I’m just kidding. She’s more likely to steal from Lee Greenwood.

Also: Give the woman a break for saying yes to a presidential inauguration!

This post is just to share that after I took the bait and played to conservative type by criticizing “Imagine” at the Jimmy Carter funeral, I had an exchange with a sensible, Christian fan of the song. Scott Shea is my producer at the Catholic Channel on Sirius XM (I have a two-minute feature that runs every other hour on weekdays there). He’s author of the recent book All the Leaves Are Brown: How the Mamas & the Papas Came Together and Broke Apart, which we talked about here: 

And here’s what Scott shared about “Imagine” after I filed a little rant about it for the Sirius-sphere:

I actually love “Imagine.” For me, it’s more about the melody and the way John Lennon sings it and that it’s indelibly marked on my childhood because it was such a big hit and always on the radio. No, I don’t buy into its nihilistic message, and I believe in religion and going to Mass, but the great thing about music is that you can interpret it however you like. To me, “Imagine” sounds like how Heaven might be even though John says, “Imagine there’s no Heaven.” But maybe he’s talking about it in the metaphysical sense. You’re in the beatific vision of God and none of that physical stuff means anything anymore and should be nothing but a distant memory. I don’t know if that was John Lennon’s intent, but it makes some sense to me. There’s no hunger, no more conflict, no more of the BS that weighs us down here on earth. Is there organized religion in Heaven? Beats me. Is there need for it if we made it to being in God’s presence? All good questions, but we won’t know the answers until we die.