Imagine all the tributes ... Fans in New York's Strawberry Fields pay their respects earlier today. Photograph: Richard Drew/AP
Amid the one-day-only reprise of Lennonmania - wall-to-wall BBC coverage, a slew of articles in today's press, tribute events in Liverpool and New York - there have been some small but audible voices of discontent.
One featured (inevitably) on this morning's Today programme: Dominic Sandbrook, historian and self-billed debunker, declared that "Lennon doesn't really mean that much" (RealPlayer audio file). He was, Sandbrook continued "shot ten, possibly more, years after he ceased to be culturally important". Cue sound of those irritating Today eggcups being smashed by baby boomers across the land.
John Harris, writing in the Guardian, had a slightly different complaint - that, egged on by Yoko, the nostalgia industry has taken over entirely. A "festival of cheap sentiment", awash with commemorative CDs, DVDs, books and just-in-time-for-Christmas gifts, is now upon us.
Same too with Pete Paphides in Saturday's Times, who first came into contact with Lennon (like many others, I suspect) via the schmaltz-coated sentimentality occasioned by his death. Paphides has it about right, I think:
Wouldn't Lennon have allowed himself a quiet chuckle of vindication if you showed him a crystal ball of the Stones, 35 years later - a Volkswagen-selling, AmEx- sponsored stadium-packing "legacy brand" of absolutely no artistic consequence? He almost certainly would, until you took him to www.babiesrus.com, with its John Lennon Elephant Blankie, John Lennon sports bottle and John Lennon Musical Bunny - the soothing strains of Imagine are yours for a tug on the string hanging from its backside.
Though neither Paphides nor Harris makes the connection, it's interesting to draw a comparison with another dead idol, John Peel: the key difference being that, in Peel's case, nostalgia became mass-produced before the man was cold in his grave.
If our own Jon Dennis's comment piece is right, Lennon deserves to be remembered not as a rock-star commodity to be consumed, but a hero who - if not really working-class, let's be honest - nevertheless did his bit of raging against the machine.
So what is the best way to remember Lennon? Will you be lighting a candle at 11pm tonight (New York time, of course), or campaigning against poverty? Should today be a vigil, a wake - or a protest?
