Imagine there's no heaven. Imagine there's no countries. Imagine no possessions. Imagine a brand of sneakers decorated with lyrics from John Lennon's "Imagine". You may say I'm a dreamer, but it isn't hard to do: they're currently on sale, retailing for about $60 (£33).
Converse, a subsidiary of Nike, are to thank for this John Lennon- themed, Yoko Ono-sanctioned shoe. It's the same make of sneaker Lennon wore on the cover of Abbey Road, except this one is emblazoned with the singer's self-portrait and the line "Imagine all the people living life in peace". Sacrilege? Or clinching proof that "Imagine" is trite, vapid tosh?
Lennon wrote his most famous post-Beatles hit in 1971, when he and Ono were becoming involved in political activism and hanging out with radicals like Abbie Hoffman. He meant it to be a subversively palatable expression of counter-cultural values, although its message of brotherhood and togetherness was somewhat offset by the inclusion of a song maligning Paul McCartney on the same album.
It regularly gets picked in polls for the public's favourite song and has been praised as an inspiration by today's best known campaigning rock star, U2's singer Bono, who will be speaking about debt relief and Africa at the Labour party conference in the UK today. But for all the millions of people who hum along to "Imagine" in misty-eyed recollection of the sainted ex-Beatle, there are many others who can't help recoiling from its cloying melody and sentimentality.
You certainly need a strong stomach to put up with a millionaire pop singer telling us to imagine a world without possessions, and an even stronger one to watch the film Yoko Ono made at the time, which shows Lennon playing "Imagine" on a pristine white piano in a huge English country house. But let's be generous and absolve him of hypocrisy.
When he wrote it, one year after The Beatles' acrimonious break-up in 1970, he was trying to relaunch himself as a solo performer. By imagining away the trappings of fame, perhaps he was trying to shake off his past and begin again.
The real problem with "Imagine" is its woolly politics. Ostensibly a protest song about religious hatred, nationalism, materialism, famine and war, it actually opts out from dealing with them. Just imagine they're not there and we'll all feel better, it suggests.
Perhaps this escapism reflects an underlying pessimism: Lennon's despair at the never-ending nature of the Vietnam war and the inevitability of Richard Nixon's re-election, for example.
According to the singer, it was "virtually the Communist manifesto, even though I am not particularly a Communist and I do not belong to any movement . . . But because it is sugar-coated, it is accepted." This attempt at entryism was successful, inasmuch as the song was a hit when it came out (it became an even bigger hit after Lennon's murder in 1980).
But the sugar-coating, which was added by the producer Phil Spector, also undermines the song's aspirations: it rewards its listeners for piously imagining a better world rather than doing anything concrete to improve it. A form of emotional vanity, "Imagine" allows us to congratulate ourselves for simply having a conscience.
No wonder it's become pop's favourite comfort blanket, invariably reached for in troubled times. Neil Young performed it in a post-9/11 concert. Madonna included a version of it in her recent tour.
And now Converse's Lennon sneaker takes "Imagine" to a new level of absurdity. In what must be the most ambitious claim ever made on behalf of footwear, the company says the shoe has been created with the aim of bringing about world peace.
"We are doing this because we have in our hands a global icon and blank canvas capable of unifying people in the universal pursuit of what is imaginable and possible: peace," the company's CEO said at its launch last month. It's a preposterous statement, but not far removed from the spirit of a preposterous song.
