Roll Over Beethoven
In the 1960s the Beatles covered Chuck Berry’s classic hit, Roll Over Beethoven. The lyrics are lowbrow poetry, or at least verse that challenge the elite. “ Roll Over Beethoven …tell Tchaikovsky the news…I’ve got the rockin’ pneumonia, I need a shot of rhythm and blues.” What did the Beatles represent to the culture? The long haired, working class boys from Liverpool were saying, “Move over high-brow elites, the working class is taking over.” The “Fab Four'' took the world by storm. I recall the night I saw them live at the Indiana State Fairgrounds in the summer of 1966. I put down my five dollar bill and my buddy, Dean, and I took our seats and waited for the Beatles arrival. The girl seated next to me sat quietly for about an hour. Then the black limousine carrying the boys pulled onto the infield and behind the stage. The young girl stood on her chair and began to scream along with 17,000 others, mostly girls. I couldn’t hear myself or Dean or the music of the band. I don’t think we heard a note that evening, only screams. Fifteen minutes into the concert the girl had been carried out along with half the people seated near us. They all had hyperventilated and passed out. I don’t think Paul, John, George, and Ringo thought of themselves as telling the controlling elites to “move over,” but they certainly had taken possession of the popular culture.
John Lennon in particular developed an anti-cultural narrative as he matured and married Yoko Ono. His antiwar anthem, Imagine, aspired to a world of peace and love. It also was a feckless and weak portrayal of a world absent of the real conflicts that make us human. It assumed that humans have an innate ability to live in peace with one another and the only reason we don’t is the corruption of governments, their politics, their interest in power, and their armies. It was very much Rousseau, not Augustine. Rousseau saw the problem of evil not coming from a bad impulse, but from a good impulse in trying to please or accommodate others. Augustine saw the same problems, but took responsibility because of a fixed human nature that was fallen. Rousseau saw the solution in a person’s quest to be their authentic self. Augustine presented the solution as repentance, forgiveness, and reformation of the soul.
Move over Beethoven is more apt than roll over because that is what we now face as the revolutionary 1960s critique is replacing conventional ways. The 1960s rebellion was against conventional society, the controlling elites have now come full-circle. Those who were hippies in the 1960s are now in control and have become the very thing they hated. Yet now that they have the money and power, even though they loathe what they have become, they enjoy it. There is an important difference in what you rebel against and how far you are willing to go, for what you plan to replace the present regime with is basic.
Rebellions against a king, a political ideology, or oppression of a government have their place. America itself is a product of a rebellion against a king and governmental oppression. John Milton (who wrote Paradise Lost, a famous poem about the fall of man) participated in the English Civil War, after which King Charles was beheaded. Please see the film starring Richard Harris, Cromwell. Milton approved of the beheading and barely survived the new king. Then, he wrote Paradise Lost about the rebellion of Satan against the King of Heaven and Earth. His point was you can rebel against a human king only because he is sinful, but you can’t rebel against the King of Heaven. You can’t rebel against God because then you become satanic, then you become evil. [1]
Rebelling against God is more than rebelling against the church. Milton was a Puritan which itself was a form of rebellion against the Catholic Church. Rebelling against God is taking on the entire idea that nature has an ordained meaning. It calls into question that humans have souls and that our lives have meaning. That we live and die and we are connected to both the past through our parents and the future through our children. You can rebel against the elites, telling Catholics or governments or tyrants to “move over”, but when you challenge the fact of creation, you slip into another realm.
This is the difference between the American Revolution and the French Revolution. The American Revolution was against the British elite. It maintained the values and the aspirations to be an elite culture, a good culture. The French Revolution was against the church, against God, and against the entire nature of creation. It was a Paradise Lost satanic revolution that ended the way those revolutions do, with bloodshed and murder and people killing each other. Where we are presently is with people who started out rebelling against the elite and they slipped into rebelling against their own humanity and the higher meaning of creation. This is seen even in recent days with another police shooting of a young black man. Some are protesting and insisting on their pound of flesh prior to a full investigation, violating the participants civil rights. People are fired for insisting that the law be followed. Protesters are interested in the poetic truth, the truth of a narrative that may or may not be true. They certainly have a right to peacefully protest, but what they are asking for violates their own civil rights and that of a society.
Though nothing has been quite as extreme as Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib calling for no more arrests, no more prosecutions, and I would say, no more understanding of human nature. She is calling for the restraints to be taken off the wicked and deceptive nature of the human heart. She has left the normal political protest and has moved into an insurrection of God and his place at the top of the created order.
She doesn’t understand that her call for justice has simply cast any hope of justice to the wind. She is advocating a journey into a moral darkness where self-fulfillment is the highest goal. Without knowing it, when you arrive at this destination of yourself as the ultimate judge, you are lost along with all those who have followed you.
[1] Thanks to Andrew Klavan and his insightful explanation of Paradise Lost as it relates to revolution.
