walked out to them, blood spattered on his white coat, and told them that John Lennon had just been pronounced dead.
Asked how he felt at the time, Dr. Lynn, a longtime Beatles fan, replied stiffly that emergency doctors are taught not to feel but only to react to medical emergencies. He stifled a slight quiver and gave this clinical judgment: "I think the world would have been substantially different if we could have saved him."
Then he excused himself and returned to his bustling emergency room.

From The NY Times

(Printed without permission)
Rice Is Challenged in Europe Over Secret Prisons
By JOEL BRINKLEY
BUCHAREST, Romania, Dec. 6 - Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was pelted with questions on Tuesday about covert prisons and a mistaken, secret arrest, as she grappled with what has become an incendiary issue in Europe. She declined to answer most of them in two European capitals.
Europe has been roiled by reports that the United States maintained secret jails for terror suspects in Europe, and by residual anger over the American practice of rendition, or secretly transferring terrorism suspects to the custody of third countries, including some outside Europe that routinely use torture.
The anger has made it harder for Ms. Rice to repair already strained relations with many European nations at odds with American policy on Iraq, like Germany, where she met in Berlin with the new chancellor, Angela Merkel, hoping for a fresh start. But the issue confronted her repeatedly.
Mrs. Merkel said at a news conference that Ms. Rice had admitted making a mistake when the United States abducted a German citizen, Khaled el-Masri, on suspicions of terrorism and held him in detention for five months. But aides to Ms. Rice scrambled to deny that, saying instead that Ms. Rice had said only that if mistakes were made, they would be corrected.
Mr. Masri filed suit in Federal District Court in Alexandria, Va., on Tuesday against the former director of central intelligence and three companies he charged were involved in secret flights carrying terrorism suspects. He has said he was tortured during his detention. He also said that on Sunday he was denied entry to the United States, where he hoped to file his lawsuit in person.
State Department officials confirmed that he had been denied entry, but said that he would be allowed into the country if he applied again.
As Europeans continue to investigate whether torture or detention of terrorism suspects took place on European soil, Ms. Rice assured Mrs. Merkel that "the United States does not condone torture."
"It is against U.S. law to be involved in torture or conspiracy to commit torture," Ms. Rice said. "And it is also against U.S. international obligations."
But the American definition of torture is in some cases at variance with international conventions, and the administration has maintained in recent years that American law does not apply to prisoners held abroad.
In defending the practice of rendition, American officials have said that they obtain assurances from the third countries that prisoners will not be tortured, but that the United States is limited in its ability to enforce the promises.
The Central Intelligence Agency's inspector general found last year that the some aspects of the agency's treatment of terrorism detainees might constitute cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment, as the international Convention Against Torture defines it. The United States is a signer of that convention, though with some reservations.
A legal opinion by the Justice Department, issued in August 2002, said interrogation methods just short of those that might cause pain comparable to "organ failure, impairment of bodily function or even death" could be allowable without being considered torture.
The administration disavowed that classified legal opinion in the summer of 2004, after it was publicly disclosed. But a second legal opinion issued in December 2004, which defined torture more broadly, did not repudiate interrogation techniques that had been previously authorized. It remains unclear how many of those techniques are still in use by the C.I.A.
Congress is debating an amendment, passed in the Senate last month, that would prohibit the abusive treatment of terrorism suspects. But the White House has urged that the C.I.A. be exempted from any such ban.
In Romania, Ms. Rice signed a military cooperation agreement that would allow American forces to train with Romanian troops at the Mihael Kogalniceanu air base, which Human Rights Watch identified as a probable location of one secret prison.
Asked about the charge at a news conference, Traian Basescu, the Romanian president, vociferously denied that any such detention center existed and invited anyone who doubted that to come and see for himself.
During the news conference in Germany, Mrs. Merkel spoke openly about matters the Bush administration deems secret, while Mr. Rice continued to speak elliptically. That produced some awkward moments.
Mrs. Merkel spoke openly of "the issue of the C.I.A.'s overflights" that apparently hold secret detainees going to or from secret jails elsewhere, while Ms. Rice refused to answer most questions and continued insisting that the prison issue and related issues were classified matters.
Mrs. Merkel then said Ms. Rice had admitted that the United States had mistakenly abducted Mr. Masri.
"The American administration has admitted that this man had been erroneously taken and that, as such, the American administration is not denying that it has taken place," Mrs. Merkel said.
Ms. Rice said she could not talk about the case specifically, but added, "Any policy will sometimes result in error, and when it happens we do everything we can to correct it."
Later, an aide to Ms. Rice, who spoke on the condition that he not be identified, said that "we are not sure what was in her head" when Mrs. Merkel spoke of the American admission of error in the Masri case. Ms. Rice did not discuss the case with her in any direct way, he and other aides insisted, even though the senior aide said, "The American government has talked about this issue with the German government."
Mrs. Merkel said simply, "We've talked about Mr. Masri."
Speaking of Mr. Masri and the issue of the detainees in general, Mrs. Merkel added, "We can't go public about all the details, but at the same time we need to introduce a certain degree of transparency."
After the mistaken arrest was discovered, the United States asked Germany to keep it secret, and Germany complied. Asked about that, Ms. Rice said, "Intelligence matters need to be handled sensitively."
Before leaving Washington on Monday morning, Ms. Rice issued a long, unapologetic statement on the secret-prison issue, which has become the subject of many investigations in Europe, while refusing to acknowledge that the prisons exist.
Aides said she was no more forthcoming in her talks with Mrs. Merkel.
Asked about Ms. Rice's statement in Washington, Mrs. Merkel said it was "a good basis on which we build," but added, "As chancellor, I work under and adhere to German laws." She announced that the intelligence committee of the German Parliament would take up the Masri case.
Even though aides to Ms. Rice said they realized that the secret-prison issue would dominate a good part of her trip, at times she has shown exasperation over the debate.
"We have an obligation to defend our people, and we will use every lawful means to do so," she declared in Berlin, adding that the public debate over the secret prisons ought to include "a healthy respect for the challenges we face" fighting terrorism.
The questions on the secret prisons posed to her and Mr. Basescu here in Bucharest came from the American reporters traveling with her. The Romanians asked about the new defense agreement. It would allow 1,500 American troops to be stationed at the air base on a rotating basis to take part in joint exercises and training. About 100 of those servicemen would be stationed there full time.
Mr. Basescu greeted the new agreement with unbridled enthusiasm, saying it shows that "the Romanian force has reached the potential that it can be a partner of the United States."

'Narnia represents everything that is most hateful about religion'
Children won't get the Christian subtext, but unbelievers should keep a sickbag handy during Disney's new epic, writes Polly ToynbeePolly London Guardian December 5, 2005

(Printed without permission)
GuardianAslan the lion shakes his mighty mane and roars out across Narnia and eternity. Christ is risen! However, not many British children these days will get the message. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe opens this week to take up the mantle left by The Lord of the Rings. CS Lewis's seven children's books, The Chronicles of Narnia, will be with us now and for many Christmases to come. Only Harry Potter has outsold these well-loved books' 85 million copies.
How suitable that one fantasy saga should follow on from the other, despite the immense difference between the writings and magic worlds of these two old Oxford dons. It was JRR Tolkien who converted CS Lewis to Christianity during one long all-night walk that ended in dawn and revelation. Narnia is a strange blend of magic, myth and Christianity, some of it brilliantly fantastical and richly imaginative, some (the clunking allegory) toe-curlingly, cringingly awful.
This new Disney film is a remarkably faithful rendition of the book - faithful in both senses. It is beautiful to look at and wonderfully acted. The four English children and their world are all authentically CS Lewis olde England. But from its opening scenes of the bombing of their Finchley home in the blitz and the tear-jerking evacuation from their mother in a (spotlessly clean) steam train, there is an emotional undertow to this film that tugs on the heart-strings from the first frames. By the end, it feels profoundly manipulative, as Disney usually does. But then, that is also deeply faithful to the book's own arm-twisting emotional call to believers.
Disney is deliberately promoting this film to the religious - it has appointed Outreach, an evangelical publisher, to promote the Christian message behind the movie in British churches. The Christian radio station Premier is urging churches to hold services on the theme of The Gospel According to Narnia. Even the Methodists have written a special Narnia-themed service. And a Kent parish is giving away £10,000 worth of film tickets to single-parent families. (Are the children of single mothers in special need of the word?)
US born-agains are using the movie. The Mission America Coalition is "inviting church leaders around the country to consider the fantastic ministry opportunity presented by the release of this film". The president's brother, Jeb Bush, the governor of Florida, is organising a scheme for every child in his state to read the book. Walden Media, co-producer of the movie, offers a "17-week Narnia Bible study for children". The owner of Walden Media is both a big Republican donor and a donor to the Florida governor's book promotion - a neat synergy of politics, religion and product placement. It has aroused protests from Americans United for Separation of Church and State, which complains that "a governmental endorsement of the book's religious message is in violation of the First Amendment to the US Constitution".
Disney may come to regret this alliance with Christians, at least on this side of the Atlantic. For all the enthusiasm of the churches, Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ bombed in Britain and warehouses are stuffed with unsold DVDs of that stomach-churner. There are too few practising Christians in the empty pews of this most secular nation to pack cinemas. So there has been a queasy ambivalence about how to sell the Narnia film here. Its director, Andrew Adamson (of Shrek fame), says the movie's Christian themes are "open to the audience to interpret". One soundtrack album of the film has been released with religious music, the other with secular pop.
Most British children will be utterly clueless about any message beyond the age-old mythic battle between good and evil. Most of the fairy story works as well as any Norse saga, pagan legend or modern fantasy, so only the minority who are familiar with Christian iconography will see Jesus in the lion. After all, 43% of people in Britain in a recent poll couldn't say what Easter celebrated. Among the young - apart from those in faith schools - that number must be considerably higher. Ask art galleries: they now have to write the story of every religious painting on the label as people no longer know what "agony in the garden", "deposition", "transfiguration" or "ascension" mean. This may be regrettable cultural ignorance, but it means Aslan will stay just a lion to most movie-goers.
All the same, children may puzzle over the lion and ask embarrassing questions. For non-CS Lewis aficionados, here is a recap. The four children enter Narnia through a wardrobe and find themselves in a land frozen into "always winter, never Christmas" by the white witch, (played with elemental force by Tilda Swinton). Unhappy middle child Edmund, resentful of being bossed about by his older brother, broods with meanness and misery. The devil, in the shape of the witch, tempts him: for the price of several chunks of turkish delight, rather than 30 pieces of silver, Edmund betrays his siblings and their Narnian friends.
The sins of this "son of Adam" can only be redeemed by the supreme sacrifice of Aslan. This Christ-lion willingly lays down his life, submitting himself to be bound, thrashed and humiliated by the white witch, allowing his golden mane to be cut and himself to be slaughtered on the sacrificial stone table: it cracks in sympathetic agony and his body goes missing. The two girls lay down their heads and weep, Magdalene and Mary-like. Be warned, the film lingers long and lovingly over all this.
But so far, so good. The story makes sense. The lion exchanging his life for Edmund's is the sort of thing Arthurian legends are made of. Parfait knights and heroes in prisoner-of-war camps do it all the time. But what's this? After a long, dark night of the soul and women's weeping, the lion is suddenly alive again. Why? How?, my children used to ask. Well, it is hard to say why. It does not make any more sense in CS Lewis's tale than in the gospels. Ah, Aslan explains, it is the "deep magic", where pure sacrifice alone vanquishes death.
Of all the elements of Christianity, the most repugnant is the notion of the Christ who took our sins upon himself and sacrificed his body in agony to save our souls. Did we ask him to? Poor child Edmund, to blame for everything, must bear the full weight of a guilt only Christians know how to inflict, with a twisted knife to the heart. Every one of those thorns, the nuns used to tell my mother, is hammered into Jesus's holy head every day that you don't eat your greens or say your prayers when you are told. So the resurrected Aslan gives Edmund a long, life-changing talking-to high up on the rocks out of our earshot. When the poor boy comes back down with the sacred lion's breath upon him he is transformed unrecognisably into a Stepford brother, well and truly purged.
Tolkien hated Narnia: the two dons may have shared the same love of unquestioning feudal power, with worlds of obedient plebs and inferior folk eager to bend at the knee to any passing superior white persons - even children; both their fantasy worlds and their Christianity assumes that rigid hierarchy of power - lord of lords, king of kings, prince of peace to be worshipped and adored. But Tolkien disliked Lewis's bully-pulpit.
Over the years, others have had uneasy doubts about the Narnian brand of Christianity. Christ should surely be no lion (let alone with the orotund voice of Liam Neeson). He was the lamb, representing the meek of the earth, weak, poor and refusing to fight. Philip Pullman - he of the marvellously secular trilogy His Dark Materials - has called Narnia "one of the most ugly, poisonous things I have ever read".
Why? Because here in Narnia is the perfect Republican, muscular Christianity for America - that warped, distorted neo-fascist strain that thinks might is proof of right. I once heard the famous preacher Norman Vincent Peel in New York expound a sermon that reassured his wealthy congregation that they were made rich by God because they deserved it. The godly will reap earthly reward because God is on the side of the strong. This appears to be CS Lewis's view, too. In the battle at the end of the film, visually a great epic treat, the child crusaders are crowned kings and queens for no particular reason. Intellectually, the poor do not inherit Lewis's earth.
Does any of this matter? Not really. Most children will never notice. But adults who wince at the worst elements of Christian belief may need a sickbag handy for the most religiose scenes. The Guardian film critic Peter Bradshaw gives the film five stars and says, "There is no need for anyone to get into a PC huff about its Christian allegory." Well, here's my huff.
Lewis said he hoped the book would soften-up religious reflexes and "make it easier for children to accept Christianity when they met it later in life". Holiness drenches the Chronicles. When, in the book, the children first hear someone say, mysteriously, "Aslan is on the move", he writes: "Now a very curious thing happened. None of the children knew who Aslan was any more than you do; but the moment the Beaver had spoken these words everyone felt quite different. Perhaps it has sometimes happened to you in a dream that someone says something which you don't understand but in the dream it feels as if it had enormous meaning ..." So Lewis weaves his dreams to invade children's minds with Christian iconography that is part fairytale wonder and joy - but heavily laden with guilt, blame, sacrifice and a suffering that is dark with emotional sadism.
Children are supposed to fall in love with the hypnotic Aslan, though he is not a character: he is pure, raw, awesome power. He is an emblem for everything an atheist objects to in religion. His divine presence is a way to avoid humans taking responsibility for everything here and now on earth, where no one is watching, no one is guiding, no one is judging and there is no other place yet to come. Without an Aslan, there is no one here but ourselves to suffer for our sins, no one to redeem us but ourselves: we are obliged to settle our own disputes and do what we can. We need no holy guide books, only a very human moral compass. Everyone needs ghosts, spirits, marvels and poetic imaginings, but we can do well without an Aslan.
· The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is released on Thursday
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2005

Fossil strengthens dinosaur ancestry case
By Steve Connor
A perfectly preserved fossil of a feathered creature that lived 150 million years ago has provided further evidence to show that modern birds originate from dinosaurs. The fossil is a complete skeleton of an Archaeopteryx and shows that it had features common to birds and a group of meat-eating dinosaurs called theropods.Scientists said the feet of the fossilised Archaeopteryx were anatomically almost identical to those of theropod dinosaurs, which pointed to a common ancestry for both groups.Archaeopteryx had many bird-like features, such as feathered wings and a wishbone, but it also had distinctly reptilian traits, including jaws with teeth, a bony tail and claws on its fingers.
The foot is better preserved than any previous Archaeopteryx specimenSeveral fossils excavated in China have shown that some dinosaurs also grew feathered wings, which led scientists to suggest that perhaps birds are a living group of specialised dinosaurs.The latest work on Archaeopteryx, the first specimen of which was discovered just two years after Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species was published in 1859, lends further support to the dinosaur origin of birds. Gerald Mayr of the Forschungsinstitut Senckenberg in Frankfurt, Germany, and his colleagues describe details of their investigation into the 10th and best-preserved specimen of Archaeopteryx in the journal Science.The foot is better preserved than any previous Archaeopteryx specimen. It shows a hyper-extendible second toe, rather like the killer claw of Velociraptor, the vicious theropod dinosaur depicted in the film Jurassic Park. "These observations provide further evidence for the theropod ancestry of birds," the scientists say. The hyper-extendible second toe blurs the distinction between this ancient bird and the theropod dinosaurs, which brings both closer together as a group, they say.The theropod dinosaurs ate meat and hunted on two legs, using the claws on their forelimbs to grasp and manipulate their prey.One theory is that some theropods grew feathers for insulation, but these were useful for escaping from larger predators because flapping feathered forelimbs helped the animals to run and jump. This behaviour eventually resulted in gliding and powered flight.The fossil described by Mayr and his colleagues grew to the size of a magpie and probably lived most of its life on the ground rather than in trees.They say Archaeopteryx had dinosaur-like feet not designed for perching like those of modern birds. The new fossil, found in the limestone deposits of Bavaria where other specimens have been excavated, also had a head similar to that of a theropod dinosaur with toothed jaws.Archaeopteryx, which means "ancient wing", was not capable of flying like modern birds and probably flew no more than a few metres at a time.The Natural History Museum in London owns the first Archaeopteryx specimen to have been discovered, which it bought for £750 in 1862. Now, it is probably the most expensive fossil the museum possesses.Twenty years ago, some scientists claimed that the fossil was a fraud made by sticking feathers into cement around a fossil reptile. But museum scientists soon proved the fossil genuine.
This article was originally published on page 3 of The Sunday Independent on December 04, 2005

Published on the Web by IOL on 2005-12-04 09:20:00
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Read it and weep!
Lennon Lives Forever

By MIKAL GILMORE (Rolling Stone DEc 5th 2005)

Printed without permission
Twenty-five years after his death, his music and message endure By MIKAL GILMOREIt has been twenty-five years, and it can still stop your mind.
It had been a good night. John Lennon had just finished making music with his wife, Yoko Ono, that he regarded as some of the best music of his life, and his judgment wasn't off the mark. He had also learned, just a bit earlier, that his and Ono's album Double Fantasy -- the first collection with new music from Lennon in five years, following a mysterious sabbatical -- had gone gold that day. Now he and Ono were on their way back home from the studio to see their son, Sean, the five-year-old whom Lennon had devoted himself to more than to his career. Their car pulled up to the Manhattan apartment building where they lived, the Dakota, and Lennon got out. It was a balmy night, for December. He moved to the Dakota's entrance, then he heard a voice call his name.
Nothing made sense that night. John Lennon was murdered, shot five times in the back, in the presence of his wife. It was a murder of madness.
A future was gone -- Lennon wouldn't make music again, he wouldn't get to kiss his son -- but also, the past suddenly made no sense. A story that had started in hope had ended in blood. It was an awful payoff. Lennon had constructed the Beatles -- the group that in its time meant everything -- and then in his work after he left the band, he had strived for an honesty and an idealism that was unlike anything rock & roll had produced before. In doing so he threatened not just cultural conventions but also unforgiving powers, because he had an unusual command: He had made music that had moved the world. This violent ending ruined the epic.
Nobody ever pushed the possibilities of rock & roll like John Lennon, and nobody in the music's history has really mattered as much. This isn't to say that Lennon was the primary reason for the greatness of the Beatles, though the Beatles are, of course, unimaginable without him. Nor is it to say that after he left that group he necessarily made better albums than the other former Beatles -- though he made more interesting and consequential ones, and he took greater risks. And it isn't to say that he led a life of uprightness or sanctity, because -- and this is the important one -- he didn't. With songs like "Give Peace a Chance" and "Imagine," Lennon idealized optimism and compassion, but he realized those ideals in himself only fleetingly. He had a notorious, biting temper, he wasn't always fair to the people who loved and trusted him, and he sometimes lashed out viciously at an audience that simply believed in him.
What John Lennon did, above all else, was look after himself. He wanted love and validation, and he wanted those things on his own terms -- the only terms he cared about, and after he had become so legendary, the only ones he needed to accept. Fortunately for us all -- fortunately for history -- Lennon's terms involved high standards. He was prideful enough that he wanted to improve his art, both in and past the Beatles, and he succeeded in that ambition. He was also self-important enough to believe that he could wrestle with the times he lived in and make a difference -- and the difference he made was immense. Lennon was looking after himself when he made art and proclaimed hopes that would outlast his being. He was looking after himself when he made a family and nurtured and preserved it as his most meaningful legacy -- when he looked into his son Sean's face, and wanted to be worthy of the veneration he saw in that face. He did it when, after all his fuck-ups and all his years of silence, he believed enough in the purpose of what he had to say that he was willing to start over.
Maybe it's surprising or simply incidental that all this self-interest affected us in such wondrous and valuable ways. Or maybe it isn't incidental at all. The marvel of John Lennon's story is that all he really wanted was peace for his own interests -- he hated feeling hurt, and he felt it his whole life -- and in pursuing that end, he changed the times around him and the possibilities of the times that followed him. Deep-running hurt drove him. It's what made his story.
"You're born in pain," Lennon told Rolling Stone in 1970, after he had just left the Beatles, "and pain is what we're in most of the time. And I think that the bigger the pain, the more gods we need."
Lennon's pain reached back to his earliest memories -- and cut through his entire life. Without it, his most memorable and lasting artistic creation -- the Beatles -- would likely never have happened, or at least would not have accomplished what they finally accomplished.
Lennon was born in Liverpool, in northern England, on October 9th, 1940, during the days when Britain was the primary major democratic force willing to stand up against the advancement of fascism in Europe. Liverpool was one of England's leading port towns and a frequent target of Nazi bombing raids. On the night of Lennon's birth, air-raid sirens announced an impending attack, and the city shut out its lights. John Lennon was born that night into darkness. Though the city was hit hard and often, Liverpudlians were resilient people, with rough manners, harsh humor and a spirit of proud individualism. They needed those qualities, since much of southern England -- particularly London -- regarded the city as a plebeian backwater. "We were looked down upon by the Southerners as animals," he said in 1970. "We were hicksville."
Whereas the other young men who eventually joined Lennon to form the Beatles -- Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr -- grew up in housing projects and tougher parts of Liverpool, Lennon was raised in relative comfort, in his aunt Mimi's home in the cozy suburb of Mendips. But that benefit didn't shield the young boy from other deprivations. His father, Alfred, was a ship's steward and liked to drink; his mother, Julia, was impulsive and rebellious -- traits that Lennon inherited. Julia and Alfred married young, in a burst of passion in 1938, and John Winston Lennon was born two years later. Alfred, however, was often at sea, sometimes for a year or more, and in 1944, Julia became pregnant by another man. Alfred returned home in 1946, and when he couldn't put his family back together, he told the five-year-old John to choose between his father and mother. John at first chose his father, but when he saw the pain this was causing Julia, he relented, crying, begging his mother not to leave him. John would not see his father again until well into his fame in the Beatles; in 1970, when he severed his relationship with Alfred, Lennon still felt rage over the neglect from years before. "Have you any idea what I've been through because of you?" he screamed at his father. "Day after day in therapy, screaming for my daddy, sobbing for you to come home. What did you care, away at sea all those years?"
As it turned out, neither of Lennon's parents raised him. Julia's family was offended by her extramarital conduct, and Julia's sister Mimi took custody of the boy. Mimi was stern -- nothing like Julia. She tried to give Lennon a steady home and firm direction, though she was often unwilling to accommodate his youthful enthusiasms, and she withheld love unless he pleased her judgments.
Julia's influence, on the other hand, was immense. Whether she meant to or not, Julia provided her son a model of social defiance; she didn't feel bound by proper conventions and easy morals, and neither would John. She also encouraged his fervor for rock & roll.
In the mid-1950s, Lennon and much of English youth were in the grip of a passion for skiffle -- a rhythmic mix of the British music-hall tradition and American folk music, popularized in Lonnie Donegan's "Rock Island Line" -- when a harder beat emerged from America, led by artists like bluesmen Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf, R&B singers Ray Charles and James Brown, and fierce new stylists such as Gene Vincent, Elvis Presley and Chuck Berry. Lennon loved this music immediately -- he sought it out nightly on Radio Luxembourg, an early form of British pirate radio. But the class-conscious Mimi saw rock & roll as entertainment for commoners, and she wouldn't let Lennon learn to play it in her house. When John purchased a guitar anyway, Julia allowed him to have it sent to her home, where she taught him some chord patterns and rhythms, and gave him room to practice with friends.
Julia was killed in 1958 -- hit by a car driven by a drunken off-duty policeman -- and Lennon was left with the sense of an unfinished relationship that forever haunted his memories and longings. "I lost her twice," Lennon told David Sheff in a lengthy 1980 Playboy interview. "Once as a five-year-old when I was moved in with my auntie. And once again . . . when she actually, physically died . . . The underlying chip on my shoulder that I had as a youth got really big then. Being a teenager and a rock & roller and an art student and my mother being killed just when I was re-establishing a relationship with her . . . it was very traumatic for me."
The adventure of the Beatles was forged by John Lennon's temperament and needs. He formed the group to make his way through the world un-alone, in a partnership that might lessen his sense of anxiety and separation. Later, he would end the group for the same reasons.
As a teenager, at Quarry Bank High School and later at Liverpool College of Art, Lennon was seen as unusually bright, imaginative, creative -- and as a constant troublemaker. He wrote clever prose and drew skillful caricatures, but he had no patience for conventions of form and showed little respect to school authority for its own sake. Though Lennon struck some as a nasty character, he was also in serious pursuit of the securities and union that could be afforded by love and family. He found a romantic form of that quest in Cynthia Powell -- who married him in 1962 and bore him a son, Julian, the following year -- but Lennon's true effort at building a family came in the communion he formed with the Beatles. Indeed, the Beatles proved the great love story of the 1960s -- love was their main theme, first as a romantic ideal, then later as a social and political end -- but love wouldn't save their family.
The group debuted in 1962 with "Love Me Do" (a song by Paul McCartney) and first hit Number One on the British charts in 1963 with "Please Please Me" (a song by Lennon that was also a clever plea about oral sex). Within a year, the Beatles were the biggest event in British culture since the Second World War. A year later, after the group's breakthrough in America on The Ed Sullivan Show, the Beatles were simply the biggest thing in the world, short of nuclear fear. They represented a sea change -- in music, in culture, in democracy itself. They weren't always comfortable with having that effect. "People said the Beatles were the movement," Lennon later said, "but we were only part of the movement. We were influenced as much as we influenced." True, but the Beatles were a key part of that movement. They represented youthful hope, and they represented the new social power that rock & roll might achieve -- a power not only to upset but to transform. The world was changing -- or at least it felt that way -- and the Beatles served as emblems of that change.
As wonderful as all that may have seemed to the Beatles' audience, the group's internal reality was rather different. Lennon called life with the Beatles "a trap." In part, he meant the confinements and pressures that came with their fame and the fears -- such as the dread they felt traveling America in 1966, under constant death threats in the wake of Lennon's controversial statement that the Beatles were "more popular than Jesus now." Certainly, Lennon reveled in the money and fame, the hedonistic opportunities that spilled forth every place the Beatles turned, but he hated the touring. He resented making nice for private audiences with local privileged officials, and he felt the concerts offered no chance for musical growth. He also lamented that all these obligations kept him from time with his son Julian, though, according to Cynthia in her recent book, John, her former husband's emotional investment in his son was often strained even in the best of circumstances. The truth is, Lennon had inherited more of his mother's spirit than he understood. He lived intensely in the moment -- he threw himself into attachments with real ardor -- but when those moments and the infatuation had passed, he liked to move on. Quickly.
Lennon's first diversions came in the way of drug experiences -- a pursuit that he shared with the other Beatles, as their experiments with marijuana, then LSD, affected the growth of their music on Rubber Soul, Revolver and Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band -- followed by a devotion to Eastern mysticism and meditation. During a meditation seminar in Bangor, Wales, in August 1967, the group learned that its manager, Brian Epstein, had been found dead in his London apartment at age thirty-two, of a drug overdose. "I knew we were in trouble then," Lennon said in 1970. "I didn't really have any misconceptions about our ability to do anything other than play music. And I was scared. I thought, 'We've fuckin' had it.'"
But another event that would figure just as much into the Beatles' fate had already transpired. In November 1966, during the recording of Sgt. Pepper, Lennon visited London's Indica Gallery for a preview of an exhibition by Yoko Ono, a Japanese-born woman who had been a key player in New York's influential Fluxus avant-garde art movement in the early 1960s (she had helped conceive performance art). Her works were unlike anything Lennon had seen before. They were playful and intellectual at the same time, and all of them offered the viewers conundrums but also invited them to become a part of the art by addressing the conundrum. There was no such thing as a false answer to the riddles in Ono's art.
Lennon was puzzled, even annoyed by some of the challenges in Yoko Ono's art, but he got it, and he was captivated. Ono represented possibilities to him -- certainly romantically, but more important, the possibility of growth as an artist and the prospect of a new kind of partnership. In May 1968, Lennon sent Cynthia away on a vacation to Greece, and the night before her return, he invited Ono over to his country home in Weybridge. He and Ono talked for hours and made a remarkable experimental recording, Unfinished Music No. 1: Two Virgins. At dawn they made love. When Cynthia returned home that afternoon, she found the two sitting together in robes, drinking tea, and she was startled by their quiet intimacy. She later said, "I knew immediately [when] I saw them together that they were right for each other. I knew I'd lost him." For his part, Lennon knew there were other losses to come. "That's when I started freeing myself from the Beatles," he said. "And that's when everybody started getting a bit upset . . ."
Ono knew nothing about the rock & roll world and wasn't particularly impressed by the Beatles. Lennon's relationship with her was inspiring a new adventurism, and he felt that the Beatles would stifle that spirit. "What I did," he later admitted, "was use Yoko . . . It was like, 'Now I have the strength to leave, because I know there is another side to life.'"
Lennon began bringing Ono into the group's recording sessions during the making of The Beatles, popularly referred to as the White Album. Ono performed on a couple of Lennon's tracks and worked with him on "Revolution #9," and her participation was seen by some as a violation of the group's self-contained ethos. Lennon felt that the Beatles and others at Apple actively disliked Ono because she was a strong-willed woman and Japanese, and that they judged her "like a fucking jury." Ono said, "I sort of went to bed with this guy that I liked, and suddenly the next morning I see these three guys standing there with resentful eyes." The disparagement that Lennon perceived wounded and outraged him, and he continued to reflect on it even in his last days.
In 1969, during a business meeting around the time of Let It Be, McCartney was trying to persuade the group to return to live performances. This suggestion had been coming around for some time, and Lennon and Harrison hated it. With McCartney's hopes running so high, Lennon felt he had to come clean. "I wasn't going to tell you," he said, "but I'm breaking the group up." A shocked McCartney and Lennon's manager, Allen Klein, persuaded Lennon to hold off making any public announcements. The band still had to finish Let It Be, and there were two other albums to promote: Hey Jude and Abbey Road. Lennon agreed to the delay. On April 10th, 1970, close to the date the Beatles were set to release Let It Be, McCartney released his first solo album, McCartney, along with a press release announcing that he had quit the group and wouldn't miss it. Lennon was dismayed and furious. He had held off on his own announcement at McCartney's request, and now McCartney had gotten the jump on him.
In a famous, lengthy 1970 interview with Jann S. Wenner in this magazine, Lennon largely held McCartney's wiles to blame for the group's dissolution, but he also had plenty to say about the Beatles in general and the audience that claimed them. Among those statements: "We sold out. The music was dead before we even went on the theater tour of Britain . . . The Beatles' music died then, as musicians." "I didn't become something when the Beatles made it or when you heard about me -- I've been like this all me life. Genius is pain too. It's just pain." "Fuckin' big bastards, that's what the Beatles were. You have to be a bastard to make it, man. That's a fact, and the Beatles were the biggest bastards on earth." "One has to humiliate oneself to be what the Beatles were, and that's what I resent . . . About all we can do is do it like fuckin' circus animals. I resent being an artist in that respect, I resent performing for fucking idiots who won't know -- who don't know -- anything. 'Cause they can't feel -- I'm the one that's feeling, 'cause I'm the one that's expressing what they are trying to. They live vicariously through me and other artists."
It was difficult to read his words without feeling that Lennon was indicting not just the band but those who had placed a stake in the Beatles. No other major artist ever razed his own image so devastatingly.
However -- not surprisingly -- when Lennon applied his hurt and vitriol to his music, the result was transcendent. He had been active in Los Angeles in an experimental form of treatment, primal therapy, authored by psychologist Arthur Janov. The therapy's premise was that to heal oneself, you had to go into your deepest repressed pains in a cathartic way, and when you hit the center of that pain, you would erupt in a cry -- the primal scream -- and would know yourself better. It seemed tailor-made for Lennon. "I was the male who never cried, you know," he told Playboy in 1980. "I would never have gone if there hadn't been this promise of this scream, this liberating scream." Lennon brought some of that practice to bear on his first solo album, John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band, released in December 1970. The singer recruited Phil Spector to produce the record. Spector had formulated the orchestral-like Wall of Sound style for his famed recordings with the Crystals, the Ronettes, Ike and Tina Turner and the Righteous Brothers, and he had applied some of that sensibility to the Beatles' Let It Be and George Harrison's All Things Must Pass. Lennon, though, wanted an altogether different sound for his first album: minimalist instrumentation -- just guitar, bass, drums, piano and voice. The result was startling. Lennon sang about the most painful memories and undercurrents of his life -- the death of his mother, the failures of faith and fame, the betrayals in misplaced ideals -- in such a way that there was nothing to shield a listener from the resulting raw anger and anguish. He later said that he decided, for this album, to "shave off all imagery, pretensions of poetry, illusions of grandeur . . . Just say what it is, simple English, make it rhyme and put a backbeat on it and express yourself as simply [and] straightforwardly as possible."
The album's crowning moment was "God," a litany of all the systems of belief and mythology and history that Lennon was now turning his back on, until at song's end, in a mesmerizing and aching voice he pronounced, "I don't believe in Beatles/I just believe in me/Yoko and me/And that's reality." A short time later he told Jann S. Wenner, "I don't believe in the Beatles myth. I don't believe in the Beatles -- there's no other way of saying it, is there? I don't believe in them and whatever they were supposed to be in everybody's head, and including our own for a period." But Lennon was taking the measure of more than his former band. "God" caught the wonderful and terrible sense of a generation in its time -- romantic, shattered, reeling as hope dissolved all around it, and now left on its own. "The dream is over," he sang at the song's end, in the loveliest voice he ever summoned. "What can I say?/The dream is over/Yesterday/I was the dream weaver/But now I'm reborn/I was the Walrus/But now I'm John/And so, dear friends/You'll just have to carry on/The dream is over."
John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band would be the most powerful work of Lennon's career -- the only album by a former Beatle that can stand in its entirety alongside the best of the band's recordings. It didn't, however, sell as well as any of the Beatles' releases, nor as well as McCartney and Harrison's solo debuts. With his next album, Imagine, Lennon tried to present his concerns more accessibly. Spector produced again but this time brought his more familiar warm, lush style to the new songs. Lennon's lyrics still chased troubling themes -- his hatred of deceitful political leaders, jealous insecurities in his marriage, a bitter disdain for his former songwriting partner (he loved beating up on McCartney) -- but this time he wrapped them in a savvy pop sensibility. The album's title track, in particular, put forth some daring notions -- "Imagine there's no heaven . . . no hell . . . no countries . . . no religion . . . no possessions . . . imagine a brotherhood of man" -- and it did so in a beguiling and haunting way. The song was a prayer, the most radical prayer that ever played widely on radio. "'Imagine,' both the song and the album," Lennon said, "is the same thing as 'Working Class Hero' and 'Mother' and 'God' on the first disc. But the first record was too real for people, so nobody bought it . . . 'Imagine' was the same message but sugarcoated. . . . 'Imagine' is a big hit almost everywhere -- anti-religious, anti-nationalistic, anti-conventional, anti-capitalistic, but because it is sugarcoated it is accepted. Now I understand what you have to do: Put your political message across with a little honey."
Lennon's gambit worked. Imagine reached Number One on Billboard's album charts, and it produced an unorthodox anthem that has never been equaled in popular music. It was also the last great album Lennon would make until the last few weeks of his life.
In 1971, John Lennon and Yoko Ono moved to New York. Lennon felt vitalized by its art and music and politics, and he and Ono became friendly with some prominent radical activists, including Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman of the Yippies. Lennon had been politically concerned for some time, but in New York his politics grew more radical and outspoken. For years, starting before the end of the Beatles, Lennon and Ono had pursued a media-directed campaign for the cause of peace -- which at that time meant promoting an end to the war in Vietnam, though they were also advocating the larger philosophy of nonviolence that had guided India's Mahatma Gandhi and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. In March 1969, following their marriage in Gibraltar, Lennon and Ono flew to Amsterdam, where they staged a "bed-in" for peace. For seven days they sat in bed in their pajamas at the Amsterdam Hilton and gave hundreds of interviews, discussing their views that true peace begins as a personal pursuit and talking about intersections between activism, popular culture, ideology, and Eastern and Western religion. In May, they staged a similar "lie-in" for peace in Montreal, where they recorded the enduringly popular "Give Peace a Chance" in a hotel room with several friends and visitors. Lennon later said that he was trying to change his own heart as much as anybody else's. "It's the most violent people who go for love and peace," he told Playboy. "But I sincerely believe in love and peace. I'm a violent man who has learned not to be violent and regrets his violence."
After arriving in New York, the couple played some political benefits on the East Coast and appeared at demonstrations for social justice and against the war, though they still refused to take part in anything that might result in a battle. "We are not going to draw children into a situation to cause violence," Lennon once told Rubin and Hoffman. "So you can overthrow what? And replace it with what?" Lennon and Ono capped their political activity with a double album, Some Time in New York City, which addressed concerns like harsh drug laws, feminism, the Irish conflict and justice for black radical Angela Davis (a philosophy instructor tried and acquitted in a death-penalty case for the shooting death of a California judge). It was . . . well, it was a truly awful album -- the worst work of Lennon's career. The problem wasn't his political stances but instead how he expressed those concerns: The songs lacked any of the lyrical originality or effectiveness of Lennon's prior writing. He later said he was aiming for a journalistic style of immediacy, but other artists -- most notably Bob Dylan -- had done better with the same tack by humanizing their subjects, drawing portraits of people who embodied the pains of war and injustice. For the first and only time in his life, Lennon demeaned his material. There was nothing threatening or inspiring about Some Time in New York City. It worked only as a parody of itself.
Unfortunately, the U.S. government, under the administration of President Richard Nixon, saw Lennon's politics as a serious hazard. In 1972, a Senate internal-security subcommittee of the Judiciary Committee sent a memo to Sen. Strom Thurmond, noting Lennon's political activities. The letter suggested that Lennon intended to interfere with Nixon's renomination at the Republican Convention in San Diego. Thurmond then wrote Attorney General John Mitchell, hinting that Lennon should be deported. The Immigration and Naturalization Service informed Lennon he must leave the country within weeks, due to a guilty plea he had entered in a 1968 marijuana-possession case in England. Lennon fought the order and managed to win an extension, but he had to fight the matter for years. It wasn't until 1975, after Lennon had sued the federal government, that he finally prevailed and the government withdrew its case. Later, when the matter was all settled, and Nixon and much of his administration had been forced out of power over their criminal actions in the Watergate matter, Lennon told journalist Pete Hamill, in a Rolling Stone interview, that he didn't want to talk about the president's fall: "I'm even nervous about commenting on politics. They've got me that jumpy these days."
But Lennon faced other trouble during this period. In October 1973, he and Ono separated, after four years of marriage. Lennon claimed she threw him out. Ono said she was feeling lost as an artist. "What am I going to do?" she said. "My pride was being hurt all the time." Lennon moved to Los Angeles for a time, accompanied by his and Ono's secretary, May Pang, who became his lover. At first, Lennon asserted a delight at leading a single person's life. He caroused and drank heavily with Harry Nilsson (a favorite songwriter of Lennon's, who died of heart failure in 1994), the Who's drummer, Keith Moon (who died in 1978 of an overdose of medication he was taking to treat alcoholism), and Ringo Starr (whose alcohol addiction in those days sometimes resulted in blackouts). It became apparent that Lennon was miserable without Ono. He begged her -- often calling many times a day -- to take him back, but she said he wasn't ready. Lennon fell apart. He behaved horribly in public, and he smashed up a friend's house where he was staying. Nilsson later recalled Lennon crying while drunk at night, wondering what he had done wrong.
Lennon's depression and bravado ran alongside each other in his 1974 Walls and Bridges. The work was essentially an open plea to Ono -- indeed, parts of it, such as "Nobody Loves You (When You're Down and Out)" and "Bless You," were heartbreaking. Interestingly, the album yielded Lennon his first Number One single as a solo artist, the spry "Whatever Gets You Through the Night," which he recorded with Elton John. On Thanksgiving night that year, Lennon appeared at Elton's Madison Square Garden concert in New York, one of his rare appearances before a large audience, and it was a triumph. Ono attended the concert, and within a few weeks she allowed him to return to the Dakota. Almost a year later, on October 7th, 1975, Lennon finally won his deportation battle. A U.S. Court of Appeals Judge declared, "Lennon's four-year battle to remain in our country is a testimony to his faith in the American dream." Two days later, the forty-two-year-old Ono -- who had suffered three miscarriages before with Lennon -- gave birth to a son, Sean. The date was also Lennon's thirty-fifth birthday. That was when he decided to quit the world.
John Lennon's infant son transformed his life as nothing else ever had. His wife had offered him a deal: "I am carrying the baby nine months, and that is enough. You take care of it afterward." Lennon took his charge seriously. Just as his father and mother had, in effect, abandoned him, Lennon had also forsaken his first son, Julian, during his years with the Beatles, and only spoke with him sporadically since his divorce from Cynthia.
This time he was ready for parenthood. He turned his business over to Ono, who attended to managing their fortunes as if she were undertaking a new art form. Lennon, though, had little room in his days for art. He became Sean's primary nurturer, with the help of a domestic staff. He designed the boy's play routine, cultural education and diet, and when Lennon learned to bake loaves of bread, he viewed the accomplishment with the same sort of excitement that once greeted the release of the Beatles' albums. Lennon and Ono also became adherents of destiny systems like astrology and numerology, basing major decisions -- including business, travel and relationships -- on how the stars or the numbers looked. Elliott Mintz, a former ABC radio interviewer who became one of the couple's closest friends, saw much of their private life firsthand. While he kept his humor about it all, Mintz was also convinced that the family's belief systems and rituals helped transmogrify Lennon. He told Rolling Stone writer Chet Flippo in 1981, "We sometimes joked about the paradox of [Lennon] singing 'God' and 'I don't believe in I Ching and I don't believe in magic and I don't believe in Buddha and I don't believe in Krishna' -- but let me tell you, he believed in all of it." Lennon also studied feminist history and theory. "It's men who have come a long way from even contemplating the idea of equality," he told Playboy. "I am the one who has come a long way. I was the real pig. And it is a relief not to be a pig. The pressures of being a pig were enormous. They were killing me. All those years of trying to be tough and the heavy rocker and heavy womanizer and heavy drinker were killing me. And it is a relief not to have to do it."
Lennon said he didn't listen to much popular music during those years. He played Hank Williams and Bing Crosby records, watched a lot of TV (primarily The Tonight Show, with Johnny Carson) and did a lot of reading. He composed only sporadically in these years (though two of his rough demos, "Free As a Bird" and "Real Love," became the Beatles' final two singles, when McCartney, Harrison and Starr expanded on them for the Beatles Anthology project in 1996). One of the few musicians Lennon allowed himself contact with in this time was McCartney, who sometimes dropped by unannounced with a guitar, to Lennon's minor annoyance. When the Beatles' legal matters were settled in 1975, Lennon and McCartney were able to re-establish a cautious but respectful relationship. Each sometimes praised the other's solo work, and in one of his last interviews, Lennon paid McCartney his highest compliment. "Throughout my career I've selected to work with . . . only two people: Paul McCartney and Yoko Ono . . . That ain't bad picking." Overall, Lennon's feelings about the Beatles had turned warmer -- he knew they were unrivaled -- but he never once considered any of the many demands or invitations for a reunion of the group. "Why should the Beatles give more?" he said. "Didn't they give everything on God's earth for ten years? Didn't they give themselves? Didn't they give all?"
In the summer of 1980, Lennon abruptly decided that he and Ono would resume recording. Ono had sent him on a sailboat trip to Bermuda, but a three-day storm had made the captain and the boat's two deckhands sick. Lennon was forced to steer the ship for a night, keeping it on course as waves lashed at him. He sang sea chanteys and Beatles songs as he held the wheel tight. "I arrived in Bermuda," he said. "Once I got there, I was so centered after the experience at sea . . . all these songs came to me." He called Ono back in New York. It was time, he said, for them to make a new pop record together. In August, Lennon and Ono entered Manhattan's Hit Factory and produced a duo album, Double Fantasy, and Ono's single "Walking on Thin Ice" (a dark and brilliant piece of dance music). The new album was, in a sense, the most shocking music Lennon ever made. In the Beatles he had written and recorded some of the most daring pop of the 1960s, and he had taken numerous risks -- well beyond pop -- in his solo and experimental work. But Double Fantasy was a departure in unexpected ways that disturbed and disappointed some fans and critics. It was a collection of songs about marriage and family, about domestic affirmation, and it featured the most polished musicianship and professional production of any of his works. To some it sounded as if Lennon had made an easy peace, philosophically and aesthetically. But Double Fantasy ran deeper than that; it was, as Lennon and Ono saw it, a work about how modern capitalism aims to undermine the family. It was no less defiant, for them, than the music of the Clash or any of the other punk bands making brave music in that time. It was all music about a better world. "In one sense," critic Stephen Holden wrote, "Double Fantasy literally fulfills the dream of 'Imagine' by describing a real utopia." Or to put it in other terms, John Lennon was finally making good on an old claim: All you need is love.
In any event, Double Fantasy proved a hit. The night of December 8th, David Geffen -- the head of the label Lennon and Ono had signed with -- visited the couple at the recording studio to tell them the album had just gone gold. Lennon and Ono finished that night's work on "Walking on Thin Ice," which Lennon called the best song they had recorded in their re-emergence. He left the studio a happy man -- probably as happy as he'd ever been. He had wrested a satisfaction and purpose from life that had long eluded him: He had established a secure family, and he was making music he believed in. On that night, as he and his wife arrived back at the Dakota, Lennon carrying the tape of Ono's "Walking on Thin Ice," anxious to see their five-year-old son, he had found a balance. Then, as the singer walked to the entrance of his apartment building, a man stepped from the shadows. "Mr. Lennon," he said.
After his death, things changed around us. America entered the years of Ronald Reagan; Britain, the years of Margaret Thatcher. Modern history was reversing its hopes. Rock & roll, and later hip-hop, has still pushed against that reversal, but it has never pushed as hard as it did in the years of John Lennon. That isn't simply because Lennon was killed. Rather, it's because he lived. The Beatles set something loose in their time: a sense of generational transformation that moved quickly from the blissful to the artistic to the political, and for a few remarkable years, it seemed irrefutable. The story of our times since then has been the product of a determination to make sure that nothing like that could happen again. While "Imagine" can still be played on radio because its music sounds familiar and comforting, there's little -- if anything -- with that sort of nerve in today's mainstream pop. The free market of ideas just isn't that free right now. A pop star as popular as Lennon proclaiming similar ideals in our current environment would run the risk of being judged a heretic.
So we got something when we had John Lennon, and we lost something when his voice was killed. We lost somebody as fucked up as us, who worked his whole life to overcome himself, and, in doing so, his creativity would help us overcome the madness of our times -- at least for a while. Through it all, he told us to keep faith, to keep courage, to defy our hurt, our fear, to find love and hope and to fight for their meaning.
I remember that for about two years after Lennon's murder, I couldn't listen to "Imagine." That blighted message was just too heartbreaking. Instead, I was drawn to Lennon's brave performance of a song he hadn't written, Ben E. King's "Stand by Me," from Lennon's Rock 'n' Roll album. "If the sky that we look upon," Lennon sang, "should tumble and fall/And the mountain should crumble to the sea/I won't cry, I won't cry/No, I won't shed a tear/Just as long as you stand, stand by me."
The mountain crumbled, and we shed tears. We were on our own. We had been for a long time. The dream was over.(Posted Dec 05, 2005)