But yr comments on Chapman, on Manson, on Reagan, do put my feelings – personal feelings which I confessed in the blog were of the gut rather than cerebral ones – in a wider context. Thank you for sharing those thoughts.

A Beatles-related parallel can actually be found in Charles Manson’s claim that their White Album, specifically the song “Helter Skelter,” contained coded instructions to instigate the race war he lusted to start. I don’t know how anyone could deduce that message from the White Album myself, even playing it backwards on acid, but Manson did, because he WANTED that “justification” to be there for his lunatic fantasies. If the White Album hadn’t come out right at that time, Manson likely would have found the same message in some other equally-innocent source.

It’s hard for me to imagine J.D. Salinger cooperating in explicating his books, no matter the circumstances, as I recall him as pretty close-mouthed even before went into seclusion and stopped publishing back in the 1960′s. He came from that generation of writers who grew up with the idea (nurtured by the “New Critics” of the time) that their books should speak entirely for themselves, without any provision of the author’s own human background. I still recall how radical it seemed to read Norman Mailer’s first-person confessions in those same 1960′s, as he would admit to lust for success, his competition with fellow writers, and other such solipsisms heretofore considered beneath the dignity of “serious” novelists.

I share your outrage over Chapman’s murder of Lennon, Simon, and in my own irrational way, I’ve always tended to connect 3rd-party blame to Ronald Reagan rather than J.D. Salinger — Reagan was elected president just a month before the killing, and then a whole string of tragedies that directly affected my life occurred early on his watch: Creem publisher Barry Kramer died in 1981, Lester Bangs died in 1982, both of my parents were diagnosed with fatal diseases, etc., etc.. I can’t link Reagan to any of those events, of course, but they just seemed of a piece with the poisonous zeitgeist he released into Amerika then. And John Lennon’s murder was the first tragedy in that chain. I’m with Yoko Ono when Chapman comes up for parole again.