The Synchronicities of Leonard Cohen and Dick Cheney
Two very different voices stood for light and truth
The solipsist in chief first plagued us on that first Tuesday following that first Monday in November 2016.
Even worse, we lost a beautiful soul within 24 hours or so of that election.
The soul we lost was Leonard Cohen, one of the great songwriters of the past half-century.
Yes, we lost a mystical Jewish man, who wrote many luminous songs, none more luminous or well-known than “Hallelujah.”
Not enough people now seem to appreciate the Torah and the Word.
Few read those texts, and even fewer have the stamina or imagination to write a song approaching the beauty of “Hallelujah,” a song that is partly about music itself, about elements of the divine that we can hear in language, notes, chords and letters, all of which can have a holiness to them.
We are living in an age where a demagogue and his enablers are poisoning our discourse, degrading language, speaking to the lowest common denominator.
In my first post for Substack in June of this year, “No Kings, No Tyrants,” I mentioned that Trump’s use of the word, “obliterate,” in reference to Iran’s nuclear facilities, was not only hideous; it was also perfectly fitting for Trump, given that, at core, “obliterate,” which derives from Latin, means to negate or to erase letters or language.
(Note: Please feel free to check out my newly launched website, www.robertdavidjaffee.com, where many of my posts from Substack and elsewhere can be found.)
I have written before of how, in addition to damaging our country and the lives of people in other countries such as Iran and Venezuela, our disgraced chief executive is also damaging and trying to obliterate our language.
Of course, the solipsist in chief, who has referred to himself as having “the best words,” has never had an irony detector.
Leonard Cohen, by contrast, understood irony and paradox, the complexities of human existence.
He descended from the Cohanim, an ancient sect of holy priests, close to God.
Maybe, he was close to King David, too.
Like a prophet, Cohen had a remarkable insight into the ear of the greatest of the Israelites, the shepherd boy who became king.
As Leonard Cohen wrote and sang so eloquently, “Now, I heard there was a secret chord that David played, and it pleased the Lord.”
He then added, “But you don’t really care for music, do you?”
No, Trump, who is filled with hatred, tries to deluge us with noise. But Trump is failing in his bid to destroy our lives.
It is true that he is harming our country, but he is putting his own soul in the deepest spiritual peril.
The headline of a HuffPost article I wrote years ago still rings true: “Trumpy Dumpty Will Have His Great Fall.”
He will indeed, whereas Leonard Cohen soars in the heavens with the angels.
I might leave it at that.
But another synchronicity occurred on the first Tuesday following the first Monday of this November.
Within 24 hours or so of the victories of Zohran Mamdani, Abigail Spanberger, Mikie Sherrill and Proposition 50, we lost someone who was not a prophet, like Leonard Cohen.
Rather, we lost another complicated figure, one who, for all his flaws, should be remembered as a patriot.
We lost Dick Cheney, who served our country in many capacities, as the youngest White House chief of staff at that point in history, as a Congressman, as a secretary of defense, as George W. Bush’s vice president, and perhaps most significantly as a voice of opposition within the Republican Party against the tyranny of Trump.
There is no doubt that Dick Cheney and George W. Bush made errors when they brought us into a war against Iraq.
And the errors were significant.
It was not only that the intelligence was incorrect when Bush and Cheney and their colleagues claimed that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq; it was also that Iraq had next to nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks on our country.
Yes, our nation made a major foreign policy mistake in the Iraq war, as well as other mistakes in the Bush-Cheney years.
But I never believed that either Dick Cheney or George W. Bush was other than a patriot.
I always knew that they cared about our country.
And Cheney made that quite clear when he spoke out against Trump prior to the 2024 presidential election.
Trump, on the other hand, cares about nothing and no one, except those who are more evil and corrupt than he, like Putin.
Trump has no loyalty to our country, and he never has.
We all know that he ducked the Vietnam War with five deferments, including a medical deferment for his supposed bone spurs, though the solipsist in chief can no longer tell us on which foot those bone spurs were located.
We should also not forget that, when millions of Americans were suffering and dying from the coronavirus, Trump reportedly sent treatments for COVID to Putin, his fellow tyrant and buddy in the netherworld.
And that is where Trump’s loyalties lie, with forces of evil.
At a time when millions of Americans are now suffering from hunger and when health care premiums are becoming unaffordable, Trump is pushing H-1B visas because, as he told Fox News’ Laura Ingraham, we lack “certain talents” in this country.
Leonard Cohen, who was from Canada, thrived in the United States where he wrote music that inspired the world.
Dick Cheney might not have inspired the world, but he did stand up for our nation, for the rule of law, and for all the gifted souls, who enrich our democracy, when he and his daughter, former Congresswoman Liz Cheney, announced publicly that they would be voting for Kamala Harris in November 2024.
We did not win that election, nor did we win in November 2016, when we lost Leonard Cohen.
But we are winning now.
Voices of light and truth, voices of the Kabbalah, can never be extinguished no matter how hard tyrants like Trump try to erase or obliterate us.