One to One: John and Yoko – A Collage of the Times

by Frank Panzarella, PAR reader and musician

For the last 60 years, the conservative corporate elite have used every tool to defame and compromise the legacy of the rebellions of the 1960s.  Two major pillars of that fear were embedded in the coming together of the Civil Rights movement and the social and cultural revolutions that were fueled by the war in Vietnam.

The rising tide of Black liberation inspired a generation to challenge the power of Jim Crow, and question all aspects of capitalist society in the United States and its tentacles of international involvement throughout the world.  The war in Vietnam became a funnel for many of these challenges of power.

Even on a social level these often contradictory and painful explorations challenged the norms of patriarchy and sexual relations and self-definition often embodied in the art and music of those times and the growing fight for a new kind of liberating culture.

A new quasi-documentary about John Lennon and Yoko Ono called One to One: John and Yoko is a fascinating, if somewhat limited, collage of that social revolutionary time.  It provides a small but rich glimpse into the maelstrom of events and the ferment of ideas of a generation seeking a new ideology and even somewhat challenging its own biases.

In today’s environment, where the reactionary forces of racist and fascist politics are attempting to reverse the modest gains since those times, this HBO feature is a welcome small window that reminds us of the complexity and dynamic energy that changed social relations in our country in those times that still reverberate today despite some of the chaotic flaws of those years.  It is those many advances that scare the most conservative in our society that the dreams of democracy, equality, and justice for all might actually happen, threatening the remnants of white privilege and corporate control of most of the wealth in our world and the health of our planet.

This is a worthwhile film.

View the trailer : https://youtu.be/oxagfYjeMV4