Showing posts with label two-headed snake. Show all posts
Showing posts with label two-headed snake. Show all posts

Thursday, October 3, 2019

America is a two-headed snake and both heads are venomous: Nasty politics will destroy us all

My friend David, a herpetologist, recently returned from a research expedition in India where he discovered a two-headed snake. David identified the snake as a banded krait, a venomous creature common in India and Southeast Asia.  The krait's bite is quite lethal, generally killing the victim in less than eight hours. When a banded krait has two heads, both heads are venomous.

A two-headed snake! How does that work?  Not very well.

David told me that both heads have independent executive powers, although one head usually dominates the other. The two heads sometimes disagree about what direction to take and they often fight with each other for food. Because the two heads don't get along well together, they usually die quite soon if left in the wild.

It seems to me that America has become a two-headed snake. Conservatives dominate in the South, the Midwest, and the Rocky Mountain West. Liberals dominate on both coasts and in the large cities--Chicago, Houston, Denver, etc.

At the margins at least, conservatives and liberals hate each other. Liberals are outraged at the election of Donald Trump to the presidency, and some will stop at nothing to overturn the election results. If the Democrats can't impeach him based on the Mueller report, they will try to impeach him for a phone call to Ukraine. If that doesn't work, new justifications will pop into Adam Schiff's head and will continue popping into his head until Trump is out of office.

Meanwhile, legislatures in conservative states are trying to diminish a woman's right to have an abortion, passing laws that may very well be unconstitutional.  And Trump's education secretary, Betsy DeVos, has angered so many people with her reckless and heartless administration of the student-loan program that she needs a personal-security detail that costs the taxpayers $21,000 a day.

Our nation's politics are insane, and we are more politically divided now than at any time since the Civil War. Of course, America has seen nasty politics before: the Know-Nothing party of the 1850s, the rising of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s, and the McCarthy era.  But these demented episodes were short because Americans of goodwill came to their senses. But I see no end to our present political madness.

If Trump is re-elected, his enemies in the Democratic Party will continue to undermine him and plot for new ways to impeach him. If a Democrat is elected and some of the candidates' spending schemes are enacted into law, the nation will quickly go bankrupt and the stock market will plummet so far and so fast that 1929 will look like a Methodist picnic by comparison.

Meanwhile, Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran are watching our political antics like a bunch of kids eating popcorn during a Three Stooges movie. They can see we are self-destructing, and it must be fun for them to watch.

American politics has become a venomous, two-headed snake. Our elected leaders are so bent on crushing their political enemies that they are willing to wreck the national economy just to harm their foes. And make no mistake: our nasty politics will destroy us all--no matter which venomous head prevails over the other.