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And Finally
Lennon was less of a leftie by the time he died
By CMU Editorial | Published on Thursday 30 June 2011
Well, we all get a little bit more right wing with age, don’t we? I recently turned 36 and have now joined my local Tory club, bought a Sarah Palin poster for my kitchen and thrown out all my hip hop records.
And it seems even John Lennon was distancing himself from his former left-leaning radical self in the latter years of his life. Or so says Fred Seaman, who was the late Beatle’s PA during his final year alive. In a new documentary, Seaman says that Lennon was a Ronald Regan supporter, and enjoyed winding up those with left-wing opinions similar to those he once promoted.
Says Seaman: “John, basically, made it very clear that if he were an American he would vote for Reagan because he was really sour on [Democrat President] Jimmy Carter. He’d met Reagan back, I think, in the 70s at some sporting event. [Of course] Reagan was the guy who had ordered the National Guard, I believe, to go after the young [peace] demonstrators in Berkeley, so I think that John maybe forgot about that… [But] he did express support for Reagan, which shocked me”.
He adds: “I also saw John embark in some really brutal arguments with my uncle, who’s an old-time communist… He enjoyed really provoking my uncle… Maybe he was being provocative… but it was pretty obvious to me he had moved away from his earlier radicalism. He was a very different person back in 1979 and 80 than he’d been when he wrote ‘Imagine’. By 1979, he looked back on that guy and was embarrassed by that guy’s naiveté”.
Ah, if only he’d lived, Lennon could have had his own Fox News show by now.
