Opinion/Editorial
DEMOCRACY IS COMING
A song composer and singer named Leonard Cohen wrote a song many years before his death that was called “Democracy is Coming to the USA.” It is a long song but the brilliance of the writing and accompanying melody make this a never really discovered classic that will keep knocking on heaven’s door until it gets let in. I am quoting only one stanza of the lyrics here, although the entirety of the work is at that same level: “It’s coming from the sorrow in the street, The holy places where the races meet, From the homicidal bitchin,’ That goes down in every kitchen, to determine who will serve and who will eat. From the wells of disappointment, Where the women kneel to pray, for the grace of God in the desert here, And the desert far away. Democracy is coming to the USA.”
This far-seeing brilliant man had a handle on things, from my own perspective. Much is being written and played across our televisions and on the Internet about how democracy is under attack everywhere, and particularly here at home. The gun thing, the phony stolen election thing, the January 6th Insurrection attempt, the virus, and the country’s response to it are all thrown together in a witch’s brew and stirred liberally and violently by our confusing and confused mass media. Where are we, the citizens of the USA, in all of this, as the world has grown to 194 countries and more than 8 billion human souls?
How is it the USA lost its way, not that many years back, in being able to continue to build its internal belief structure to move ever closer to becoming the kind of nation the framers wrote so endearingly about hundreds of years ago? Some of it is simply that the communications structures we’ve invented and applied have been suborned to pay for the wild lives of super-billionaires, most of whom don’t even pay taxes (if these new reports are found to be fully credible). How is it that facts are no longer issued forth by our media, such as the economic strength and gains of the USA when considered against the rest of the world? Putin is spoken about as the autocrat running a nearly co-equal country. The sitting president should not have time for someone who’s taken his country from a worth of 1.46 trillion dollars up to 1.76 trillion since he’s been running the place. That is a smaller economy than almost each and every one of the European Union countries and on about the same level as South Korea. Brazil is more successful than the Russian Federation. But here we are, with nobody trotting out the real facts although they are fully available if you spend only minutes a day on Google. The U.S. economy, by the way, under various leaders representing both parties, through that same twenty-year time period has grown from a worth of 10.2 trillion to 21.43 trillion, and no, China isn’t even close, and they are number two in the world.
Why is the mass media not telling us stuff like this? Democracy is changing, it is not fading nor going away because of a lack of success. The democratic nations of the world put the rest of the autocratic-run countries to shame in almost every category one might want to measure, but that’s not the story back home. The kind of democracy that has been happening of late is very much in tune with what Leonard Cohen was writing about so long ago.
The USA is a representative republic form of democracy, and that representation has been called into question on the greatest issue that should be used as a yardstick for gauging the worth of a politician. That word is trust. Because of their ability to become ‘stars’ in the media and their need to stay noticed by that media, these representatives have lost their way in looking over their shoulders to see how their ‘flock,’ the citizens they represent, are doing…and then responding to what they find from that viewpoint. America has become driven by headline fear, sporadic (blown out of proportion) violence, racial imbalance and so much more.
The representatives in this representative form of democracy have deactivated their listen button. They now inform, like almost all news organizations. Most of them live like aristocrats and most of the news organizations do not have comment sections, real letters to the editor or, God help us, articles written by people who are not male, eighty years old and so out of touch that they would not recognize Cohen’s name, his music, and especially this cogent, poignant but so very truthful song. The USA is a democracy, but the words of the song lay it between the lines…Cohen’s democracy is coming to the USA alright…it is just the form of it that is about to change.
