The song is about communism, from the "red age", which is URSS, to Communist China and the fact that none of them worked as dreamt.
In Russia in 1922 "every soul was duty bound to uphold all the statues of boredom", which means that everyone was forced to agree with what the leader (Lenin), then dictator (Stalin) did "and 'cause it made no money, nobody saved no one's life this time", so "therein lies the fatal flaw" that marked communism as a threat for other countries "so we burned all our uniforms and let nature take its course again" and "the big ones just eat all the little ones" we unhappily returned to capitalism.
Then we tried again "we've got rules and maps and guns in our backs" this time in China in 1949 but "we still can't just behave ourselves, even if to save our own lives" China even waged war to Tibet, murdering thousands of innocent Buddhist monks, who just worshiped life in all its forms.
At the end Mercer mentions Thomas More, who wrote Utopia, an ideal society based on common sharing, implying that every work wrote about communism (Engels and Mark's) just wasn't applied correctly and miserably failed, but this doesn't mean that it couldn't work or that capitalism is the right system, in fact he still tries to imagine a better society "when hatched a tragic opera in my mind and it told of a new design"
The song is about communism, from the "red age", which is URSS, to Communist China and the fact that none of them worked as dreamt. In Russia in 1922 "every soul was duty bound to uphold all the statues of boredom", which means that everyone was forced to agree with what the leader (Lenin), then dictator (Stalin) did "and 'cause it made no money, nobody saved no one's life this time", so "therein lies the fatal flaw" that marked communism as a threat for other countries "so we burned all our uniforms and let nature take its course again" and "the big ones just eat all the little ones" we unhappily returned to capitalism. Then we tried again "we've got rules and maps and guns in our backs" this time in China in 1949 but "we still can't just behave ourselves, even if to save our own lives" China even waged war to Tibet, murdering thousands of innocent Buddhist monks, who just worshiped life in all its forms. At the end Mercer mentions Thomas More, who wrote Utopia, an ideal society based on common sharing, implying that every work wrote about communism (Engels and Mark's) just wasn't applied correctly and miserably failed, but this doesn't mean that it couldn't work or that capitalism is the right system, in fact he still tries to imagine a better society "when hatched a tragic opera in my mind and it told of a new design"