THE LAWLESS AND THE CAPITOL

This parody has a different twist to it. It’s not a parody of a song but of a poem. Marcus Bales penned the lyrics you’re about to hear as a parody of the Lewis Carroll poem “The Walrus and the Carpenter” from his book “Alice through the Looking Glass. The music for the work was created by Don Caron.
Executive Producers Sally Headley and Jerry Pender

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Lyrics The Lawless and the Capitol
Lyrics by Marcus Bales – A Parody of The Walrus and the Carpenter

In his coat and gloves the Lawless spoke
     To wind them up that day,
To try to get his Coup Cucks Clan
     To do what he can’t say:
It would be so grand if you would clear
     Democracy away.

“O, Loyalists, come and walk with me,
     Our long march has begun,
The Capitol’s just over there,
     Where voting-counting’s done.
Let’s do our own – I’m right behind
     You – ‘til and if you’ve won.”

In wild surmise they looked around
     Evincing some distress
“Where’s Pennsylvania Avenue?”
     They asked, while shouting “Yes!”
“You’re on it.” “Oh!” And off they went,
     Dull whites in silly dress.

They got up to the Capitol  
     Where barricades were bright,
Some cops invited them right through
     Around the building’s site.
And this was scarcely odd because
     The Polizei were white.
Twiddly Drumpf and Trumpty Tweet
For freedom you must fight.

“Oh, would you like to riot here,
     And pillage, steal, and loot?
Well, there’s the windows, here’s the door,
     We promise not to shoot
Except for once, to make it seem
     Like we put in the boot”
Twiddly Drumpf and Trumpty Tweet
It’s time to execute.

They stole the Speaker’s podium
     And postured on the Floor
Threw shit about and killed a cop  
     From two right on past four,
Then waved to cameras as they went
     Back out the open door.

The riot squads by five arrived
     And made some noise at them,
And said they all had got to go
     At least by six p.m. –
And someone cried “Don’t shoot! You know
     We’re not the BLM!”

“The time has come,” The Lawless said
     “To talk of many things,
Of sinking ships and fleeing rats
     And Russian blackmail rings,
And whether certain Presidents
Twiddly Drumpf and Trumpty Tweet
“Can do self-pardonings.”

He told them that he loved them, then
     He kindly sent them home,
And told them they were special, there,
     Beneath the Stately Dome.
Then he said they’d be arrested  
     Wherever they might roam.

So on his watch Republicans
     Are in a parlous state –
They’ve lost the Senate, House, and White  
     House, lost the whole debate –
So after all we must admit
     He made America great.

About The Walrus and the Carpenter

“The Walrus and the Carpenter” is a narrative poem by Lewis Carroll that appeared in his book Through the Looking-Glass, published in December 1871. The poem is recited in chapter 4, by Tweedledum and Tweedledee to Alice. The poem is composed of 18 stanzas and contains 108 lines, in an alternation of iambic tetrameters and iambic trimeters. The rhyme scheme is ABCBDB, with masculine rhymes throughout. The rhyming and rhythmical scheme used, as well as some archaisms and syntactical turns, are those of the traditional English ballad.

The Walrus and the Carpenter are the eponymous characters in the poem. Walking upon a beach one night when both sun and moon are visible, the Walrus and Carpenter come upon an offshore bed of oysters. Groups of four are called up; the exact number is unknown. To the disapproval of the eldest oyster, many more follow them. After walking along the beach (a point is made of the fact that the oysters are all neatly shod despite having no feet), they rest on a low rock. After bringing bread, pepper, and vinegar the Walrus and the Carpenter are revealed to be predatory and eat all of the oysters. The Walrus expresses some compunction towards the oysters but eats them anyway, while the Carpenter dispassionately asks for more bread and complains that the butter is spread too thickly. After hearing the poem, the good-natured Alice attempts to determine which of the two leading characters might be the more sympathetic, but is thwarted by the twins’ further interpretation:

“I like the Walrus best,” said Alice: “because you see he was a little sorry for the poor oysters.”
“He ate more than the Carpenter, though,” said Tweedledee. “You see he held his handkerchief in front, so that the Carpenter couldn’t count how many he took: contrariwise.”
“That was mean!” Alice said indignantly. “Then I like the Carpenter best—if he didn’t eat so many as the Walrus.”
“But he ate as many as he could get,” said Tweedledum.
This was a puzzler. After a pause, Alice began, “Well! They were both very unpleasant characters—”

The characters of the Walrus and the Carpenter have been interpreted many ways both in literary criticism and popular culture. British essayist J. B. Priestley argued that the figures were political, as does Walter Russell Mead, who utilizes the Walrus and the Carpenter as an allegory for the United Kingdom and the United States respectively. However, in The Annotated Alice, Martin Gardner notes that, when Carroll gave the manuscript for Looking Glass to illustrator John Tenniel, he gave him the choice of drawing a carpenter, a butterfly, or a baronet, since each word would fit the poem’s metre. Because Tenniel rather than Carroll chose the carpenter, the character’s significance in the poem is probably not in his profession. Gardner cautions the reader that there is not always intended symbolism in the Alice books, which were made for the imagination of children and not the analysis of “mad people”.

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