Fifty-five years ago, newlyweds John Lennon and Yoko Ono spent a week in bed in the presidential suite of the Amsterdam Hilton.
A few days earlier, they had sent a card that said, “Come on John and Yoko’s honeymoon: a bed at the Amsterdam Hotel.”
Every day they opened the doors of their rooms to hundreds of journalists and cameramen and sat on their beds to give interviews. As far as honeymoons go, it was particularly crowded.
‘We spoke to the press. We met people from communist countries, people from the West, from all the countries in the world,” John recalled. “We gave the press eight hours a day, every waking hour, to ask all the questions they wanted about our position.”
This week of honeymoon was part of their campaign for world peace. “It’s the best idea we’ve had so far.
John Lennon and Yoko Ono photographed on November 2, 1980
American criminal Mark David Chapman, the man who shot John Lennon, in a mugshot taken at the Attica Correctional Center.
We’re making a peace ad on the front pages of newspapers around the world instead of a war ad,” John said. “We’re trying to sell peace, as a product, and sell it like people sell soap or soft drinks. “.
Some of their more rigorous visitors asked them probing questions about their pacifist stance; some of his responses were shockingly insensitive and selfish.
When asked by a journalist how she would have faced the threat of Hitler, Yoko replied: “I would have slept with him.” In ten days she would have changed his mind.
Not everyone was convinced. Even some of the Beatles’ most enthusiastic fans were skeptical.
“Beneath the seemingly disinterested holy nonsense… there was a core of exhibitionist self-promotion,” wrote Ian MacDonald in his masterful book The Beatles, Revolution In The Head.
Despite John and Yoko’s efforts from bed, the Vietnam War would continue for another six years. Undaunted, Yoko Ono remains firmly convinced that the two changed the world for the better.
In an interview with Tom Hibbert in 1988, she astonishingly boasted that she and John had been, at the time, the only two people in the world who embraced peace.
“At first, John and I were pretty much alone in what we were saying, the only ones, but now I think 98 percent of the world is really for peace… In the end, you see, it had an effect. The year Last time, when Reagan and Gorbachev had their summit and shook hands, I felt, well, John and I had an effect. In my mind I was saying to John, ‘John, we did it!’
Fifty-five years later, Yoko Ono is 91 years old and the subject of a celebratory exhibition at the Tate Modern.
Critics have pounced on each other in their headlong rush to celebrate his “genius.”
This is reminiscent of Alan Bennett’s observation that “if you live to be 90 in England and can still eat a boiled egg, they think you deserve the Nobel Prize.”
Fifty-five years later, Yoko Ono is 91 years old and the subject of a celebratory exhibition at the Tate Modern.
Mark Chapman has been incarcerated for the past 44 years. Every two years he reports for parole; Every two years, Yoko Ono instructs her lawyers to oppose it.
Meanwhile, her husband’s murderer, Mark Chapman, remains locked up in prison in New York. He has been incarcerated for the past 44 years. Every two years she reports for parole; Every two years, Yoko Ono orders her lawyers to oppose her.
If Chapman were released, she says, “me and John’s two children would not feel safe for the rest of our lives; people who are in positions of high visibility and outspokenness, like John, would also feel unsafe.”
He adds that the murder of John Lennon “managed to change my entire life, devastate his children and bring deep sadness and fear to the world.”
Earlier this month, Chapman was denied parole for the 13th time; Now it seems inevitable that he will die in prison.
Of course, there will be those who say that what Chapman did was inexcusable and that it is only fair that he spend the rest of his life behind bars.
This is a natural human reaction. However, Yoko Ono has spent her life publicly preaching forgiveness and urging the rest of us to follow the path of love and peace.
In Northern Ireland and South Africa, ordinary people who have suffered terrible family losses have somehow managed to forgive their enemies, all in the pursuit of peace.
As John Lennon sang in Mind Games: “Love is the answer.” Isn’t it time for Yoko Ono to practice what she has been preaching for a long time?