Growing Up Southern

There was a saying back home when I was a kid. If you said So-and-So had “Snakes in his boots,” it meant he lied a lot. I guess now you would say “he has snakes in his Gucci’s.”

I was thinking about this recently while I was reading through The New York Times. A couple of reporters had counted and added up, apparently, all the outright lies our current president has told in his first ten months in office. It turns out, he is the “Whopper King,” and we aren’t talking about cheeseburgers, or anything else you might imagine. We’re talking lies. Wow. The Times counted them up and even unleveled the playing field in his favor when comparing him with his predecessor. The current’s tally didn’t count mere exaggerations. The former’s even included stated intents that didn’t come to pass.

Even so, the tally was 103 in ten months for our sitting president. Many are still being repeated, both by the originator, or by his robotess press secretary. (Snakes in her Christian Louboutin’s)? By comparison, the previous president racked up a total of 18 in eight years, making him a raging amateur in the Annals of Prevarication. Further, unlike The Whopper King, Number 44 didn’t repeat falsehoods once they were disclosed. Joseph Goebbels would have been aghast. He said that’s the way to make falsehoods believed, and he knew what he was talking about.

My sainted mother would have had a thing or two to say about all this. “Somebody has snakes in his boots.” That’s what she would say. She used to say that about an uncle (by marriage) of mine, a man known for lying as well as, during infrequent periods of employment, spending his pay on liquor while his wife and children went without. This was my earliest cognizance that there were those who would turn their backs on the most dependent of those among us for our care and support. I call them “The “Anti-Beatitudes” crowd, and, personally, I don’t agree with their politics, but what the hell?

Anyway, once, this uncle was doing some work hauling slab wood for my father. It required the wearing of boots while in the field and he kept his pair on our back porch at night.

Oh yes. You can guess what I did. Early one morning before “Uncle Sorry-Ass” showed up for work, I initiated a reconnoiter to check out the veracity of this bit of southern prognostication. I was a little shy of four years old, I guess, and already showing a bent for investigative reporting. Sainted Mother caught me, questioned me, and forbade any repetition only a minute or so before the owner showed up for his boots. I had completed my analysis, though, and am sorry to say that the boots in question were unoccupied by any form of reptile, at least that morning.

I was never a strong devotee of mythology thereafter. Further, there are those among us now whom I wouldn’t trust if they told me my name was Jimmie.