There’s a land where the sun never rises,
Where the dark is as sackcloth of hair,
Where the fog is so thick it surprises,
And voices are lost in the air.
Where the fever swamps bubble and bubble,
Along which the blind lead the blind,
Where thinking is just too much trouble—
It’s the Land of the Liberal Mind.
There, talk is but fragments of thinking,
Where words mean whatever they wish.
The professors are mumbling and blinking,
While they lecture of children and fish.
The chimps are running for office,
The monkeys are marching for peace,
The owls are seeking a redress
For trees, lest homes should increase.
The ladies of that gray enclosure
Where once the sun brightly shone,
Seem but a gaunt, final exposure
Of beauty once proudly their own.
The men, ah, but how would we know them?
The men seem as if in a dream,
While waiting for someone to show them
The way to a road or a stream.
So this is the last sad reduction
of reason’s continued denial,
Of fantasy’s final seduction,
The dregs of ambrosia’s vial.
Still yet may there be a reversal,
A transport from cant into sense?
If not, this is but a rehearsal
Of perdition’s last grim recompense.
Oh, how could our culture so wander
From the truth and the hope of the past,
Allowing the misfits to squander
Faith’s riches, the treasure so vast?
So now, but for heaven’s sustainment,
The end of all things is at hand,
The ineluctable cosmic arraignment
Of all that so darkened the land.
But wait, what is this now descending?
A pearly white city I see—
So history is not at its ending,
Things wondrous are yet still to be.
The fools and the frauds shall be banished,
The trusting and true shall be kings;
The shame and the sin will have vanished,
Dispelled by the Judge of all things.
So let us not flee from the battle,
Nor yield to the posturing knaves,
Nor respect any longer their prattle,
Since delusion has made them its slaves.
No matter these martinets hate us,
Truth is the hope of mankind.
So stand! For more triumphs await us
In the Land of the Liberal Mind.