Getting on the right side before Trump’s Civil War starts

When the news came on and a leader of a country announced that he may not honor the results of an election, that the free press is the enemy of mankind and that he was going to send more and more unidentified forces to capture leftists and haul them away in unmarked cars for declaring that black people are fully human, Tie Rod and Slemp thought they had accidentally tuned in to one of the Spanish channels reporting about Argentina. About that time the Supreme Court urged the government to start killing people again and to hurry up the process, so the boys figured those anarchists could be strapped down and shot up with whatever our official poison is almost as soon as they disappear from the streets of blue state cities. It seems a little harsh to kidnap the left. Maybe a gentler solution would be to have them sew onto their outer clothes a red “L.”

When Trump exposed his dictatorship, Tie Rod and Slemp smelled danger and decided which side to get on in the new civil war. Before that Tie Rod and Slemp were about as nervous about which side to get on in the upcoming civil war as were their ancestors. Most Kentuckians waited until the old Civil War was over and then got on the side that lost. Tie Rod and Slemp wanted first to be on the side that will win and secondly, if possible, to be on the side that is morally right. Tie Rod, a Democrat who strays, but who lives on government checks, and Slemp, a Republican anti-socialist who loves all the socialist programs, had to choose, heeding the advice of old mountain poet James Still who said “You got to hold your hand up for somebody.”

Slemp says that Trumpism just proves that the same word can have different meanings to different people, such as the word “great.” He doesn’t see government efficiency at kidnapping, anarchy and carrying out executions as being all that great nor does he equate greatness with going back to the days when “You and I Were Young, MAGA.” When Slemp looks back on how he used to think about and treat Black people in those days he doesn’t feel so great, and oughtn’t to. He says that if there were any justice in the world John Lewis would have been President. He says we need a few good John Lewises right now to offer up their skulls to fascism.

Slemp kind of doubts Trump’s claim that he had done more for Black people than anybody except, maybe, Abraham Lincoln, which the President thinks should allow him to stir up racial hatred.

But Tie Rod says that he admires the President for being creative, being the first Presidential candidate to Jim Jones the voters, campaigning by encouraging voters to catch a disease which may kill them and probably would kill their grandparents. Spew, hack, cough and spit droplets on one another in the name of Trump . Drink the bleach.

Larry Webster is an attorney in Pikeville.

This story was originally published July 30, 2020 at 2:03 PM.