forget Reagan
THE BEATLES BROUGHT DOWN THE USSR:
Their Gift of “Internal Freedom”

From the London Guardian:

Beatlemania washed away the foundations of Soviet society because a person brought up with the world of the Beatles, with its images and message of love and non-violence, was an individual with internal freedom. Although the Beatles barely sang about politics (our country was directly mentioned only once in their repertoire, in Back in the USSR), one could argue that the Beatles did more for the destruction of totalitarianism than the Nobel prizewinners Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Andrei Sakharov.

The Beatles slipped into every Soviet flat, on tapes, just as easily as they assumed their place on the world's stages. They did something that was not within the power of Solzhenitsyn or Sakharov: they helped a generation of free people to grow up in the Soviet Union.

For more, click here.

I think that the Beatles also did for me what they did for citizens of the former Soviet Union. That is, they endowed me with “internal freedom.”

I look back on my personal philosophy’s gradual transformation from right to left over the years and several major factors come to mind. I remember my first real intellectual doubts about conservatism occurred when I spent the summer of 1988 working at a stock brokerage firm in Houston: for the first time, I saw, up close, intense and disgusting greed; I saw love of Mammon personified—that the Iran-Contra scandal and a major market crash had happened just a year earlier only magnified my sense of needing to reevaluate my political views. My studies of theater and RTF at the University of Texas also pushed me to the left: I saw how badly the political establishment treats the arts; I saw the increasing corporate influence over popular culture; I also became friends with many students who embraced left-leaning political views.

But before all that there were the Beatles.

I was a bit of an oddball as a Beatle fan when I was a child and teenager in the late 70s and 80s. Corporate pop culture celebrates the Beatles today—they are still big moneymakers, after all, so they get a lot of hype and promotion. When I was a kid, however, there was a weird period when the Beatles were consigned to oldies stations and bargain bins. I tried telling my friends how great they were, but not many seemed to understand. My seventh grade yearbook has a message from a girl telling me to “forget that Beatles stuff, think Rush!” (Rush, I must say, is a fine arena-rock band, but they are simply out of their league when compared to the Beatles.) Perhaps the fact that almost none of my peers were into them made me love them all the more. I don’t know. But I sure did love them.

I studied them. I read as much as I could about them. I collected their albums. I hung their pictures on my bedroom walls. I learned to play guitar with a Beatles songbook. I took up songwriting in order to emulate my heroes. Through them, I learned about the 60s, about revolution and counter-culture. I learned about the very confusing Vietnam War. In sixth grade, I proclaimed myself to be a hippie in a poem I wrote, which completely perplexed my baby boomer language arts teacher.

Strangely, at the same time, while doing research for the debate tournaments in which I competed for my suburban school, I was learning about and embracing conservative politics and economics. I was also regularly attending Southern Baptist church training classes and Sunday school—I became “born again.” I embraced fundamentalist Christianity and became a youth group leader. The Texas indoctrination machine had done its work: I graduated from high school as a conservative Republican.

But the Beatles were still entrenched deeply within my identity, within my soul, biting away at my harsh, stern conservative views. Something had to give, and, ultimately, it did. I’ve embraced my inner mop-top. Their messages of peace, love, and freedom (not to be confused with the conservatives’ bogus usage of these words) and the fact that they expressed these messages through art set the template for what now gives my life meaning and purpose: without the Beatles’ gift of “internal freedom,” I might never have become a politically conscious artist.

It’s funny: in the 1960s, both Soviet conservatives and American conservatives regularly denounced the Beatles. That, in and of itself, means that John, Paul, George, and Ringo must have been doing something right.

Thanks to J. Orlin Grabbe for the link to the Beatle story.

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