I’d like to thank everyone who took a flyer, stopped to chat, or made supportive comments or gestures at yesterday’s 30th anniversary in Strawberry Fields. I was there from around 8AM to 4:30PM; a few observations. Early on I circulated with my sandwich sign, holding a copy of Fenton Bresler’s Who Killed John Lennon? and a handful of flyers, but by noon the area around the Imagine mosaic was so crowded I just posted up near the entrance. A lot of people were interested and supportive, from near and far: New Yawkers of course, but also people from Australia, the UK, Argentina, Spain, France, and elsewhere (I didn’t ask most people where they were from). I’d handed out maybe 500 flyers by the time I’d left. A number of people were excited because they’d been thinking the same thing for years. Several people asked to buy Bresler’s book (or asked if I’d written it). A ton of people wanted to take my picture, some wanted to pose with me (I’d guess some of that might have been tourists wanting to show their friends the local nutcakes, but some were clearly supportive). There were a few nasty comments in passing, and a couple of folks who just wanted to laugh at me, but overall I think that more people expressed interest than did at the 25th. Nobody in the major media paid any attention to me, as far as I know, but some foreign reporters sounded me out. Several people interviewed me on video, at least one of these has made its way to YouTube but he was one of those who just wanted to piss on me, as the comments seem to show (“stupid beetnick [sic], stupid fucking hippy” “His sunglasses stink. Stupid hippie know-it-all asshole” etc). This doesn’t bother me, I’ve got a pretty thick skin and with these types I was willing to play the straight man to their Don Rickles routine. Here’s something: a tall white middle-aged guy, clean-shaven and dressed office casual, stopped and told me he used to work for the CIA and, he said, as far as he was concerned it’s totally possible that the CIA did the deed. He said he had no direct knowledge of this -- “everything there is compartmentalized” – but he wouldn’t be surprised. He went on to say how much he hated the organization, what they did to him personally and what they do in the world. No I can’t read minds, but my take on this guy was that he was the real deal.
Something here is changing. I can tell ya that I’ve been monitoring the Web for about 8 years now with Google alerts on Mark David Chapman and a few other search terms, and there has been precious little out there on the CIA and Chapman – it’s why I’m doing this in the first place – until now. Just in the past week, those alerts are bulging with the CIA-Chapman connection, so much so that I can’t even follow up on them all (I have a full-time-plus day job). There’s a new book out: John Lennon — Life, Times And Assassination, by Phil Strongman, published by The Bluecoat Press, which was highlighted in the British press last week – I haven’t gotten it yet, but I will and will post about it. There was a play about the Chapman-CIA connection revived for a Liverpool performance this past year by the British playwright Ian Carroll, “One Bad Thing” And then there was Jesse Ventura’s segment on his cable show Conspiracy Theory.
It seems that global interest in John Lennon is not fading, and may actually be growing, if yesterday’s events are any indication. And with that, it just may be that we’re going to see more attention paid to who was really behind his being taken from us…