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Lost In Translation

from Trail Of Mars by John McDaid

supported by
Terry England
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Terry England So well written and so relevant. Great job!
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lyrics

We're livin' in a cave
Watching shadows in projection
Like laboratory rats
And Penfield's hacked all our connections
Nothing is for certain
It's all interpreted sensation
Any effort at ontology
Lost in translation

Well we don't know what comprises
Most of the universe’s matter
But we might not see the answer
If it was served up on a platter
Things get weird down in the regime of
Loop quantum gravitation
Our notions of what is, are
Lost in translation

Fish aren't aware of water
Nor humans of perception
Any time we say we know
Is an act of self-deception
There's no way outside of
Our egocentric situation
Even phenomenology is
Lost in translation

Chorus
Well we’ve been down this road before
And we’ve studied all the rules
We see the charlatans and quacks
Treating us like fools
Enlightenment don’t come easy
If it comes at all
But the royal road to knowledge
Won’t be stopped by any wall

The Fox is in the henhouse
The tools are on the Hill
There's Russians in our Facebook
Waving hundred-dollar bills
And the mango Mussolini
Twitters out his fabrications
The promise of America
Lost in Translation

Well I went to ask the Bishop
For a couple words of wisdom
But they'd put him in the big house
For abusing little children
All former moral centers
Vanished to evaporation
Our core institutions
Lost in translation

The acolytes of Heston
Demand their guns be buttered
So the schools are all installing
Heavy metal roll down shutters
Any moderate position
Branded an abomination
Any middle ground at all
Lost in translation

Veterans living on the streets
And children locked in cages
Walkin' wounded in the cubicles
Of Kübler-Ross's stages
And we have no response
That is not mute capitulation
The children of the sixties
Lost in Translation

Chorus
Anti-vaxxers on the left
Climate deniers on the right
And a botnet in the middle
Looking for a fight
You got college prices going up
Wages trending down
We all are Number 6 now
And the circus is in town

There are no easy answers
But the question's still worth asking
Though it's hard to pay attention
And we suck at multi tasking
We are easily distracted
By random information...
Hey, look, a squirrel!
Lost in Translation

It’s a Prisoner’s Dilemma
It’s a comic book adventure
And we shamble down the sidewalk
Picking brains out of our dentures
We’ve been sold light anesthetic
When what we need is deep sedation
We’re zombies on the half-shell
Lost in Translation

We amused ourselves to death
Squeezin' reason through a funnel
We precessed our simulacra
In a Disney-themed dark tunnel
We are nomads on the rhizome
Apres nou, le conflagration
All of Western culture
Lost in translation

credits

from Trail Of Mars, released October 2, 2020
Bass: Craig Akin
Drums: Eric Parker
Electric guitar, mandolin: Jim Henry
Guitar, vocal: John McDaid

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about

John McDaid Portsmouth, Rhode Island

Award-winning science fiction writer, freelance journalist, folk/filk singer-songwriter.

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