I’ve never been able to fully trace the history of The Fable of the Snake. I came across it in 1994 in the movie Natural Born Killers, and that same year in Hunter S. Thompson’s riff on the 1992 presidential election, Better Than Sex. I’ve since learned that it was around at least as early as 1968, when soul singer Al Wilson recorded a version of it as “The Snake.” It’s probably much older than that. Here it is, in bare bones form:
A woman comes upon a snake in some kind of trouble (frozen, injured or being attacked). She rescues the snake, takes it home, and nurses it back to health. It becomes a trusted friend and pet. Then one day, she decides to go to town and picks up the snake to take it with her … and it bites her. As she dies, she asks the snake why. “Lady,” the snake says, “you knew I was a snake when you picked me up.”
Every new government outrage against all that is right and good elicits reactions of astonishment and outrage — and every time I hear those reactions, I think of The Fable of the Snake.
Seriously, folks: We’ve been pulling the dead weight of government for thousands of years and laboring in the mines of the modern state for hundreds. How could anything that government does be surprising?
The irritant of the day is “health care reform,” specifically “ObamaCare” — a scheme which calls for the US government to feed the wallets (and bodies) of its subjects en masse into the maws of the insurance and pharmaceutical companies — which was passed by the US House of Representatives on Sunday evening and shall shortly be “the law of the land.”
I’ve covered the ObamaCare scam in detail in previous columns; those details are not important to my point here, and in fact there’s nothing particularly unusual about the con (hint: The purpose of all government programs is to transfer wealth from the productive class to the political class).
My point here — the object of my frustration, to be more specific — is that people don’t seem to understand that if they persist in clasping friggin’ poisonous snakes to their bosoms, they’re going to get bit.
Samuel warned the Hebrews what would happen if they insisted that God appoint a king (see 1 Samuel, chapter eight) … it wasn’t pretty.
Thomas Paine warned America’s British colonists that “government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state, an intolerable one.”
George Washington is quoted (possibly apocryphally but certainly wisely) as likewise warning Americans that “government is not reason, it is not eloquence — it is force! Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master. Never for a moment should it be left to irresponsible action.”
Folks, the guys I’m quoting here are the naive, feel-good, utopian, hippy dippy doo optimists of political history. If you want to a more level-headed, accurate assessment of the ends to which government means inevitably lead, read any well-written history of the Third Reich’s Holocaust, Pol Pot’s Killing Fields or Mao’s Great Leap Forward.
It’s time to stop kidding yourself.
It’s time to stop buying the “this time, it will be different — really!” line.
Lucy will always pull the football away when Charlie Brown tries to kick it, and a poisonous snake will always bite you if you let yourself be charmed into giving it the opportunity to do so.
There are two ways to deal with a poisonous snake: Avoid it, or kill it. The same is true of the state.
I think Upton Sinclair was referring to this rather obvious passage in Washington's farewell address:
"And there being constant danger of excess, the effort ought to be by force of public opinion, to mitigate and assuage it. A fire not to be quenched, it demands a uniform vigilance to prevent its bursting into a flame, lest, instead of warming, it should consume. It is important, likewise, that the habits of thinking in a free country should inspire caution in those entrusted with its administration, to confine themselves within their respective constitutional spheres, avoiding in the exercise of the powers of one department to encroach upon another. The spirit of encroachment tends to consolidate the powers of all the departments in one, and thus to create, whatever the form of government, a real despotism. A just estimate of that love of power, and proneness to abuse it, which predominates in the human heart, is sufficient to satisfy us of the truth of this position. The necessity of reciprocal checks in the exercise of political power, by dividing and distributing it into different depositaries, and constituting each the guardian of the public weal against invasions by the others, has been evinced by experiments ancient and modern; some of them in our country and under our own eyes. To preserve them must be as necessary as to institute them. If, in the opinion of the people, the distribution or modification of the constitutional powers be in any particular wrong, let it be corrected by an amendment in the way which the Constitution designates. But let there be no change by usurpation; for though this, in one instance, may be the instrument of good, it is the customary weapon by which free governments are destroyed. The precedent must always greatly overbalance in permanent evil any partial or transient benefit, which the use can at any time yield."
Yes, it reeks of optimism and the classical liberalism fallacies. No, it isn't word for word what Sinclair wrote. If it is a sin to make George Washington more eloquent, then Sinclair certainly sinned.
Though I’ve never heard it in that form, sounds pretty clearly to me a variant of ‘The Frog and the Scorpion’ (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scorpion_and_the_Frog)
(From Wikipedia): The story is about a scorpion asking a frog to carry him across a river. The frog is afraid of being stung, but the scorpion reassures him that if it stung the frog, the frog would sink and the scorpion would drown as well. The frog then agrees; nevertheless, in mid-river, the scorpion stings him, dooming the two of them. When asked why, the scorpion explains, “I’m a scorpion; it’s my nature.”
In other words, a warning about expecting beings to act outside of their nature.
Nonetheless, I very much agree with it’s application to Government here!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xd82HxYyHZg Al Wilson sings the story of the woman and the snake. (With lyrics)
It appears to be recorded in 1968 judging by the image of the record.