Authority's nightmares.

The odd story of John Lennon's FBI files, in which the FBI refused release after claiming for 25 years "that an unnamed foreign government secretly provided the information, and releasing the documents could lead to diplomatic, political or economic retaliation against the United States," poses a small riddle. Given the apparently innocuous nature of the information therein, why on earth should the FBI have kicked up such a fuss?

Our three guesses:

1. A rogue John Lennon fan within the agency wished to suppress information he or she saw as being embarrassing to the pop star. Estimated probability: low.

2. Information of genuine sensitivity was once contained in the file, but discreetly removed and shredded before release. Estimated probability: still low but slightly higher.

3. The FBI felt embarrassed at once again exposing their own ridiculous paranoia about the "counterculture," and the many irrelevancies this led them to collect against people better-liked than themselves. Estimated probability: high.

Lennon's mass appeal is arguably the greatest among the many famous people the US government has, over the years, classed as "suspicious" or worthy of surveillance. The FBI, CIA, and the government in general have always found it difficult to admit the superstitious sense of power that they attach to art and pop culture. They've learned from the best in the game: if Stalin couldn't whistle it, it wasn't music, as the saying went -- and therefore dangerous. (Stalin effectively forbade performances of Hamlet for almost fifteen years before his death; the play bugged him for some reason.) Hitler had his "degenerate" modern painters to rail about; Greil Marcus, among others, has found significance in his early denunciation of the Dadaists.

A backbeat, a splatter, a man in black. The nightmares of Authority are full of them, still are. The highest goal of power is the control of the subconscious, something they have never quite attained. In our dreams, for the moment, we remain free.