The other day a friend brought over a great yard-sale score, a 1987 book commemorating 20 Years of Rolling Stone. It's an amazing window into the past. We think we remember things, but so often we remember our own, or someone else's, or the media's rewriting of an event. The same could be said here, of course, but I have a sense (perhaps naive) that Rolling Stone was more honest than most in its early days. And in the case of an interview, we're reading what the subject said (albeit edited) in the moment.

An interview with John Lennon is particularly poignant. When asked about the effect of the Beatles on history, Lennon replied: "The people who are in control and in power and the class system and the whole bullshit bourgeois scene is exactly the same except that there is [sic] a lot of middle-class kids with long hair walking around London in trendy clothes... The dream is over."

When this country elected Barack Obama to the presidency, it was looking for change, and while we've gotten some change, the natives are increasingly restless. We forget how difficult it is to turn around an enormous ocean liner like the United States. If such a thing were easy, the Titanic wouldn't have sunk and we wouldn't be at war in Iraq.

I winced when I read that the President had signed a bill allowing firearms into the national parks and wildlife refuges "as long as state law allows it." I don't think this kind of change is what voters had in mind. Obama has been so supportive of our parks—even taking his family to Yellowstone this week, and when was the last time a President did that?—but this almost makes me forget that he also signed legislation to increase parklands by more than two million acres. Is our dream over?

Then I remember that this sneaky measure was slid into a bill that imposes new restrictions on credit card companies, and if we want to stop getting exorbitant interest hikes and having cards canceled at the whim of a large bank, there are going to be trade-offs. There is no straight-ahead road to change, mostly because not everybody wants it. 

So maybe Lennon was right in 1971, and maybe change just happens more slowly, even, than melting icebergs.

It is ironic, however, that Lennon raved about "Happiness Is a Warm Gun" as being one of his best songs. He remembered being inspired by a gun magazine that had those words on the cover and thinking, "... it was a fantastic, insane thing to say. A warm gun means you just shot something."

Painting by Phil Kern, painting photo by Jerry