Devil's in the Details

They're not kicking in the doors, they're just changing all the locks;

they're not burning all the books, they're just redesigning the blocks

of text until the meaning's gone, until the truth is blurred,

until the revolution is a misremembered word.

The evil's not a monster, it's a memo and a pen

in the hands of tired, smiling, ordinary men

who draft a thousand pages of a scripture of subtraction,

a quiet, slow, and legislative, terminal transaction.

It's a gospel of nostalgia for a time that never was,

and it justifies the cruelty with a paragraph and clause.

They're turning back the clock, not with a bang, but with a tick;

a quiet little poison that is designed to make you sick.

'Cause the devil's in the details, and the devil's in the fine print,

in the footnote of the law that's got a malevolent glint.

They're not stealing your whole future, just the parts that let you choose;

it's the slow and steady victory of those who love to see you lose.

Yeah, the devil's in the details, the comma and the date,

the bureaucratic patience of a well-constructed hate.

They're not building any prisons, they're just making smaller cages

by redacting all the hope from history's most sacred pages.

They are experts in the art of making freedom look like sin

and makin' you believe the walls are there to keep the danger from within.

They will tell you it's for safety, they will tell you it's for grace

while they're engineering the extinction of a time and of a place

where a person could be complicated, messy, and alive.

Now the only thing they ask of you is that you quietly survive.

So read it all twice over, every single word they write;

the darkness is not coming in the middle of the night.

It's arriving in the daytime, with a lawsuit and a smile

and it's asking for your patience, just for a little while.

'Cause the devil's in the details, and the devil's in the fine print,

in the footnote of the law that's got a malevolent glint.

They're not stealing your whole future, just the parts that let you choose;

it's the slow and steady victory of those who love to see you lose.

Yeah, the devil's in the details, the comma and the date,

the bureaucratic patience of a well-constructed hate.