The musician Leonard Cohen died yesterday at the age of 82. Like most of my generation, I loved & still listen to his music; it was the soundtrack to our loves & life.
But I won’t grieve his loss though, not for a moment, because in 2009 he defied the cultural boycott of Israel (BDS) called by Palestinians & performed in Tel Aviv just 45 miles away from Gaza where nine months earlier Israeli warplanes carpet bombed for three weeks & killed 1,150 people.
He was a modest & gentle man they say, yet It was okay by him to be the soundtrack to ethnic cleansing in 2009. In the 1973 Israeli war with Arab countries over the Golan Heights & Sinai, our man performed for Israeli troops at the front lines. Hard to understand a gentility that can live with those contradictions.
This is one of Cohen’s masterpieces sung by K.D. Lang. He left a heritage of beautiful music along with his regrettable politics.
Build the cultural boycott of Israel in his memory. May he RIP.
That campaign went on for what seemed an eternity of hell. And the postmortem writers think they’re gonna drag it out another couple years? In a pig’s eye! Call me anti-intellectual, but you read one postmortem on the Trump election, you’ve read ’em all.
The sore losers gotta let go of their recriminations, blaming everybody under the sun for Clinton’s loss–from third parties to Sanders supporters to low-paid white workers. You’re bringing yourself down. Face up to it: she was no prize package as a candidate. Just ask the Haitian people.
Do you want to do a Fox News thing & endlessly recycle the gripes? The election is over. Stop reading or writing those postmortems. You’re acting out Plato’s allegory of the cave thing if you really believe elections are the be-all & end-all of political life. That’s not where social change happens. That’s where trouble brews.
Elections bring social movements to a halt. It’s long since time to get them rolling again. Take your mind off all the campaign chaos; there’s political work to do. There’s an antiwar movement to rebuild; human rights to defend; solidarity to build. Consider activism as Plato’s allegory of the sun which illuminates, gives insight, creates life. Never let an election bring you down.