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Comment by GCA10 | Hacker News Reader

It pains me to see high school English teachers of a certain age keep assigning "Catcher in the Rye" to their students. Those forced readings must account for a large share of the 250,000 copies sold per year.

As the Tablet article acknowledges, most of Salinger's writing is a relic of 1950s NYC. Why linger, stuck, in that misshapen world? We're blessed with so many newer authors and so many different cultures that have something to say. High school is a great time for students to discover authors that speak to them -- whether that's Zadie Smith or Neal Stephenson. If that means hitting "refresh" on the assigned reading list, please have the courage to do so!

Let Salinger fade into the back stacks of libraries, hanging out with Thackeray, Dreiser and other novelists in the land of long-ago bestsellers that now rest quietly in obscurity.

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I felt the same way when they sang Imagine at New Years 2019 in Times Square. America is still stuck in the mid 20th century.

Christmas often feels this way as well. The musical canon was was locked in with the childhood of baby boomers.

A lot of Christmas is locked into Victorian England which itself derived from Germany.

I assume you have seen the xkcd illustrating this issue:

https://www.xkcd.com/988/

Window may be shifting - ASCAP's top 25 for 2018 included:

1. "All I Want For Christmas Is You" (1994) 7. "Last Christmas" (1984) 22. "Christmas Eve/Sarajevo 12/24" (1995)

(OT: 25. "Wonderful Christmastime" (1979) persists as a favored lump of coal for radio/streaming Krampuses everywhere.)

https://www.ascap.com/press/2018/11/11-29-holiday-songs-2018

I'm sure in 40 years kids will be saying that we're still stuck in the turn of the millennium.

But I also hate Imagine. A world where no one plans anything, and there's nothing worth fighting for and all of our culture is gone, replaced with godless communism. Sounds like a real dystopia to me. I can imagine Lennon's world, and I'd fight it to the end. The music is solid though, as expected of Lennon.

However I do think that the world without imaginary jealous fathers in the sky watching everything you do (often even requesting his followers to kill those who don’t believe in him in order to get to an imaginary place where they would have nothing to fight for) would indeed be better.

I don't think Lennon saw the dystopia in that.

There's plenty of dystopia in a nationalistic world where everyone is embedded in local cultural reality tunnels too. Every political paradigm seems to turn into some kind of dystopia when taken to an extreme.

Taking the words of a singer literally is a bit of a misnomer.

It's like saying Little Prince doesn't make any sense because the planets he visited were too small to have any gravity at all. The book isn't about that.

Besides, being from a purely communist country myself Imagine always felt more about friendship (read "cooperative behaviour"), rather than "we should all live in a socialist world where everyone is absolutely selfless".

PS: Saying that, I know Lennon was more communist that capitalist. But who really cares about what musicians say about politics? He inspires me to take a pragmatic stance on his ideas and transform them into something real.

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