"And they're also very good at math, these super boogers, and so they teach Billy the ways of mathematics"
About this Quote
A line like this smuggles propaganda mechanics into nursery-rhyme cadences: “super boogers” is baby talk weaponized, a comic-book upgrade of the enemy into something both ridiculous and ominously competent. Joyce isn’t just name-calling. He’s doing a neat rhetorical two-step: dehumanize with the gross-out label, then concede a grudging excellence (“very good at math”) that makes the threat feel modern, disciplined, and therefore scarier. The result is a villain you can laugh at and fear in the same breath.
The detail that lands is “they teach Billy.” “Billy” is Everyboy, the pliable young citizen. Teaching becomes infiltration: ideology as pedagogy, conquest as curriculum. It’s not bullets; it’s arithmetic. Math reads as more than math here. It signals technical mastery, bureaucratic precision, the kind of competence that powers factories, rockets, codes, budgets - the machinery of a state. By framing that competence as something the “boogers” pass on, Joyce hints at cultural contagion: foreign skill and discipline might seduce or remake the naive home front.
Context matters because Joyce’s era was saturated with total-war messaging and a rising anxiety about rival systems that looked, to many, chillingly efficient. His phrasing collapses those fears into a children’s-story register, suggesting the real target isn’t an adult intellect but a mass audience to be shepherded. The joke softens the cruelty, the cruelty sharpens the joke - and that’s the point. It teaches you how to sneer and obey at the same time.
The detail that lands is “they teach Billy.” “Billy” is Everyboy, the pliable young citizen. Teaching becomes infiltration: ideology as pedagogy, conquest as curriculum. It’s not bullets; it’s arithmetic. Math reads as more than math here. It signals technical mastery, bureaucratic precision, the kind of competence that powers factories, rockets, codes, budgets - the machinery of a state. By framing that competence as something the “boogers” pass on, Joyce hints at cultural contagion: foreign skill and discipline might seduce or remake the naive home front.
Context matters because Joyce’s era was saturated with total-war messaging and a rising anxiety about rival systems that looked, to many, chillingly efficient. His phrasing collapses those fears into a children’s-story register, suggesting the real target isn’t an adult intellect but a mass audience to be shepherded. The joke softens the cruelty, the cruelty sharpens the joke - and that’s the point. It teaches you how to sneer and obey at the same time.
Quote Details
| Topic | Funny |
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