Democracy Is Comin'... To The U.S.A.

"The economy can only go down from here. The number of revelations from Robert Mueller can only go up," wrote Edward-Isaac Dovere in his Atlantic essay, 10 New Factors That Will Shape the 2020 Democratic Primary. And whether those two sentences excite you or depress you, he wants to warn you that they don't mean a Democratic candidate is a shoo-in for 2020. That's debatable but what isn't is that the primary race for the nomination "will be different from any that have come before" and that, as he put it so eloquently "the early polls being circulated will likely have as much relevance to the outcome of the race as learning Mandarin does to visiting Algeria." [That said, Sonatrach, Algeria's government-owned oil giant-- the largest company in Africa and 11th largest oil consortium in the world and employs 120,000 workers, producing 30% of Algeria's GNP jointly operates the Adrar refinery, near the village of Sbaa with the China National Petroleum Corporation. On top of that, China is playing an increasingly important and hands-on role in Algeria's economic development.]

Dovere lays out 10 factors he says will define the Democratic primary to choose a final combatant to take on Trump. First off will be Trump's role as an annoying ring-side commentator. He'll try to do as much damage to each candidate as he has already likely done to Elizabeth Warren. "The most predictable part of Trump’s reaction to the primary campaign: He’ll be tweeting about all the big candidates as they get in. He’ll throw out nicknames. He’ll insinuate. He’ll let loose rumors from the oppo files, forcing reporters to chase them down... Usually, an incumbent lets the other party’s primary finish before getting engaged in the race, but Trump isn’t the usual incumbent. The 2020 Democratic candidates will be introduced to the broader American public not just by the media and their own campaigns, but also by the man they’re hoping to run against."

And then there's the cost, especially now that "the primary calendar now puts California and Texas so early in the process, any campaign looking to survive will need to run simultaneously in both of those large states, along with the traditional early states and a handful of other big primaries. The candidates will need to run organizing operations on the ground across the country, and they’ll need to run commercials on the air." That's great news for Beto in Texas (and theoretically for Kamala Harris in California, although many California Democrats barely know who she is and she certainly isn't as popular a figure in California as Beto is in Texas). It also gives a huge advantage to candidates with the most name recognition: Bernie, Biden, Elizabeth Warren... and whomever Rachel Maddow decides to plaster all over MSNBC over and over, whether Amy Klobuchar, Eric Swalwell or... well, let's just remember how lucky we all are that Maddow's self-admitted choice for president, failed Missouri conservative Claire McCaskill, is off to the glue factory. "According to Democratic operatives who are planning campaigns," wrote Dovere, "to get to the first week of March, when Super Tuesday is held, it’ll take a minimum of roughly $40 million. On the high end, it could soar past $60 million. And they’ll need many millions more to take them through the rest of the campaign season." That gives an advantage to plutocrats Mike Bloomberg and John Delaney, as well as to the progressive billionaire "in" the race, Tom Steyer.

Monday night Lawrence O'Donnell had a panel on his show discussing the portnetial candidates. Joy Reid ventured that Kamala "ticks off all the boxes," but, alas, none-- not one-- of the boxes she listed have anything to do with being a good president. It was wall-to-wall identity politics: her gender, the unending list of races in her pedigree... all the kinds of things that excite political journalists for whom issues are just too damn complicated to talk about. Dovere wrote that "There’s never been a presidential-primary race with more than one female candidate. There’s never been a presidential-primary race with more than one black candidate." (At least he adds that "There’s never been a presidential-primary race with more than one candidate running from the left of the base.")

All those patterns will be broken in 2020. And that means the traditional calculus about who gets which voter groups is out the window.

Some of these changes could directly affect candidates’ thinking about the primary map. The heavily African-American Democratic electorate in South Carolina, for example, tends to favor black candidates and those with strong ties to the black community. But this time around, there will likely be at least two black candidates, Kamala Harris and Cory Booker, and others with a long history of support from black voters.

Meanwhile, in New Hampshire, the conventional wisdom is that local New England candidates have the edge. But this cycle, there could be several who come from neighboring states, such as Elizabeth Warren, who launched an exploratory committee on Monday, and Bernie Sanders.

And at the same time California is moving up in the primary calendar, this race could have four Californians-- Harris, Steyer, Eric Garcetti, and Eric Swalwell-- and others with strong support in the state, such as Sanders and Joe Biden. If no one can count on locking down any particular group or place, it could mean just about everything is up for grabs.

And then there's the undeniable fact that voters will want "to know where the 2020 candidates stand on impeachment questions, and there likely won’t be much room for anything but absolutism. Revelations from Mueller’s Russia investigation are likely to keep coming-- including indictments, pleas, and sentencing deals-- and the new House Democratic majority is planning multiple new lines of inquiry. If the past two years are a guide, the Democratic candidates’ responses to the latest Trump scandals will get much more attention than any policy rollouts they might prepare." Every campaign will have to come up with some kind of canned response that doesn't sound canned. "And," as Dovere reminds us, "any House members who are running for president would be in a position to vote on sending impeachment articles to the Senate, and any senators running would be in a position to vote on whether to keep their Republican opponent in office." Awkward.

And this seems really important: besides Biden, obviously, how many candidates are just going to be campaigning on a kind of status quo ante? "As they look ahead, will Democrats want a restoration of the last president’s policies, or a restart?" By now, we should all know where Bernie stands, Jeff Merkley and Elizabeth Warren too. Anyone else? Most are just the kinds of politicians who know how to pull their fingers out of their asses, put them in their mouths to wet them and hold them up to the wind. "For all the Democrats still gushing about Obama, many also see his presidency as full of missed opportunities: What if, for example, he’d included a public-insurance option in Obamacare? What if he had been harder on Wall Street after the crash?"

Then there's something special for the candidates like Bloomberg and others from-- at best-- the Republican wing of the Democratic Party:

The Republican electorate doesn’t tend toward soul-searching or taking out its leaders—at least not usually. This time around may prove a little different, as the remaining Never Trumpers reach out to Had-Enough Trumpers and There’s Got to Be Something Other Than Trumpers—who, along with the rest of the traditional Republican Party, have been left dizzy and confused by the president. Operatives are working hard to come up with a consensus choice to run against Trump. But so far, they have not come close to a consensus, let alone a choice.

For the Democratic candidates hoping to make it to the general election by picking up wayward Republican votes, that could mean engaging in the debate going on within the other party. They’ll have to answer several tactical questions: Do you agree with the Republicans attacking Trump? How do you do that without seeming sympathetic to the Republican arguments and leaving yourself vulnerable to the absolutism of some Democratic voters? How do you embrace the turmoil within the other party while also making the wider aspirational embrace that campaigns are going to be aiming for?

Will evil outside forces play a role... via hacking? Russia? China? The Saudis? Israel? Organized Crime? The Mercer family?

And then there what Dovere dubs "The X factor. Recession? War? Natural disaster? Presidential meltdown? Trump spent the holidays showing just how wild he can make things on his own. The months ahead could present any number of world- and history-turning events, and any number of reactions from the president will shape what follows them. More than just reacting, the people auditioning to replace Trump as commander in chief will have to come up with their own proposed solutions amid the flames of whatever is burning-- and will likely have to do so more than once."

Death of a Ladies Man: Leonard Cohen 1934-2016

Leonard Cohen and Sharon Robinson

-by Denise Sullivan

“It is difficult to get the news from poems yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there”
- William Carlos Williams

As if Tuesday's election result wasn't enough to knock out poets, artists, activists and other sentient beings, Thursday's announcement that singer-songwriter and poet Leonard Cohen, 82, had died earlier in the week was simply too much bad news in an already unprecedented year of loss. Not only will Cohen obviously be missed by fans and fellow artists who relied on his wisdom, but women have rarely known an artist of Cohen's generation who loved, admired, honored, respected, and employed them in the studio and on the road as consistently as he did.

The women in Cohen's life were not simply ornaments, adjuncts, or names in song titles: Marianne, and Suzanne were famously real people as was Joan of Arc. But Cohen who notoriously loved the company of women, was also an advocate for working women artists and paid them (we hope equally as their male counterparts) to write with him, produce and engineer his records, and sing on the road. Even in the so-called liberal, open-minded and progressive music business, there are relatively few working female producers and engineers and too few top name recording artists who employ them. But Cohen consistently placed female collaborators in the highest levels of operation. That he should be such a hit with us is no surprise. Elevating women in song and verse is one thing but having the knowledge and humility to take our value into the workplace added a layer and depth to his own art. His actions are pretty much unprecedented in the male-dominated music business, unless I'm missing something: Jennifer Warnes, Sharon Robinson, Leanne Ungar, Perla Battala, Anjani Thomas, Julie Christensen and Rebecca DeMornay were among his most frequent collaborators; I've missed some, but you get the idea. Cohen's biographer was Sylvie Simmons and Lian Lunson directed the 2005 concert film, I'm Your Man.

One of Cohen's best-known songs, "Everybody Knows," was co-written by Sharon Robinson

This was not a good week for a champion of women and a great empathizer of the human condition-- with our frailties and foibles-- to leave us. Perhaps the conspicuous loss of our 20th Century cultural icons, artistic geniuses, and principled public figures (men like David Bowie, Prince, and Muhammad Ali,) is not entirely a coincidence. I have to believe that there is something greater than us that called them away from this plane at this time. That they would've all happily and humbly passed the torch to make room for others--including the feared and dreaded "other"-- and inspired us to shine our light through those proverbial cracks as we confront the abyss (which, in case you are not Biblically-inclined, goes straight to hell) is a grievous loss.



Moved by the language of the synagogue as a child in Montreal, Cohen gravitated to poetry quite naturally when he first read the work of Frederico Garcia Lorca as a teenager. Spanish guitar, gypsy melodies, and the Beat writers inspired him to write and publish poetry and prose before making albums. Music was a second-calling he took up, he joked, so he could make a living. He was signed to Columbia by John Hammond in the mid-'60s during the folk boom.

Recording 14 albums over six decades, Cohen sometimes took years to write songs, and like Bob Dylan, could be said to be a Nobel-worthy wordman. “His gift or genius is in his connection to the music of the spheres,” said Dylan of Cohen in last month's New Yorker. Known on the surface for his songs of love and longing Cohen also delved deep into matters spiritual and socio-political, his existential truths often filtered through the lenses of Judaism and Buddhism. His 1992 album The Future (his only album recorded in the' 90s) took a headlong look at world matters and our US experiment gone awry. The Future, and it's leading song, “Democracy,” was inspired in part by the fall of the Berlin Wall. Cohen told Paul Zollo, “It's a song of deep intimacy and affirmation of the experiment of democracy in this country. That this is really where the experiment is unfolding. This is really where the races confront one another, where the classes, where the genders, where even the sexual orientations confront one another. This is the real laboratory of democracy.” Co-produced by his then-partner DeMornay, Cohen had officially moved into his late-period, synthesized sound which carried through to his final recordings. The album may be considered his masterwork.



Not long after The Future, Cohen checked himself into the Mt. Baldy monastery he'd been drawn to for decades to live a monk's life with his zen master Joshu Sasaki Roshi. Cohen's exploration of Buddhism dated back to the '60s and he practiced as a means toward inner peace, though Roshi, not exactly ascetic, had an appetite for drugs, alcohol and inappropriate conduct that landed him in some trouble before his death a couple of years back at the age of 107. Perhaps not surprisingly, after decades of studying Buddhism with Roshi, a trip to India and an intensive study with a Hindu practitioner, Cohen claimed he was relieved of his lifelong depression. By 2001, Cohen returned to recording with Ten New Songs, a collaboration with Robinson; it was followed by 2004's Dear Heather. But during his absence from the material world, it was learned the woman he'd charged with his business affairs had been embezzling from him. At a time of life when he had intended to be winding down, at age 70 Cohen began a steady touring and recording regime; it turned out to be a revitalizing and fulfilling experience, despite the circumstances, and he earned back his fortune and then some.

Lunson's 2005 film, I'm Your Man, captured artists like Nick Cave, U2, and Rufus Wainwright paying tribute to Cohen and kicked off the resurgence of his music with a younger generation, much like an early '90s tribute album, I'm Your Fan, had done with covers by The Pixies and R.E.M. The results of Cohen's persistent late-stage touring were nothing but a triumph and he was further fueled to record Old Ideas (2012) and Popular Problems (2014), though his touring days had been curtailed. You Want It Darker, released last month, was made at home with his son Adam once Cohen had become too weak to work in a recording studio: It is a stunning effort by any measure, not just because it was recorded by a dying man, but the recording technique and the songs themselves are high level, contemporary sounding, and spiritually demanding. We will be listening to this record for a long time.



Cohen, like all good seekers, had spent his life living, preparing to die.

Aside from his children and grandchildren, his albums and his songs, Cohen left two novels and a number of collected works of poetry. The following piece is taken from his 2004 collection, Book of Longing:

Mission
I've worked at my work
I've slept at my sleep
I've died at my death
and now I can leave

Leave what is needed
And leave what is full
Need in the spirit
And need in the hole

Beloved, I'm yours
As I've always been
From marrow to pore
From longing to skin

Now that my mission
has come to its end
Pray I'm forgiven
The life that I've led

The Body I chased
It chased me as well
My longing's a place
My dying a sail

Sail on, Leonard Cohen, your work here is done. Thank you for bringing the news in your celestial poems and songs and for showing us how to die with dignity.

May future civilizations take note, listen to its poets, heed their advices, and God willing, be spared a miserable life.




Denise Sullivan reports on arts, culture and gentrification issues for Down With Tyranny!

Leonard Cohen, Canadian Poet, Novelist, Recording Artist, Painter.

-by Noah

"I am an old scholar, better looking now than when I was young.
That’s what sitting on your ass does to your face."
-Leonard Cohen

Everyone seems to think of Leonard Cohen as a singer-songwriter. I dislike that term. It seems superficial to me. There are so many singer-songwriters, and, to me, the vast majority are generic, whining, humorless poseurs lacking in any amount of depth, emotional, intellectual, or otherwise. Give me real emotion, real sarcasm, real anger. Give me real.

"Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just ash. Out of the thousands who are known or who want to be known as poets, maybe one or two are genuine and the rest are fakes, hanging around the sacred precincts, trying to look like the real thing."

I think, having known Leonard a bit over the last 36 years, that he would at least cast a sly jaundiced eye towards the term singer-songwriter as directed at him. Those above two quotes indicate a lot about the importance of poetry to his art. Although also a highly regarded painter, at the core, he was a man of words first, whether in his poetry, his novels Beautiful Losers and The Favourite Game, or just in conversation. As Leonard himself more than once said

"And I had not much of a voice. I didn’t play that great guitar either."

Leonard Cohen didn’t have to play great guitar. He didn’t have to because he could communicate so well with just the basics. As for his voice, it was endearing, charming, filled with feeling, and instantly recognizable. Like all great recording artists, you might not have heard the song before, but you knew who it was on the first listen. The voice, and, the subject matter, the turn of a phrase, the timing: they all gave it away.

"Children show scars like medals. Lovers use them as secrets to reveal. A scar is what happens when the word is made flesh."

Leonard with Anjani Thomas and Noah, 2007

Leonard Cohen’s work was hugely powerful and influential. Only Bob Dylan had a larger and deeper impact on his generation. In its excellent obituary, written by Richard Gehr, Rolling Stone magazine referred to Leonard Cohen as "The dark eminence among a small pantheon of singer-songwriters (there’s that term again) to emerge in the Sixties and early Seventies."

Long known as a poet in his native Canada, music fans first became aware of him when his song "Suzanne" became a hit performed by Judy Collins in 1966. Previously, Leonard had published it as a poem called "Suzanne Takes You Down." It had appeared in his book Parasites Of Heaven.

In 1967, "Suzanne" was his first single from his first album, Songs Of Leonard Cohen. It quickly became a radio staple of the late Sixties, influencing many artists. The song was even covered by a very young Bruce Springsteen in his pre-E Street Band, The Castiles. More recently, Nick Cave recorded the song for a Leonard Cohen tribute project called I’m Your Man.

Other famous songs followed over the next 50 years, including "First We Take Manhattan," "So Long Marianne," "Bird On A Wire," "Everybody Knows," "Famous Blue Raincoat," "Sisters Of Mercy," "In My Secret Life," "Ain’t No Cure For Love," and his most famous song, the oft-covered "Hallelujah."



"If I knew where the good songs come from, I’d go there more often... We’re in a world where there’s famine and hunger and people are dodging bullets and having their nails pulled out in dungeons, so it’s very hard for me to place any value on the work that I do to write a song. Yeah, I work hard, but, compared to what?"

Issuing a statement on Leonard Cohen’s death, manager, Robert Kory, rightly said "Unmatched in his creativity, insight and crippling candor, Leonard Cohen was a true visionary whose voice will be sorely missed. I was blessed to call him a friend and for me to serve that bold artistic spirit firsthand, was a privilege and great gift. He leaves behind a legacy of work that will bring insight, inspiration, and healing for generations to come."

Leonard Cohen was and is a giant. He wrote, painted, and recorded until the end. A new album, You Want It Darker was just released on October 21st. He was 82.

"How do we produce work that touches the heart? We don’t want to live a frivolous life. We don’t want to live a superficial life. We want to be serious with each other, with our friends, with our work. That doesn’t necessarily mean gloomy or grim, but seriousness has a kind of voluptuousness aspect to it. It is something that we are deeply hungry for, to take ourselves seriously and to be able to enjoy the nourishment of seriousness, that gravity, that weight."