Leonard Cohen died November 7, 2016, the day before Donald Trump was first elected. Cohen’s son Adam says his father predicted Trump would win. Everyone thought Clinton would. Why did he think so?
Like any great poet, Cohen was a prophet. He saw deeply into the zeitgeist; he could see which way things were heading. In 1992, he put out an explicitly prophetic album, “The Future.” In in he traced two possible paths: a dark one: “I’ve seen the future, baby. It is murder”; and a hopeful one: “Democracy is coming—to the USA.” It was, clearly, a warning.
It does seem America and the world has been going down the dark path traced in “The Future”:
Give me absolute controlOver every living soulAnd lie beside me, babyThat's an orderGive me crack and anal sex…
This sounds like the obsession with power relationships and self-indulgence that underlies woke culture.
Destroy another fetus nowWe don't like children anyhowI've seen the future, babyIt is murder
That hardly needs comment, does it?
On the other hand, surely Trump’s election was and is the second path, the path of light. Cohen saw that the US was, as of 1992, not truly democratic. That new truer democracy is the “populism” Trump and Elon Musk’s X represents.
It's coming from the silenceOn the dock of the bayFrom the brave, the bold, the batteredHeart of Chevrolet
This predicts a return from multicultural idolatries to traditional American culture. Make America great again!
It's coming from the sorrow in the streetThe holy places where the races meetFrom the homicidal bitchin'That goes down in every kitchenTo determine who will serve and who will eat.
The holy places—sounds like a predicted religious revival. The more so since he also says it comes “From the staggering account/In the Sermon on the Mount.” In “The Future,” he laments, “Give me Christ or give me Hiroshima!”
And this stanza also sounds like a rejection of feminism and sexual politics, the great example of the woke power dynamics.
He also says true democracy is coming from “the ashes of the gay.” This might mean gay martyrdom. Or it might mean gay politics become a spent force.
Democracy is, Cohen says, coming to America first partly because of America’s cultural dominance, partly because the US system is flexible. It has “the machinery for change.” And partly because “It’s here the family’s broken.” This sounds like a need to return to “family values.”
I wonder if Cohen died in peace, seeing clearly that the US and the world was going to choose the better path after all.
'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.
