Doped with Religion, Sex and TV   “Working class hero, my foot,” Darleen spat.  “Pampered British rock star’s more like it.  He don’t know nothin’ about no working class,”  she sneered, “and that Jap witch he married.  She’s probly the one who put them ideas in his head.”    Darleen and I worked on the assembly line  at the Capitol Records plant, putting fresh-pressed LPs  into sleeves, the packaged albums into cardboard boxes,  the boxes onto pallets for the forklift guy  to take them away to the loading dock.   “I used to like some of them early songs.  ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand,’ ‘A Hard Day’s Night,’  but you can have this stuff. Working class hero!  Who does he think he’s kidding?”   I stuffed my impulse to defend Lennon,  point out his poverty in postwar Liverpool,  the broken family, the absent sailor father;  mainly offended by Doreen’s naked racism,  pitying her for the misogyny she’d absorbed  from generations of farmers on the prairie.   I was a college student, working part...
 
 
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