Everybody Knows...

In the year Britain voted for Brexit and the day after Trump won the election, Leonard Cohen bailed out on us. I spewed out this:

Everybody knows that the dice are loaded Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed Everybody knows the war is over Everybody knows the good guys lost Everybody knows the fight was fixed The poor stay poor, the rich get rich That's how it goes Everybody knows

Everybody Knows Leonard Cohen

1934-2016

I didn’t. I didn’t know. Stupid, naïve, glass-half-full little me. I thought life was fair and people were good.

Now I know better. Or worse.

Fuck you Brexit, fuck you Trump. Fuck the emotionally stagnant future you offer us. A return to a past that never was. I want my heroes back. I want Bowie, Prince, Obama (not dead but dethroned). And now, Leonard Cohen.

I couldn’t spend too long with Cohen, his honesty was too raw for any extended stay. But he was there for me whenever I needed him in my darkest hours. Teaching me that love was messy, life was hard and sex was not something to be ignored (‘you can’t melt it down in the rain’). A Canadian Jew (Trump’s worst nightmare) who stared unflinching at the worst of life and drew from it works of cathartic beauty.

If someone can just take a gun – one of Trump’s guns perhaps – and shoot Alan Bennet and Stephen Sondheim? It’s for the best, I think. That way I can just shut up shop, close down and leave what little remains of my hope outside the door in case someone else can use it, mangle it into a ‘at least we’re getting our sovereignty back’ whimper to the bright side. Frankly, if ‘sovereignty’ is that important to you, it’s not something you should be allowed to play with, you emotionally stunted little regressive.

I can’t see the future anymore. All I can see is the last 8 years of progress – gay marriage, Black Lives Matter, Obamacare – being ripped away from the free world. All I can see is 20 years of a Supreme Court who answers to the Republican party, not to Justice.

And the man I turned to for comfort in my darkest hours has just left me.

The glass is half empty. And the other half is Trump’s piss.