In the odd event you're reading this in an isolation chamber, today would have been John Lennon's 70th birthday. Those of us who landed smack in the middle of our teenage years just as The Beatles arrived, have vivid memories of John's outspoken nature and so it's no accident, since this is mostly a political blog the sister site of a bigger political blog and dealing primarily with situations from the past and how they relate to the attitude of our current state of affairs, that I ran across this excerpt of an interview with John Lennon recorded just before his assassination in 1980, when Reagan had just won the election. Among a vast range of subjects John talked about, his take on the then-current state of political affairs is quite interesting and certainly fuels speculation on how he would have felt about our current situation.

John Lennon: “I don’t think politics is the only answer, you see. I think this idea that we elect these leaders and then expect them to do miracles for us. Kennedy is a big dream for everybody because he didn’t live to fulfill or let us down. And it’s not to negate what Kennedy was and what he means to people. But the reality is, had he lived, how do you know how well he would’ve done at the time, right? Or how the war would have gone and how everything would have gone. So investing leaders with supernatural powers, whether they be pop starts, politicians or movie stars or football heroes, it don’t work. It just doesn’t work. Because we put them up on the pedestal and immediately want to knock them off.”

And John certainly knew a thing or two about pedestals.

And we're still good at constructing pedestals. It's as American as Apple pie.

And seventy years ago today . . . .