By CECIL BOTHWELL

You may recall a simple children’s game known as “Duck, Duck, Goose.” 

Participating youngsters sit in a circle. The “ducker” walks the perimeter tapping players’ heads. “Duck, duck, duck ...” until finally pronouncing one a “goose.” 

The goose jumps and attempts to tag the ducker before the ducker is able to assume the goose’s former place. A successful tag means resumption by the ducker, failure makes the goose ...

Am I over-explaining? Basically, a variation on “Tag, you’re it.”

Why “goose?” The game’s origin is lost in nursery school fog, but “silly goose” has been an English language expression since 1547. Naming the tappee a goose is traditional humorous mockery. 

Which brings us to “Duck Dynasty.” Now that Bill Maher and others have exposed the flimflam, heated debates attending an actor’s temporary exile from the network is revealed as vacant lunacy. It’s reasonably certain that the actor’s mouthing off, firing and rehiring were as orchestrated as the show itself, fake beards and all.

If anything, one supposes the audience has grown; that loyal fans have waxed more faithful. That’s entertainment!

But, of course, it isn’t just entertainment and it’s symptomatic of a much more serious phenomena in modern American society. Flimflam is the norm, most particularly on the far right. The gullible geese among us are completely at sea (to mix aquatic metaphors.)

Before you conservative readers get all knee-jerky, note that I am on the record criticizing liars on both the left and right, particularly liars posing as public servants.

There are liars, however, and then there are enormously wealthy, manipulative, self-serving bastards who don’t much care if America goes down in flames as long as they profit. 

Tea partiers, right-wing libertarians, and working-class conservatives have been artfully played for the past few decades by frauds as venal as the “Dynasty” actors, but with far more ominous repercussions.

Starting in the early 1980s, billionaire arch-conservative Peter G. Peterson began pushing his economic vision: aimed at collapsing Social Security and other public support systems, cutting taxes for the rich, crushing the poor, and generally returning America to that glorious gilded age when old and infirm proles were simply allowed to suffer in squalor and die.

Boy, has he succeeded!

Politicians pretending to be friends of we workers have stolen our pasts and present and are well on track to close-out our futures.

Unions, the organizations that enabled many workers to climb out of poverty and achieve “middle-class” status, have been vilified and crushed, resulting in wage stagnation for most bluecollar employees. Since the 1970s, average wages have increased a few percent and productivity has soared by 90 percent or more, with the profit landing in the pockets of the ultra-rich. 

Taxes have increased at the bottom and been slashed at the top. 

Education has been defunded so the low-cost public universities of 1960 now charge tuitions that leave graduates mired in debt. Meanwhile, graduates of our public high schools are falling behind the rest of the modern world with dollars shunted to private academies via vouchers — vouchers which help the rich while good schools remain out of reach for the poor.

Most successfully the right wing has managed to entirely subvert our news media. Even the most objective news organs label Obama as liberal, when he is at least somewhat to the right of Richard Nixon. Obamacare is painted as a liberal reform when it was invented by a right-wing think tank and explicitly benefits the insurance and pharmaceutical and medical specialty industries, not to mention banks.

The idea that our national debt is out of control is treated as a realistic assumption, when in fact it has fallen rapidly and never presented a serious threat to our economy. Falling numbers of undocumented immigrants are reported as an escalating crisis.

This, mind you, is in the mainstream media. The FOX (and friend) fringes take it all much further with wild-eyed fear mongering that bears no relationship to the real world. They wear their populist beards, and say all the right populist words, they smile for the cameras and all the while know exactly what they are about.

“Duck, duck, duck ....” If you find you’re running in Teabag circles ... you’re it!

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Cecil Bothwell, author of nine books, including “She Walks On Water: A novel” (Brave Ulysses Books, 2013), is a member of Asheville City Council.