WHAT IF

The other night, I was wondering how the world now might be different if Martin Luther King had survived. If Robert Kennedy had survived. If Lennon had survived.

Let’s take Lennon. He was 40 when he was assassinated by Mark David Chapman outside the Dakota, in NYC where Lennon lived with Yoko.

Mark David Chapman arrived in New York on Saturday December 6, and checked into a YMCA about nine blocks from the Dakota. He was seen hanging around an entrance to the Dakota. On December 7, he was outside the Dakota again and also changed hotels, moving into the Sheraton Centre farther downtown. On the morning of December 8, he lingered outside the Dakota once more and had Lennon and Yoko’s album, Double Fantasy with him for Lennon to sign.

Chapman struck up a conversation with Paul Goresh, another fan hoping to glimpse Lennon. Around 5 p.m. that afternoon, Lennon and his wife finally left the building on their way to The Record Plant Studios on West 44th Street. Chapman approached Lennon and held out a copy of Double Fantasy. Lennon scrawled his name across the front. Goresh snapped a photo of that moment.

The two men waited outside the building for another two hours. Goresh got tired of waiting and said he had to go home and would come back another day to see Lennon. Chapman tried to get him to stay and remarked, “I’d wait. You never know if you’ll see him again.”

Goresh left, Chapman waited.

The Lennons mixed sound for a new single, Walking on Thin Ice, a Yoko creation, until 10:30 that night. The title smacks of precognition, since in the aftermath of Lennon’s death, Yoko would be walking  on thin mental  ice.

At 10:50 p.m., their rented limo stopped at the curb in front of the Dakota’s 72nd Street entrance. Yoko got out first, with Lennon a few paces behind her. He walked walk under the archway and Chapman called out his name.

He was crouched five feet away, both hands clutching a .38 special, and opened fire. Four bullets tore through Lennon.

Nut case Chapman was obsessed with J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, specifically with the fictional character Holden Caufield, an icon for teen rebellion. He was reading the book outside the Dakota when the police arrived and arrested him.

So, let’s say Lennon survived. What did he create between 1980 and – let’s pretend – 2022?

I like to imagine that he started a worldwide movement called Give Peace a Chance. I like to imagine that the movement mitigated 9-11, or changed it so that there was never any Afghan War. Never a Gitmo where prisoners were tortured. No Bush, no Cheney, no Rumsfeld, and no trump. BUT – and it’s a big but – if Gore had won in 2000, would we have had an Obama? Without an Obama would we have had a trump? And without him, would we have a Biden?

The what if games are the ones that tie me in knots.

If the multiverse is real, then all of these scenarios are playing out…somewhere…