Too hard to translate and understand the accurate meaning, but when the mission accomplished you feel like a wiseman.

Edited by walder

I'm being of russian nationality have been blowing my brains struggling to apprehend this lyrics, but I'm happy I've succeed.

By this single lyrics Jay struck back as an outstanding songwriter. He huddled all the Bad Religion traits of songwriting and produced a great piece of intelligent delivery. I like the fast manner in which the song is performed.

I once read about Bad Religion, probably a review in a magazine.
"To write a Bad Religion song, you need a thesaurus. To understand a Bad Religion song, you need a dictionary."

I always figured Jay wrote this as a parody of Greg and Brett's tendency to be a bit too wordy. The song, therefore, would be deliberately over-the-top: so determined to impress you with its erudition that it becomes meaningless.

According to Jay this song is about them, Bad Religion. 'The old deflated beast' (and later on 'it') the song constantly refers to is symbolic for their seemingly downhill fight to try and get people to stop accepting everything that is told to them and to not be afraid to ask questions, and do something, when things don't seem right in the world.

A common them to punk back in the day but something that is not seen much anymore, in any from of music (hence the 'deflated beast') 'syntactic is our elegance' and ' grandiloquent in attitude' sums up Bad Religion so well that it's almost funny. 'impassioned yet inept' and 'excursive expeditions leave us holding less and less' describes how despite they're best efforts people still blindly follow along with the crowd.

Then there is the last 6 lines of the song (the changing point in the song and my favorite part) which pretty much sums up everything any BR song has ever been about.

The song in my opinion is a bitter commentary on the inhabitation of Europeans onto American soil, it could be more general than that but I'm going to be specific. I think Jay is blatantly suggesting that our forefathers destroyed the land that they occupied. They destroyed the beast. It used to be a land of green fields, pomp and passion. Their narrow-minded and authoritarian approach (hence the ruler's gavel) has caused the destruction of the green lands without much thought (with fucked up minds). They deceived themselves with the American Dream thinking they were doing the right thing. The domestication and industrialization has unfortunately left us without much. No longer can we rest in America's green fields and lea. They may have sensed some passion but it was inept and out of place. The rulers had industrial development in mind so I guess the green fields just had to go.

When Jay mentions the excursive expeditions, I think he was referring to the race to the west coast, which would eventually result in the domestication and industrialization of those lands. I think when Jay refers to the carcass, he likens the land! to the buffaloes on the plains. We've all heard the praise of how great they were, but like I said, the lively environment did not fit into what the rulers had in mind. The Indians lived with them and used them as a source of food (suckled on its breast) but now they're just deflated carcasses, or ancient memories. These treasures were just thrown away and left confused and complicated and wondering why it has become so hard to get by. Our graves are being built deeper by engaging in these destructive practices because of our adherence to these bullshit lines telling us to strive for a pursuit of mirth but not considering the consequences.

The title? If you're doing something destructive on a national scale, you might consider deceiving your people by telling them about the American Dream.