Two-faced slithering snakes ain’t rare, not in politics anyway

Uncle Dave Macon said he always carried a gallon of moonshine around with him, in case of snakebite. He also carried a snake.

The two-headed copperhead which just slithered up in Kentucky is only four heads short of a hydra, a monster in Greek mythology which, every time you cut one of its heads off, grew it back real quick. They should have named it Taliban or ISIS.

That snake, destined to be the most famous Kentucky snake since legendary old-time fiddler Snake Chapman of Canada, Ky., or the Awful, Dreadful Snake that bit the little girl in bluegrass music, has two problems. One is that it won’t live very long. Two-headed snakes die real soon without even being chopped in two with a hoe just for being a blacksnake and nothing more. I fear them without the distinction they deserve and kill very thoroughly innocent and helpful snakes along with rattlers. Here! Rattler, here!

I have a picture of me in Morocco with a cobra on my head. Somebody asked me if that cobra had been fixed and I told them I didn’t really ask, that I just assumed that somebody would not put their cobra on your head if it was still poisonous.

The other problem with being two-faced, even for a snake, is that your tail cannot figure which way to slither. One head wants you to go one way and the other head wants you to slither in the opposite direction. What’s a tail to do? What snake do you slither after?

So much rain and the leaves won’t wither and we are in a dither about how to slither hither. For one thing, we cannot decide just how much buy-off money Saudi Arabia must fork over to us to pay their way out of that little beef about the murder of Jamal Khashoggi.

We certainly will sell principle for pardon to rich kings for sawing up live columnists, something we have all been tempted to do — or at least body slam one — but it ought to cost a lot more that $950 billion, like maybe a free fill-up at the station every third tankful, and maybe some stuff for President Donald Trump.

Neither can we decide if we want everybody to vote or not, or to let the votes of everybody count the same. That would be called democracy and we have yet to try it. And so, Wyoming, about the population of Salyersville, gets the same number of senators as California, the 14th largest economy in the world, give or take. One of our snake heads can be depended on to keep as many people from voting as will likely vote for the other head, such as immigrants, felons and Democrats.

One head wants to restrain the greed of the market, so that capitalism might work and maybe the ocean will not rise up and leave millions of refugees from Florida coming here looking for high ground, wearing summer clothes. Minnie Pearl said about summer clothes that “some ’er clothes and some ’er not.” The other head, by denying that global warming is man-made, has become the most dangerous political party in the history of the world.

Any snake that thinks long enough about health care will end up realizing that a single-payer, Medicare-for-all system is the only thing that will work, the only way to spread risk around to all ages. The snake on the right wants to strike at Obamacare and ride its popular parts at the same time by defending Medicare, which is socialism without the bad name.

This story was originally published October 26, 2018 at 9:43 PM.