'Imagine' THIS!

Funeral songs, from Jimmy Carter's to my own

[Note to Readers: Yesterday I had a totally unrelated essay published by American Thinker. As I’m rapidly losing enthusiasm for posting here (not to mention just about everything else), I have chosen to not publish it here. Should you wish to see it, however (who am I kidding?), you may do so here.]

Among the many observations and comments made about the funeral of Former President James Earl Carter Jr. are those about the song “Imagine” by John Lennon having been requested by Carter to be performed at the ceremony.

Many have noted the apparent hypocrisy, or at least irony, of a song so patently atheistic and anti-religious being featured at the funeral of a man whose public image has always centered around his “deeply-held Christian values.” He claimed to be a Born-Again Christian and even taught Sunday School in his hometown of Plains, GA.

On top of that, John Lennon himself described the 1971 song’s message as “virtually the Communist Manifesto,” another reason for it to seem patently inappropriate to be performed at the funeral of a former President of the United States — a country which (at least as of this writing!), despite the unrelenting efforts of the Democrat Party, has still not quite completed the transition to Communism.

And in addition to the song being pro-Communist and anti-religious, it’s anti-nationalist; “Imagine” is an unsubtle anthem to open borders and an end to national sovereignty, an issue that seems to be rubbed more and more raw each day, as each day seems to bring fresh examples of the folly of our failure to maintain border integrity.

All of this was noted in an American Thinker essay this morning by Peter Barry Chowka, who also commented on the song having been featured at NYC’s iconic Times Square New Year’s celebration since 2005. Chowka’s essay tends to echo a number of points made in my own American Thinker essay, “You May Say I’m a Cynic, But I’m Not the Only One,” which appeared in the last days of 2018.

[By the way, that title should be an all-purpose one for me; I’m becoming ever more cynical about any number of things, if that’s even possible.]

As you’ll see in that essay (if you take the trouble to click the link and read it!), my condemnation of that song in no way diminishes my enthusiasm for- and enjoyment of John Lennon’s musical talent. If anything, the song may be viewed as further evidence of the negative influence on Lennon of Yoko Ono, as if she hadn’t already done enough damage by ruining The Beatles.

[By the way, for any of you younger-types, The Beatles was the band that Paul McCartney was in before Wings.]

Now that Carter has shuffled off this mortal coil and (as Rush Limbaugh would say) “assumed room temperature,” and as more and more becomes known about the real 39th POTUS, it is becoming harder and harder to see his professed Christian faith as anything more than camouflage.

For one thing, those of us who have been paying attention have long known that Jimmy was a Jew-hater. His brother Billy (of “Billy Beer” fame) was far less shy about revealing the deep-seated anti-Semitic attitudes that Jimmy tried so hard to keep hidden, and often succeeded, except when unmasked by his actions, such as when, like Queen Hillary, he literally and unabashedly embraced Yasser Arafat.

Despite having received the Nobel Peace Prize for supposedly brokering peace between Israel and her Arab neighbors, he was always an appeaser of Israel’s enemies and always favored a “Two-State Solution,” even though the PLO, showing their true agenda, twice rejected his proposals for such a “solution.” I happen to be among those who believe that a “Two-State Solution” is merely a prelude to another “Final Solution.”

He worked against Israeli and Jewish interests in ways both large and small. He once commented that the committee formed to establish the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum included “too many Jews.”

In 2006 Carter published a book condemning Israel as a warmongering, apartheid nation and the root of all the Middle East’s problems, while actually condoning and encouraging terror attacks on Israel and Jews by the so-called Palestinians.

But enough about the late Jimmy “Ah’ll nevah lah t’ yew” Carter. He’s gone. Boo-hoo.

Anyway, to now include the sort of highly personal free-association that I like to think characterizes these posts (as if anyone is actually noticing, or cares), the discussion of the choice of songs played at funerals can’t help but make me think of my own funeral.

Not that I expect to have one; for one thing, I expect for my remains to be unrecognizable long before anyone even begins to miss me wonder what became of me (evidenced by the increasingly diminishing response to these posts). None of the several dear friends I’ve lost in recent years seem to have had funerals. Or perhaps I just wasn’t invited. One of those, a woman my own age whom I’d known all my adult life, and whom I loved and miss dearly, succumbed to cancer in mid-2023 surrounded by her family, but had no funeral. A memorial gathering was promised, but seemed to not materialize, or at least I was not informed.

But I’ve thought about the music I’d like to have at my funeral, and it would have to include “Yesterday, When I Was Young.” It’s a song that, probably better than any other, sums up my wasted life, especially the part that goes “The friends I made all seemed somehow to drift away, and only I am left onstage to end the play.” It’s a song about how one realizes, too late, the price paid for the life one has lived.

I’d probably prefer the Charles Aznavour version. He did, after all, write it (originally in French), and although I love the versions by Roy Clark and by Glen Campbell, they both committed the flaw of singing the lyrics they thought they’d heard rather than the correct lyrics as written.

Instead of singing “The thousand dreams I dreamed, the splendid things I planned, I always built, Alas, on weak and shifting sand,” both troubadors sang “…I always built to last on weak and shifting sand.” Shirley Bassey, on the other hand, is an example of one whose version gets it right.

Joan Baez (for whom I will always carry a torch, despite her politics) committed a similar error in most of her renditions of “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,” singing “…So much cavalry…” instead of the historical reference to “Stoneman’s Cavalry,” as I noted in this essay.

Compulsive nitpicker and stickler for accuracy that I am, I absolutely will not stand for having my funeral sullied by someone singing the wrong lyrics to my requested song!!

Oh, well, if you want something done to your liking, you just have to do it yourself, Right? Maybe that’s just what I’ll do.

ST