The world we live in is full of secrets. Some secrets are not secrets, because we live them every day as naked truths. What we believe of individual rights and liberty and rulers is a collection of lies. The lie makes the truth the most secret of all secrets. Many of the people who read this silliness will be old enough to remember Monty Python and the Flying Circus. The zany and wacky antics of their skits encourages comparisons to the efforts of our rulers to establish the farcical relationship between the administration of government and the lives of ordinary people. If the Groucho brothers were still here, I would most assuredly attempt to recruit their efforts to explain why Monty Python and our governing bureaucracy were weaned from the same tit. “Who’s on first?’ probably hits at gut level to educate the hot dogs and beer “common man” of the tyranny of good intentions by criminal means.

Modern public policy in America demands that we are indoctrinated from infancy to obey the demands of authority figures regardless of how stupid, how simplistic or how absolutely nutty those demands may be. This indoctrination resembles a heartfelt belief in practice, because facts and experience are insufficient to demonstrate the falsehood of the belief. Beliefs are just that, just beliefs. What is interesting about the American success of raising a population unaware of the truth is that they live by the rule of a secret truth, unaware that it is a lie. The lie is that the truth is spoken openly in words that we understand, but which are of a different language. George Orwell went to some lengths to explain the lies, truths and secrets of language. Freedom is slavery. War is peace. Doublespeak. Doublethink. We are those folk who inhabit his world of 1984.

The language of government consists of the same words, phrases and intonations as our common language. Both languages are very useful, and both are reasonably consistent within themselves. The confusion begins with the lie that they are the same language. The lie is the secret. But since the secret is the naked truth, who can say there is a lie? No matter how exquisitely one may parse the language of law, no matter how accurately the words are spelled and the sentences constructed, the language of law precisely identical to our common language will almost always be at serious variance.

Our lawmakers (who are us) are very careful to use the language of law to create our laws in a most rigidly lawful way. Whatever the perceived loopholes or excesses, they are intentional and to those who understand secrets, they are the clever toe holds and crevices by which the law may be held, traversed and manipulated.

For those who don’t understand secrets, our laws are snares, traps, dead falls and pits intended to separate the unwary from their rights, their liberty, their wealth and often their lives. The uncivilized animal in all of us recognizes that there are secrets and dangers in those secrets. We are therefore wary of things which smell of government. Of course, people who govern understand both the secret and our wariness and they bait their traps and snares with enticements to our greed, our insecurity and our sloth. We are an easy capture and once caught, we are a submissive, docile entertainment.

The people of our governments have created the perfect monkey traps. With rare exceptions, we put our hand in the trap and grasp the bait. Our indoctrination and false beliefs will not allow us to abandon the bait and withdraw our hand. Once captured, we become that kind of monkey lunch where by the monkey is secured by the neck in the center of a serving tray, the head exposed to the chef and the diners. The monkey’s skull is cleaned and shaved while the diners wait in anticipation. The chef carefully peels back the scalp and removes a cap of skull, exposing the brain of a carefully secured, frightened and very much alive monkey. There is an art to keeping the monkey alive, while its brain is delicately consumed by the lunch crowd. Our friends and neighbors performing the function of our government are the chef. You and I are both the monkey and the lunch crowd.

When you put this essay aside, think about your own relationship with us, your fellow monkeys and chefs and diners. If you have the presumed authority, the power and the desire to scalp a monkey, you are my enemy. If your hunger drives you to hire a chef to capture the monkey, you are my enemy.

You will each discover another naked secret. . . You may presume that I will not be lunch.