Richie Havens on the turntable, Jeb Loy Nichols ponders the concept of democracy.

Richie Havens
What’s Going On?
1973

I’m called, the night after the American election, by a worried friend.  The worry, he says, has to do with what he calls ‘our precious democracy’.  I’m frightened, he says, that we’ve thrown it away.  I listen for a while and remember our last phone call, in the summer.  It’d been a rough year; economic downturns and famines and civil wars.  Upheavals on every shore.  Children staring wide-eyed from the TV.  There were flies crawling on them.  There were always wars somewhere.  There were always children.  There were always flies.  There were always squirrels too, I thought, and the squirrels thought nothing at all about our wars.  The squirrels didn’t care about anything but squirrel stuff.  What do squirrels care about starving children and crawling flies?  I mentioned this to my friend, told him about watching the news, then watching the squirrels, and about the distance between the two.  My friend told me a word: Upekkha.  Some Buddha business.  An evenness of mind, an inner strength not upset by gain or honour or praise or blame.  Basically, he said, equanimity.  One of the four Divine Houses.  Which didn’t mean a lot to me, except that I liked the way the words sounded and I liked to hear my friend say them.

I tell my friend I’m not interested in Democracy.  Or in the broken version of Democracy we seem to be practicing.  What good, I ask, is a system that delivers us Donald Trump and Kamala Harris?  That gives us Elon Musk and his grotesque horrors?  That gives us hundreds of years of oppression on all sides?  Why should we defend a system that consumes 6 million chickens every hour?  I tell my friend that there has never been, in America, democracy.  The nation is too large, too various, the people too many, with too much money; too much history, too much blood, too much, too much.  Did the Indians of North America, I ask him, vote to be the victims of genocide?  Did the buffalo vote to have themselves erased?  Did the great grasslands vote to be fenced and drained and ploughed?  Did the poor vote to be penniless?  Did the ancient forests vote to be felled and razed?  Did the rivers vote to be abused and polluted?  Did the mountains vote to be blasted and paved?  

Yesterday, my friend tells me, I bought a cheese sandwich that turned out to be made of ‘imitation cheese’.  What, roughly, do you think they mean by ‘imitation cheese’?

A petro-chemical solution, I say.  Oils and flavourings they have laying around that get glooped together and squished flat is my guess.

With imitation mayonnaise.

Fronti Nulla Fides.  

You sound worried, my friend says.

This was months ago, in the summer.  He’d called on my birthday.

Well, you know.  Yea.

Bout what?

The trees by the lake.  The Aspens.  Are they still there?

No.  Gone.

All?

All.

‘All felled, felled, are all felled, not spared, not one, country is so tender, even when we mean to mend her we end her.’  So wrote Gerald Manley Hopkins.

There is, I say to my friend, an entire catalogue of democracies.  Economic democracy, political democracy, aesthetic democracy.  The democracy of the flesh.  The democracy of love.  The democracy of desire.  The democracy of money.  The democracy of excess.  Each of them tainted, unequal to the task.

My friend says that he heard two people talking on the street.  One of them said he was worried about his flat white mocha latte.  And my Apple iPhone 16 Pro.  The other said: I worry about my 10 dollar t-shirt from Walmart.  My pension.  My brand new Ford Ranger pick up truck.  My children’s right to be happy.

I tell him: Kamala Harris spent over 1billion dollars on the election and lost.  Trump spent a billion dollars and won.  Overall, in all the races, the candidates spent 21 billion dollars.  What kind of democratic madness is that?  I tell him that there are 7.6 billion humans on this planet and we account for just 0.01 per cent of life.  So what about the other 99.9 percent of life?  The spiders and dogs and chickens and trout?  What about them?  

Let em learn to talk, let em learn to sit at the table, let em learn to hold a pencil.  Then they can vote.

Not to mention moss and rocks and water and grass.

Buncha layabouts.  Let em work for a living.  Let em pay taxes. Then they can vote.

What I think, I tell my friend, is that it’s all just too big.  A disease of Bigness.  Big countries, big purses, big ambitions, big plans, big egos.

Big democracies.

Precisely.

We need little plops of people voting and acting amongst themselves and being good but infrequent neighbours to other little plops of people.

Good luck with that.

I ask him if he’s ever heard Richie Havens sing What’s Going On.

Sure, he says, of course.

What we need, I say, is more of that.

This morning I wake and think: there is no stillness among the smallest of creatures.  Ants and beetles form relentless lines of endeavour.  They rattle in the walls, criss-cross the kitchen counters, swim in huge circles on the pond.  Never do they stop.  Movement is all.  Wood lice burrow, wasps buzz, flies slap against the window.  It seems that the smaller the creature, the more it moves.  I feel it all around me, the world of constant and surprising microscopic enterprise.  The world of possibilities.  

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