164. Song No. 2,447: “Democracy,” Leonard Cohen
The Future, 1992

I need to qualify my initial reaction to this song with some backstory first.

I was introduced to Leonard Cohen as snippets of lyrics ripped from their context and reappropriated as involuntarily discovered fanfic titles, aesthetic emphasis, fodder for digital profiles’ quote sections and all the other terrible things other people who are also like me do to reduce perfectly good songs to something much more emotionally fraught than originally intended by making the heart of a song stand on its own in a parade of innumerable ways. But the friends who cannibalized Leonard Cohen in the virtual playgrounds we shared gravitated to the most moodily brooding stuff because like attracts like, so whenever curiosity finally got the best of me and I hunted down the source content, I was introduced to yet another throaty ballad from a musician it took me ages to stop confusing for an early, more sober Tom Waits in sound and, for a brief and inexplicable time, Lou Reed in name association.

One of those decontextualized lyrics finally hooked me deeply enough—”Those were the reasons, that was New York” from “Chelsea Hotel #2,” a song about an encounter with Janis Joplin—that it finally formalized the introduction once and for all, and I finally started getting to know Leonard Cohen song by cherrypicked song.

But I really need to reiterate that my expectations were more of these densely packed wallops of growling emotion. So when I first heard “Democracy,” with its beginning march and emphatic background choir and synthy staccato musical interjections and ’80s-holdover flourishes, I laughed. I wasn’t expecting a Leonard Cohen song to sound like this, and I certainly wasn’t expecting a song that sounds like this to touch on the breadth of topics it does (…despite appearing on an album that’s positively stuffed with post-Berlin Wall political responses…) or be as beautifully sardonic as it is. Or, listening to it now, for the Canadian Cohen to have better insights into America then than most of the loudest people shrieking their bullshit do now, buuuuut that’s not really a road worth going down.

In the right circumstances, a friend of mine is prone to musing out loud if the George Harrison lyric “here comes the sun” was less of a promise and more of a threat, which is a deeply uncomfortable flip to accommodate but also has the exact same energy as the refrain “Democracy is coming to the USA” does here.

What haunts me the most in this seven-minute evocation of sins the global society has committed against itself that includes echoes of Tienneman Square, our collective willingness to dismiss and oppress homeless people and the LGBTQIA+ community and other marginalized populations, and misguided religion reimagined as a weapon is the brutal, chilling foresight of a final verse that feels eerily apt today in recognizing the ease with which one can bury themselves in the tiny glowing screen serving as a lifeline to the bread and circus that are so much more appealing to participate in than the greater, necessary fight is:

I’m sentimental, if you know what I mean
I love the country but I can’t stand the scene
And I’m neither left or right
I’m just staying home tonight
Getting lost in that hopeless little screen
But I’m stubborn as those garbage bags
That time cannot decay
I’m junk but I’m still holding up
This little wild bouquet
Democracy is coming to the U.S.A.

Though “I’m junk but I’m still holding up” is one helluva battle cry for those who keep showing up and standing down despite feeling like just one tiny voice forever bandied about and battered by the system it refuses to be crushed and silenced by. Time, indeed, cannot decay the dream for a better world, even if the world we presently live in seems hellbent on brutalizing its people before they have a chance to realize their numbers and a united front’s capacity to be a catalyst for something better.