Havel on the 60's

"I once wrote about the particular significance I feel in the death of John Lennon....When a reactionary underworld decides to shoot a progressive president, that act has in itself - on its primary level. as it were - a determinable meaning, and therefore such a death does not cry out so powerfully for an investigation of its deeper, symbolic sense.  Lennon's murder, however, is so nonsensical at that primary level that it is quite impossible to think about it other than as a symbol.  And you can't help feeling that the shot was fired by the reality of the eighties at one of the departing dreams - the dream of the sixties for peace, freedom and brotherhood, the dream of the flower children, the communes, the LSD trips and 'making love not war,' a shot as it were in the face of that existential revolution of the 'third consciousness' and the 'greening of America.'  As a symbol, Lennon's death has of course more aspects to it, and more complex ones at that, but this is the first one, the one that suggests itself most acutely.  I do not believe that certain values and ideals of the sixties have been discredited as empty illusions and mistakes; certain things can never be called into question, either by time or by history, because they are simply and indivisible dimension of the Being of humanity and therefore of history as well, which though it is a history of repressions, murders, stupidities, wars and violence, is at the same time a history of magnificent dreams, longings and ideals.  I only think that everything today is somehow harder and rougher, that one has to pay more dearly for things and that the dream of a freer, more meaningful life is no longer just a matter of running away from Mommy, as it were, but of a tough-minded, everyday confrontation with the dark powers of a new age.  The fact that Lennon was shot by a psychopathic victim, of sorts, of the modern pop-cult created by the mass media, is also not without symbolic meaning: passive identification with an idol, replacing 'active faith,' finds its obscure climax in the schizophrenia of a man who shoots his idol to regain his own identity..."

Vaclav Havel
Letters to Olga

(letter written March 1981)