I listened to a BBC documentary the other day called 'Bigger than Jesus' about the story of the Beatles with regards to John's comment that the Beatles were bigger than Jesus.

I never realized what a crucial part of their story this event was. When he made the comment, he made it in conversation, when he was discussing religion, not the Beatles, and he wasn't bragging that the Beatles were now bigger than Jesus, he was saying the church was not influencing young people as much as rock and roll was.

This comment didn't even turn heads in Britain, but when it made its way to America, it sparked a landslide of controversy as it was quoted out of context and used against them, like they were pawns of Satan, spreading rock music and corrupting the youth of today. A radio station in the Bible Belt, jumped on this quote, and began a nationwide campaign to burn Beatles albums and rouse the people against them, including the Klu Klux Klan, to the point where they had to arrive to their concerts in armored vehicles, and their vehicles were attacked by crowds trying to kill them.

They almost succeeded when the roof of one limo almost gave way. Since they were painted as being heretics, the unions refused to provide them with security, and once they got on stage, all security including the police, left.

In spite of John trying to tell the media what he meant by what he said, that message never reached the people, and the Beatles decided never to tour again, and then shortly later broke up.

Later, after several years, someone finally got John as he was walking down the street, a crazy who shot him down. Now could it be related to his comment?
Certainly.

So that comment was the turning point in their careers as the Beatles. And it was not so much the comment, but the opportunity it provided, for the people opposed to the new generation movement, as something to use against them.

The Beatles were probably happy not to have to tour anymore anyways, having made a gazillion dollars they didn't need to.
John ended up as a peace activist and was instrumental in stopping the war in Vietnam by posting billboards and doing various things with Yoko Ono, as part of the anti-war movement.

His song 'Give Peace a Chance' was the rallying cry, for the new generation.

Paul might disagree but it was stated that it was John's experimenting with LSD that led to Abbey Road, an album that changed the direction of pop music into a more intellectual form of entertainment, moving further from 50's rock, into what we see today.

A cute comment by Paul was when the incident was at its worst, and they could barely get into the stadium, having to pass Klu Klux Klan who were attacking their armored vehicle as they tried to enter, Paul said "It's John they want, send him out there first"
lol

No one told them Americans are crazy, they expected them to be rational level headed thinking type people. I guess they were surprised.

This led to the Born again movement, and then what were called Jesus freaks were out on the street giving away flowers everywhere, and a new hit musical called "Jesus Christ Superstar" hit Broadway.

So on top of all that, they sparked a religious revival in middle America, that stormed the nation for several years, then disappeared quietly, as John predicted, just like the Hula hoop.

Which is a shame in a way, because the materialistic 80's led to the angst of the 90's, and things have not really improved since, with social injustice and social ills of all types, going ignored, untreated, and unattended.

The 60's were not just a wild ride for the Beatles, they were a wild ride for the world.

Interesting BBC documentary, it filled in a lot of the blanks for me.

I suppose you have to be a child of the 60's or have been alive then, to see how the events of the late 60's totally changed the world.

You can't imagine, what it is like, perhaps unless you lived through it. It was a very paternalistic world, where fathers routinely beat the crap out of their wives and children with complete impunity. They could also abuse their children in any way shape or form, again with complete impunity.

The dad was the head of the house, he wore the pants, he carried guns, had loaded guns in the house, he was almost always drunk, and he ruled his castle like a tyrant.

He could shoot just about anyone, but certainly black people any time he wanted to, and you did often find on fire black people burning on lawns tied to stakes and such.

It took a youth movement, to change all that, and it culminated around the time of Vietnam. School sit ins, and a basic revolt really, led by people such as the Beatles.

So when you hear this song, it was not just a song people sang together on lawns in a protest like you might see today.
They sang it, before armed guards and skin heads with clubs, were about to enter the building and kill them, for having long hair, and for wanting peace.

Snipers shot them from bell towers on campus, cops on horseback cracked their heads, jocks beat them to death with baseball bats, they tear gassed them, they broke their bones, they shot them down in cold blood, but they could not take their soul, nor their pride.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6s8OOEqI5h8

Quoting something out of context is always perilous.

So true, and in the age of propaganda, it doesn't take much to get something started. All you need is something like that.

There were other unsung heroes of that time, as well as the ones people sing about like the Kennedys' and Martin Luther King Jr.

One unsung hero, who you would not probably call a hero, of any sort is Larry Flynt, who used his porn magazine to make social commentary against corrupt politicians etc, and he was shot in the spine and crippled for that one.

But then so was George Wallace on the other side of the coin, who was a southern Statesman who fought for segregation. He was shot in the spine also. Wallace was shot in 72, and Flynt in 78.

People maybe look down at Flynt because he is a low life, but he did a lot to bring to the attention of the public, the corruption and bad politics of America, and he did a lot towards freedom of speech.

But to hear Martin Luther King Jr. give his last speech, knowing he was going to be killed, but willing to die for what he believed in, a free America, for all its people, and to hear John F. Kennedy give his speeches, those were the best of times, and the worst of times in America.

Better to feel something, better to die trying, than to just waste away in apathy watching the slow degeneration of society.

I found it funny that some of the critics calling the Beatles ''evil'' and ''morally bankrupt'' were the KKK. It speaks volumes!

I miss EE_EE, psychotic little nutball that he was. It would have been amusing to see him defend the KKK, all while telling us how John Lenon is burning in hell (along with anyone who doesn't share his demented world-view). Sure, if we want complete gibbering nonsense we have RickS, but it's just not the same.

eh??? wassallthisthen? why when I was a young man, I had to walk 7 miles to school, in the pouring rain, and back and forth to 'ave me lunch as well cuz we was too poor to afford a lunch kit. Kids these days don' know what hardship is. And get shot at by our dads if we were late gettin home!
And all we had to eat was left over haggis! AND had to eat it with our bare hands. While having our ears boxed.

Alabama will never be as bad as Britain...
"What jobs did children do in mines?

Some children pushed trucks of coal along mine tunnels. They were called 'putters'.

'Trappers' opened and shut wooden doors to let air through the tunnels. A trapper boy sat in the dark, with just a small candle, and no-one to talk to.

Some children started work at 2 in the morning and stayed below ground for 18 hours. Children working on the surface, sorting coal, at least saw daylight and breathed fresh air. "

girls as young as 6 and 7 years old were forced to work in coal mines until finally, in 1842 legislation was passed, the child labor laws, which prevented children under 10 years of age from being forced to work in coal mines.

I know, you are all tongue tied, so allow me to play devil's advocate...

"yes well pip pip and Barrel a Guns! to you and all your American friends."

well there might be a reason 10 year old boys in Alabama carry hunting rifles so the colonialists won't make them work in the mines.

"yes well Just be sure your 10 year old boys in Alabama don't bend over in the woods on a canoe trip or in the priory for that matter"

yes well be sure yours don't ask for a second helping of porridge.

"yes well be sure you cook your possums well so they don't come down with ptomaine poisoning"

yes well be sure to eat your spotted d*ck slowly so the large lumps of suet don't get stuck in your throat.

"yes well say hello to your sister for me"

yes I will baaaa bye now.

Rick:

"complete, gibbering nonsense," indeed.

Although, to be fair, he somehow managed to avoid getting to the big computer enclosing the universe, where the gods manipulate the switches and nobs to draw funny little doodles onto stretches of desert. Angels coming out of King Tut's butt, anyone?

He's making less and less sense by the minute.

Like he ever made any in the first place.

I find it strange that we haven't figured out that you need to filter water at the entrance to the house yet but instead we need to buy bottled water.
But I guess that just goes to show you how mixed up people really are. They will pay 2 dollars for a bottle of water when they should just be able to get a drink out of a water fountain.

There was a time when people used to actually drink out of water fountains and they used to have them on corners by parks and you could drink the water out of your tap.

Before the world went completely insane I think from too much rock music or something.

At least he's doing something he enjoys

Myself, I work at a Wendy's, and I hate every minute of it.

Well you know, there are lots maybe 5 or 6 people out there who would love to have your job. Here in Victoria, there are a thousand people who make their living collecting bottles and cans and juice boxes since the government in their infinite wisdom, decided that the best way to help the poor, was to increase the recycle fee on disposable bottles and include juice boxes and any sort of drinking container except milk.

At the checkout, you pay an extra 5 cents, and that money goes right into the pockets of the poor!

How incredibly stupid is that?

I will tell you another story. Here in Victoria, I was talking to a neighbor having a smoke on the park bench one of the few places where you can smoke without getting in trouble, and she told me, that just down the street, they had just finished building a tiny house, 1,300 sq. feet, with a tiny patch of lawn, small lot, and they were asking $940,000 for it but they would probably take 900,000 and she said he daughter just paid, 1.3 million for her house.

So you can imagine the tax base there must be here, yet the streets are full of pot holes actual holes in the road where the pavement is missing and a horse could break a leg in, those kind, and the garbage is picked up by private companies, so the city doesn't do much of that, so then what the heck, could it possible do, with the hundreds of millions of dollars it gets since the real estate went from 45,000 to 940,000 for the same house over 20 years?

The wages for a city worker have not gone up, so the expenses couldn't have possibly gone up much, yet they now how a phenomenal amount of money as a tax base, and the only thing they do with the money is garden, and fix roads, and the roads are just unbelievable. In fact the entire system of sewer and water and roads, the infrastructure was just assessed and they said it was all in a state of emergency and bordering complete collapse.

You know I just don't understand it. And I don't understand how anyone rational could make sense of any of it.

Like what do people do, in all those office towers in all those offices every day? How on earth does any of that, add up to productivity or sustain an economy, or do anything?

You know I have a cell phone, pay as you go, so I put a hundred dollars in at a time, and what they have started doing now, since no one complains and if you tried you couldn't get through, is they just start your phone on roaming rates.

They used to send me a text message, welcome to the USA, you are now being charged 75 cents a minute. I was at home, in Canada.

So no one complained so I got a new one yesterday, it said Welcome Abroad! You are now being charged 1.85 per minute.

Ahhhh so that's how they make their money.

Lets do the math for a second.

Each night, the silent army here sets out including old people with walkers, in any weather, to sift through everyone else's garbage cans, to fish out, what bottles and cans and drinking boxes they themselves do not return.

So at 5 cents a can, you need 20 to make a dollar, and so you need 20 times that or 400 to make 20 dollars.

So for 20 dollars a day, they get up at 1 am, and set out combing the entire city. Including hunchbacked old ladies, with those laundry type pull carts, old men, who can barely walk, in the pouring rain or snow or anything, I see them because I drive delivery at night.

In a city, where a tiny house, costs 940,000 dollars.

Everyone drives a brand new car or SUV, those who have one, many will never get one, and so they bike or walk, but those who do, they are all brand new, so the clunker sale here trade in your clunker didn't go over at all because there are none.

People live in the park, under plastic, and the church downtown has a sign, "There is free wood at the back of the church, for your tents, that's all the help we can give you, return the wood tomorrow"

You want to believe the deacon drives a Mercedes.

I suppose to me, it looks like if you were playing Sim City with the cheat codes, and just had your own agenda, and really none of it was by the rules at all.

How else can you explain the American economy, where they make their money by going shopping. Shopping is the back bone of the American economy. Well that makes as much sense as thinking you are helping the poor, by giving them more empty containers to collect.

I guess the point I am trying to make in a round about way is the Brits needn't worry about religious zealots here. There isn't anything religious about the people here.

Probably not since the early sixties.
Sure there are lots of people especially those in Hollywood who do a lot of charity work.

But here in British Columbia as an example, people are in no way religious at all.

Even in Alabama, when that radio station set about its program to burn Beatles albums, they sold, the rights, to burn those albums, to a local shopping center, that created a campaign, burn your albums here and shop at so and so for good Christian bargains.

We only need to last 2 more years, that's the way I look at it. If we can all just hang on for two more years it is all going to get destroyed anyways. You know and maybe we can start over and do better next time.

I actually agree with the gist your reply. For a religion that hammers home, time and time again, the worthlessness of worldly possessions, and the vain glories of the Earth, it is a fabulous irony to see it allied to closely with capitalism. Apologists merely cite the concept of an afterlife to justify indifference to worldly injustice. It has always been the same throughout history among the wealthy and the ruling classes. People will wheel out statistics supposedly demonstrating that the very wealthy are the most generous donators to charity, but it is a drop in an ocean of systemic inequality and largely a token gesture.

This brings to mind a gloriously Christian interpretation of the Bible on Fox News that the Cenk Uygur highlighted. Get a load of Lord Haw-Haw at 1:35:



[censored] your rights! This is Christianity! Who needs workers rights!? The wealth with percolate down. Trickle trickle.

On an entertaining note the hymn "All Things Bright and Beautiful", which I will guarantee 99% of British children born prior to 1990 will have sung at some point in their schooling, contains an excruciating verse that is now expurgated from hymn books:

Ain't it the truth, ain't it the truth.

For more evidence regarding just how non religious North America is, people can glance at...

List of Christian evangelist scandals
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Christian_evangelist_scandals

Now the section on Senate probe should not be on that page, because it paints those people listed as being wrong doers by association, when in fact they are just being investigated.

But in that list are televangelists who upon receiving the prayers of people they requested via TV, which is to be accompanied by a tithe, just threw the letters in the garbage without even reading them and pocketed the money, up to 60 million dollars worth in some cases.

The problem is abundantly clear. There are all types of people in this world, and almost anyone at some time, can do something very bad, the idea is that when they do, you punish them for their crimes.

Colin Powell may not be evil, to use one example, but if he was caught covering up atrocities that contravened the Geneva convention, he was guilty and should have been sentenced, and discharged disgraced etc.

[censored] Cheney, if he sold poison gas to Saddam, he should have gone to prison as well.

Richard Nixon, should not have gotten a pardon.

It goes on and on, where if you do not punish people for high crimes and white collar crimes, and false advertising, and fraud, and vote rigging and murder and genocide, then this is the world you get where you cannot tell the bad guys from the good guys and it is all worthless and corrupted.