Why can’t Yoko forgive the man who shot John?
Fifty five years ago, the newly-wed John Lennon and yoko Ono spent a week in bed in the presidential suite of the Amsterdam Hilton. A few days before, they had sent out a card saying, ‘Come to John and yoko’s honeymoon: a bed-in, Amsterdam Hotel’.
Every day they opened their bedroom doors to hundreds of journalists and camera crews, and sat up in bed giving interviews. As honeymoons go, it was peculiarly populous.
‘We talked to the Press. We met people from the Communist countries, people from the West — every country in the world,’ John recalled. ‘We gave the Press eight hours of every day, every waking hour, to ask every question they wanted to about our position.’
this week-long honeymoon ‘bed-in’ was part of their campaign for world peace. ‘it’s the best idea we’ve had yet. We’re doing a commercial for peace on the front pages of newspapers around the world instead of a commercial for war,’ said John. ‘We’re trying to sell peace, like a product, and sell it like people sell soap or soft drinks.’
Some of their more rigorous visitors asked them searching questions about their pacifist stance; some of their answers were astoundingly insensitive and egotistical. When one reporter asked her how she would have dealt with the threat of Hitler, yoko replied, ‘i would have gone to bed with him. in ten days, i would have changed his mind.’
Not everyone was convinced. Even some of the Beatles’ keenest fans proved sceptical. ‘Under the ostensibly selfless holy foolery...was a core of exhibitionistic self-promotion’ wrote ian MacDonald in his masterly book the Beatles, Revolution in the Head.
Despite John and yoko’s bedbased efforts, the Vietnam War would continue to rage for another six years. Undaunted, yoko Ono remains firmly convinced that the two of them changed the world for the better.
in an interview with tom Hibbert in 1988, she made the surprising boast that she and John had, at that time, been the only two people in the world espousing peace. ‘in the beginning John and i were quite alone in what we were saying, the only ones — but now 98 per cent of the world, i think, is really for peace...in the end, you see, it did have an effect. Last year, when Reagan and Gorbachev had their summit and shook hands, i sort of felt, well, John and i did have an effect. i was saying to John in my mind, John, we did it!’
fifty five years on, yoko Ono is 91 years old, and the subject of a celebratory exhibition at tate Modern. the critics have fallen over each other in their headlong rush to celebrate her ‘genius’. this calls to mind 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’.
Meanwhile, her husband’s killer, Mark Chapman, remains locked up in prison in New york. He has been incarcerated for the past 44 years. Every two years, he comes up for parole; every two years, yoko Ono instructs her lawyers to oppose it.
if Chapman were to be released, she says, ‘myself and John’s two sons would not feel safe for the rest of our lives — people who are in positions of high visibility and outspokenness such as John would also feel unsafe.’
SHE adds that the murder of John Lennon, ‘managed to change my whole life, devastate his sons, and bring deep sorrow and fear to the world.’
Earlier this month, Chapman was denied parole for the 13th time; it now seems inevitable that he will die in prison.
there will, of course, be those who say that what Chapman did was unforgivable, and it is only right that he should spend the rest of his life behind bars.
this is a natural human reaction. Nevertheless, 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, and all in the quest for peace.
As John Lennon sang on Mind Games: ‘Love is the answer.’ isn’t it time yoko Ono practised what she has long been preaching?