When Mark David Chapman Gets Paroled…

... would you hire him? If he’s been set free after all these years, and comes to you looking for a job, and is qualified in every way except that he’s Mark David Chapman and he not only killed a man, he killed John Lennon. Would you give Chapman a job?

It might depend on how old you are--if John’s murder is as distant to you as JFK’s is to me, then you might be (slightly) more inclined to hire MDC. Except of course that there’s still that bothersome history of mental illness, and the fact of a murder in his past. Not to mention how your customers might feel--if you’ve got a bunch of Beatles fans and they find out that man is working for you, might they decide to boycott your business? They might. They definitely might.

Or maybe it might depend on how much you love John Lennon. If you don’t at all, you might not even recognize MDC’s name. But even a cursory background check will reveal the truth, and you’ll then have all the peripheral objections I just mentioned.

(One odd and ironic fact: John Lennon wrote “Attica State” in solidarity with the inmates after the ’71 riot. Attica State is where his killer ended up being incarcerated.)

So I suppose you have to ask yourself, Do I believe people can be rehabilitated? Or, do I rather believe that some people are what they are and can never be changed and therefore should never be let out of prison? In which case, you might as well execute them because there’s no place for them in society therefore society is better off without them. With someone like Jeffrey Dahmer, that argument carries some weight.

But is Mark David Chapman in that same camp? Is he another Dahmer or Bundy or Manson? If we believe at all in the possibility of rehabilitation, mustn’t we extend that hope even to someone like Chapman?

But John’s death is not distant to me. I have been a rabid fan for decades, and I can’t stop wondering what John might have had to say about September 11th, and the war in Iraq, and the current wave of Islamophobia, and all the rest of it. I wish I could hear the songs he hadn’t written yet. Mark David Chapman, with his absurd Holden Caulfield fixation, took all of that away from all of us, and is it the sort of thing I can ever forgive?

(Here’s a recent piece in Time where Yoko Ono talks briefly about the difficulty of forgiving the man who murdered her husband.)

But there’s the beauty of a hypothetical (for me at least--for Yoko, it can never be hypothetical). Chapman was denied parole for the sixth time the other day, and it’ll be at least two years before he’s eligible again. I don’t have to answer this question in real life, and honestly, I have no idea how I would answer if it did come up. Would my deep-rooted sorrow over the loss of John Lennon outweigh an impulse I believe John would have supported, to believe that someone like that can be brought round again, to believe in second chances and the possibility that we can become better than we currently are? Or would I find myself fighting waves of nausea at the idea that that man was sitting in front of me?

What about you? If he came to you looking for a job, what do you think you might do? Hit me in the comments.

The Daily Beatle

What are friends for? Some days, they're about showing you stuff you hadn't seen before. Therefore, courtesy of my friend Rachel Coburn's recent Facebook post, I bring you catnip for a Beatles fan, Barry Lenser's encyclopedic, and massively entertaining, The Daily Beatle.

Enjoy.

Let It Be on YouTube

O happy me. For years now, I've been patiently (no, impatiently, very impatiently) waiting for the Apple/EMI people to release Let It Be on DVD. This of course was the movie that The Beatles made, reluctantly and grumpily and almost disastrously, to document the recording of what would become the album of the same name. Not a one of them was happy with any part of the process, leading Paul to eventually release what he considers to be a superior recording (i.e., one with all of Phil Spector's production gimmicks stripped away) a couple years ago. (In the process, by also stripping away the little interstitial stuff, the bits of conversation and whatnot, Let It Be... Naked ended up feeling lifeless compared to the original.) During the course of production, George Harrison quit the group altogether for a few days, bringing the whole enterprise very nearly to a halt--and potentially denying the world both the Let It Be and Abbey Road albums.

The first time I saw the movie of Let It Be, I was probably five years old. Mom and some friends took me along to see it at a drive-through, and all I can really remember is lying on the hood of the car, enjoying some Road Runner cartoons that came before the movie and then being really bored by the movie itself. I saw it again in early 1981, when it was rereleased following John Lennon's murder, at which point I was still so shell-shocked that I just couldn't absorb any of it.

Since then, it's been hidden away. Paul McCartney hates it, Neil Aspinall hated it, and basically the movie simply disappeared after '81. There were a few expensive, poor-quality VHS tapes floating around, and that was it. I've been wanting to see it, really see it, for all these years. And the other day, it finally occurred to me to check on YouTube.

Sure enough, there it is. (The movie is broken down into nine parts; the link brings you to Part 1, then just follow with Parts 2, etc. via the links to the right.)

I won't say much about it--if you're interested, you're interested and will go check it out. If you're not interested, then you don't much care what I have to say about it. Really, as a movie it's lousy--dismal sound quality, you can almost never hear what anyone is saying because they're miked so badly, nothing ever develops, there's no through-line at all, it's just a mess. But--

But it's really the only footage of The Beatles in the recording studio, and so it is precious. Plus, after about fifty minutes of meandering, not terribly musical nonsense, The Beatles got up onto that rooftop, and suddenly it's all magical. Suddenly the jaw drops, and I find myself desperately wishing that I had been in the right part of London that particular day. (Plus, you know, not a toddler.)

So if you're a Beatles fanatic like I am (and if you are, you know you are), it's probably worth noting that these YouTube clips must be in gross violation of copyright, so I would suggest you hie yourself thither with all due despatch. And no matter how dreary it is, just remember that eventually they're going to emerge onto a rooftop and bring joy one last time.