Puppets

 

German puppets burned the Jews

Jewish puppets did not choose

“Puppets,” from Leonard Cohen’s posthumous album, Thanks for the Dance. What’s he on about?

The same thing folks are on about when they talk of “NPCs.” Or Ionescu was on about in his play Rhinoceros. Or why zombies are all the rage in popular culture.

The truth is, more and more of us are aware that more and more of us have been turning into automatons. Something is making us lose our free will, our full awareness of our surroundings, and our sense of meaning in our lives. And then we do awful things. Nazism was one dramatic expression of this, but the process seems to continue into the present time.

Cohen takes it a bit further than Ionescu, with his “puppet” image. For this suggests not just an absence of free will and consciousness, but control by another.

And Cohen suggesting this is not control by some oppressive government, dictator, or cabal. The president, too, is a puppet. 

Puppet Presidents command

Puppet troops to burn the land

It is not just the Nazis who are puppets, either; the Jews are puppets too. The root is deeper than Nazism itself.

The ultimate puppet master is the Devil. As Bob Dylan said, “You gotta serve somebody.” And this is a real psychological/spiritual phenomenon. Once we embrace any vice, we gradually lose our free will and even our sense of reality. The vice controls us, and our thinking runs in smaller and smaller circuits, with more and more prohibited to us. The sense is captured by the old temperance saying, “first the man takes a drink. Then the drink takes a drink. Then the drink takes the man.”

Cohen seems to suggest an escape from being controlled with the lines

Puppet lovers in their bliss

Turn away from all of this

But if so, he is perfectly wrong. It is actually addiction to sex that has brought us to this state of pinocchiohood. Starting in the Twenties, and mostly accelerating since. 

This is the way it always works: the addiction presents itself as an escape from the addiction. One gets drunk to forget that one is an alcoholic. Hence the downward spiral.

Although there is no question he has wrestled with such addictions personally, I suspect Cohen knows this. Otherwise this couplet would be at the end of the poem. Instead, in the poem, the puppethood persists past this. Puppet day is only followed by puppet night.

A bleak poem.