What has John Lennon and Yoko Ono's bed-in taught us?
In the piece I wrote here recently, the talk was of things that happened 40 years ago. Maybe we could stay there for a little, since today is the 40th anniversary of John Lennon and Yoko Ono's infamous bed-in, a performance "peace" staged for the world's media. Now, I'm maybe not the best person to talk about this, having remained thoroughly immune to the charms of Imagine all these years. Nonetheless, there is something here I think well worth a revisit.
After their wedding ceremony in Gibraltar, Lennon and Ono travelled to Amsterdam, where, between 25 March and 31 March 1969, they staged what they called Bed-In for Peace. Each day, for a week, the couple invited the press into their hotel room. Ensconced in bed, they would politely answer questions about their decision to stage this event as a protest against the Vietnam war. If we see it as a one-off caprice, then the event can look remarkably like irrelevant self-indulgence. With memories still reasonably fresh of how ineffective the 2003 anti-war protest was, the idea that sitting in bed for a week might have caused Richard Nixon to revise his foreign policy looks a tad hopeful, to say the least.
By: Michael Archer
Source: The Guardian, from 2009
