was something different about protesting in London that made him stop going all the way despite the revolutionary times. “There's no doubt that there's a cyclic change, a vast cyclic change on top of a lot of smaller ones. I can imagine America becoming just ablaze, just being ruined..." says Jagger. "But this country's so weird, you know, it always does things slightly differently, always more moderately, and always very boringly, most of it, the changes are so suppressed. The people suppress them." Later John Lennon after the French students had revolted a few months later in May made his own statement about the politics of the street with similar ambivalence to Jagger. “During the first recording session – between 30 May and 4 June 1968, when the fighting in Paris was still at its height – he sang: "When you talk about destruction/ Don't you know that you can count me out" and then quickly added "in" as an alternative, revealing his own uncertainty over the justification for violent political insurrection. Eventually, three versions of the song were recorded but Lennon's ambivalence had been noted much to the ire of the hard left "Now do you see what's wrong with your record 'Revolution'? That record was no more revolutionary than Mrs Dale's Diary. In order to change the world we've got to understand what's wrong with the world and then destroy it ruthlessly.”
Lennon wrote back
“Listen to all three versions then try again. Instead of splitting hairs about the Beatles and the Stones – think a little bigger – look at the world we're living in and ask yourself: why? And then come and join us. Love John Lennon. PS – You smash it – and I'll build around it.
"For those that were there and for others Grosvenor Square and the protests of that year "showed what was possible. Forty years on, I still feel outraged by governments duping voters and ignoring their feelings. Far from becoming more conservative with age, I feel more leftwing the more I'm patronised." Most people went on with their lives and became teachers and lecturers , "capitalism is good at absorbing protest. Most of the protesters went on, like me, to have good white-collar jobs." It is easy to be nostalgic, he reckons, but "every generation must find its own 1968." Hitchens is perhaps representative of a group who favored the Jagger Street Fighting man lyrics and thought that it was more in keeping than the Beatles Revolution. After he was found guilty of riot and fined a considerable amount he left to board a flight to revolutionary Cuba.
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