Hokum and Bunkum and Humbug

Oh how clever. How clever you are.

Bedecked in your ersatz splendor,

You know you've really gotten far,

Soaked in simple syphilitic ardor.

Americans love to play the game,

To pay a nickel, to see a mermaid,

To exclaim to their family members,

"Look! See I told you it was fake!"

PT Barnum thought it was all in good fun,

But that he made his living with his museum

Suggests that he took it more seriously.

That it was a game as poker is to a gambler.

Horatio Alger hawked his empty drivel

About orphans pulling themselves up

By bootstraps they haven't got, their feet

Too cracked and bloodied to walk.

Yet the American Dream Humbug persists.

And God forbid you fall flat on your face

Lest you be accused of not toeing the Party

Line, of casting doubt on that Great Tradition.

Then the Snake Oil flowed through state highways

And we immortalized these shysters as redeemed

In mid-century musicals like The Music Man

All too easy to forgive the harm they've done.

There was never a country primed for film

As America was. The turn of the century's

Trump l'oeil, designed to captivate us

And us in turn to captivate the entire world.

More fakery that we somehow legitimized.

Lights and smoke that we made whole.

Art as a confidence trick spun into industry

Which we worship and admire and envy.

We laugh at Woody Allen, the transparent fool, And he invites us to feel superior to him Just as all the great bunkum artists did. In America, You can hide evil in plain sight and be lauded for it.

Yeah, Americans love to be lied to.

We've a whole history to that fact.

So when you clutch your pearls

And gasp at Trump's prattling

Just remember that you're facing-up

To a world you abetted, uncorrected,

According to your proscriptive policies.

While you fussed about the impractical

You watched the magician's hands

And called out the tricks, but missed

the point of the show altogether.

Oh how clever. How clever you are. Bedecked in your ersatz splendor, You know you've really gotten far, Soaked in simple syphilitic ardor.