IN NONSENSE ON STILTS, Paul Graham takes the reader on a historical and philosophical quest to separate the lofty prose from the hard facts regarding the American founding as put forth by Abraham Lincoln in his Gettysburg Address.

For Graham, the imaginary "nation" and its faux "mission" as articulated in Lincoln's most famous address is the major source of today's deadly division between the government and the real living people of America and we continue to revere it at our peril.

EXCERPTS :

"The question that [is] never raised ... is whether or not the seductive words of this cunning linguist and master debater, Abraham Lincoln, were TRUE."

"Does this thing we call the Federal Government have anything to do with the American Constitution of 1787? If not, who said they could change it? Who provided permission to allow judges, lawyers, and politicians to interpret our own law and twist it into a grotesque assemblage of implied and/or inferred powers...?

"Because there was never a nation conceived in the way described by Lincoln, or dedicated to any abstract proposition ... there was no legal or moral justification for Lincoln's invasion of the Southern States."

"The country we thought we had has long ceased to exist if it ever did. The government—what Lincoln called the 'National Authority'—what we have NOW—is fraudulent government deeply invested in the 'nationalist myth'—an 'indivisible nation' with all of the markings of the post-French Revolutionary Nation-State."