Heroes and hairstyles: The positives of a pandemic in Pikeville

They were right. They told me that if I voted for Hillary Clinton we would have socialism and massive debt. I did and we do. We used to think that socialism would creep, one check at a time, but not even a Bolshevik would dare to hope it would emerge in two months because of popular demand. We need to quit making respirators and ramp up production of presses that print money.

Even better than forced household unity is the ban on barbershops. Everybody’s hair is getting longer and that may eliminate those hideous hairstyles, which I think they call mullets, and lead to a reduction in head shaving by those with sparsely populated noggins. Here’s a fact: If you come across a guy who is balding, but has some hair left, you hardly notice and five minutes later cannot remember his head. You see the same guy with a shaved head and you always remember that he is bald.

Plus, barber shops and beauty shops were mainly created to spread rumor. I had lived here 30 years when I realized that I had never heard a rumor in Pikeville that had not turned out to be true.

Our current heroes mostly wear white coats. The medical white coats are crisp and clean. Our newest heroes in America will present with white coats with blood and tripe on them. “Tripe” was a word Happy Chandler used in his speeches, but it didn’t help him last time.

But the new heroes in America are meatpackers, who are packing heat for being forced by the President to pack meat and risk their lives daily so that we can have nitrates in our diet, and so that millions of pigs did not live their lives in vain, the way chickens do. But, look at it this way. Those meatpackers always did risk their lives and fingers every day to provide us bologna, which we love but are not sure what it is. We can only hope that the President will not let the pinto bean supply chain fail. They are our food staple, but we have no idea where they come from or how they get here.

There is a sense of unity among mankind and womankind, for that matter. This is the first time in history when everybody everywhere agrees on what the damndest thing they ‘ve ever seen is. That is a start toward world peace, plus the fact that no sensible country would want to invade us and catch something.

Practically everybody I know claims they already had this virus and we can only hope they did. Whenever you ask somebody what is wrong with them they always say: “That thing that’s going ‘round.” Even those of us who felt o.k. sort of sensed that something was going ‘round and now we know what it was. We want to be tested to see if we could sell our antibodies at the flea market, but they won’t take cash at future flea markets, only precious metal.

Larry Webster is a Pikeville attorney.