“…It’s just to try and work on the good bit of you.”
- John Lennon (1969)
I Met the Walrus is an animated film directed by Josh Raskin and produced by Jerry Levitan. Illustration is by James Braithwaite and computer illustration is by Alex Kurina. It’s based on an interview with Lennon by Jerry Levitan, then 14 years old, who tracked him down to his Toronto hotel room. The film was nominated for an Oscar last year in the category of Best Short Animation.
I Met the Walrus is on youtube.
For a connection to the news of the day, read Glenn Greenwald’s, Fox News “war game” the coming civil war. Greenwald comments on Glenn Beck’s “War Games” show in which, “They discuss a coming ‘civil war’ led by American ‘Bubba’ militias — Beck says he ‘believes we’re on this road’ — and they contemplate whether the U.S. military would follow the President’s orders to subdue civil unrest or would instead join with ‘the people’ in defense of their Constitutional rights against the Government.”
I sometimes hear this stuff on the car radio when I’m driving around, but I don’t see it on television because we’re not really plugged in to the tube here. Greenwald’s analysis:
This Rush-Limbaugh/Fox-News/nationalistic movement isn’t driven by anything noble or principled or even really anything political. If it were, they would have been extra angry and threatening and rebellious during the Bush years instead of complicit and meek and supportive to the point of cult-like adoration.
My favorite part of Greenwald’s piece is the link to historian Richard Hofstadter’s 1964 article in Harpers Magazine, The Paranoid Style in American Politics.
Lennon’s message for nonviolent resistance to militarism is still relevant. Even the animation reminds me of the 1960′s.
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