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Go Home Do Not Try This At Home, Kids

THE PLANK NOVEMBER 9, 2007

Do Not Try This At Home, Kids

BY MICHELLE COTTLE

USA Today has one of those news-of-the-weird stories about the family of a Kentucky snake-handling victim that's suing a local hospital for failing to provide their loved one with adequate care following a divinely inspired run-in with a rattler. As the paper tells it:

About a year ago, Linda Long was attending the East London Holiness Church in
London, Ky. That's one of a handful of churches in the country that practice snake handling, which is
exactly what it sounds like it is -- congregation members handle venomous snakes
in the belief that the faithful will not be harmed.

Long was bitten
in the cheek by a rattlesnake and died -- and now her family is suing the hospital
where she was brought for treatment.

In a suit filed earlier this month, Long's family alleges employees of a
London, Ky. hospital ridiculed Long when she was brought there after the attack
and failed to treat her in a timely manner. She later was airlifted to the
University of Kentucky Medical Center, where she died....

Whatever the merits of the case, I gotta admit I was surprised to learn that snake handling still goes on at all in this country and--while thankfully rare--is no longer confined to the most poverty-stricken, ass-backward regions of Appalachia.

The practice is grounded in a verse from the Gospel of Mark:

And these signs shall follow them that believe; In my name shall they cast
out devils; they shall speak with new tongues; They shall take up serpents; and
if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them; they shall lay hands on
the sick, and they shall recover. —Mark 16:17-18

Just something to think about the next time one of your more devout friends is lecturing you on the glories of biblical literalism.  

Have a happy and serpent-free weekend.

--Michelle Cottle 

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20 comments

I'm from the Virginia Tidewater, but I briefly dated a woman from Galax who lived down the hill from a church where they were rumored secretly to handle snakes. (It's illegal in Virginia.)  Also I worked for a couple months in a hospital in Clyde, NC in the Smokies, where had I looked after any snakebit holy rollers I'd have been at pains to get some Crofab into them ASAP and to avoid making any remarks at all about their religion.  The most surefire way to ensure a malpractice suit is to insult your patients.

Still, Ms. Cottle, snake-handlers or not, I suggest that next time you think twice before you make a slur against an entire region.  "Ass-backwards?"  Come on.  That's exactly the sort of ass-backwards sentiment that Jim Web--whose ass seems to be right where it ought to be despite his being a son of Appalachia--the Democratic establishment must eschew if they want to be competitive again in places like West Virginia and, yes, eastern Kentucky.

- aeromonas

November 9, 2007 at 4:59pm

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that Jim Web...BELIEVES the Democratic establishment must eschew...

- aeromonas

November 9, 2007 at 5:01pm

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As for the medical/legal case at hand, as a physician, I have to believe that that poor woman's treating docs made every attempt to treat her with antivenin as soon as they possibly could.  If they didn't, and if they had antivenin on hand and elected not to administer it out of some perverse idea that she "deserved it," then it isn't malpractice, it's manslaughter.

- aeromonas

November 9, 2007 at 5:09pm

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aeromonas -- right on. I couldn't believe that Cottle would throw out such a blanket insult on Appalachia.  I thought liberals did not condone, much less encourage - even much much less make -such prejudiced slurs on fellow humans.

I've noticed a number of people here at TNR -- readers and writers -- who feel quite comfortable exposing their prejudices on this site while decrying the prejudices of those on the right.

- epackard-02

November 9, 2007 at 6:16pm

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Yes, Michelle - so unpolitically correct of you!

Why is it that liberals who live in L.A., San Francisco, New England, Seattle, New York City and similar places are expected to shut up and take it while culture conservatives hurl slur after insult after venomous comment at them and their home?

Yet Oh! the horror if someone makes a comment like this? In the context of mother-freaking SNAKE HANDLING, for crying out loud?

- WoodyBombay

November 9, 2007 at 6:23pm

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Hey - maybe "politically incorrect" would have been a better way to go there.

Forgive me. I was educated in the South.

- WoodyBombay

November 9, 2007 at 6:24pm

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Shame, shame!

Making fun of snake handlers!  What will be next -- will we be treated to the ridicule of those who speak in tongues?  Will Mormons, Scientologists, Catholics and other weirdo's be far behind?

I would hope we could just go back to the days when people could believe any silliness they like and be treated with respect -- except of course for atheists.  They're just no-damned good, as we all know.

Neil

- purcellneil

November 9, 2007 at 7:25pm

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During those halcyon days of youthful ignorance and dumb luck, I had to take care of Spade George's snake for a couple months while he was busy getting three hots and a cot (i.e., in jail).  The snake was in a terrarium.  I had to feed it a live mouse every few days.

The snake normally stayed inside a little box inside the terrarium until I dropped in the mouse.  The mouse became...unhappy.  The snake slithered out of the little box. It was over before you could get off a decent belch.

Then I agreed to cat-sit another friend's tortie while she was Back East visiting the folks.  The cat would get excited, run over to the terrarium and follow the mouse around. The snake was petrified of the cat and wouldn't come out of his box. The mouse just sat there, scared shitless. Eventually the cat got bored, went someplace else and crashed, and the world had one fewer rodent.

Then my ex-girlfriend Betty's ex-boyfriend Walter hitchhiked into town with his mutt, Daisy, and needed a place to crash. (Betty wasn't speaking to either one of us by that point; coincidentally, for both he and I our dual transgressions involved both bounced rent checks and Betty's ex-roommate, Eileen.  This is what happens when you hang out with strippers.)  I let Walter have the couch and Daisy the floor, which pissed off Prudence (the cat). I'd drop in the mouse, the snake would start to come out of his box, Prudence would go over to stalk the snake, the snake would retreat into the box, Daisy would chase Prudence into the kitchen and, again, it ended badly for the mouse.

Recalling it all now, I need a drink, as then.

So...where were we? Oh yeah: snake handlers!  Abject nutjobs, yes.  Absolutely.

- williamyard

November 9, 2007 at 7:58pm

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Here's what I don't understand: Even if you take that verse competely literally, it doesn't *recommend* that you should go handle snakes. (Or drink any poisonous thing.) The point of the verse is pretty clearly "God protects believers," not "Go handle snakes." Even if you could handle snakes, why would you want to? What's the point?

Williamyard: I suspect that your story may not be 100% true.

- Ivanova

November 9, 2007 at 8:51pm

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WoodyBombay -- Anyone should free to call snake handling people "nutjobs" or "crazy" or "silly" or whatever.  The point made by me and others is that she chose to throw a blanket slur on all the people of Appalachia.  Also, Woody, I like your reply to the point, which I'll paraphrase:  "If the conservatives can throw slurs and insults, why can't I?"

PurcellNeil -- I don't condone anyone casting blanket aspersions on anyone, atheists included, except in humor.

(Have you seen the latest where Damon Wayans and D.L. Hughley supposedly were given a free pass for saying the same things as Don Imus.)

- epackard-02

November 9, 2007 at 10:23pm

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Excuse me folks.  I think you need to reread what Michelle actually said.  Or is it your contention that there have never been ANY regions in Appalachia comparatively more ass-backwards than other regions?  Hardly a "blanket slur" in any event.

- dhuey0

November 9, 2007 at 11:39pm

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Michelle Cottle. Ann Coulter. What's the difference?

- gchoward

November 9, 2007 at 11:52pm

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This thread's probably plaid out, but here goes anyway.

At risk of being called a PC prig, whether "ass-backwards" was intended to refer all of Appalachia or merely parts of the region, it was still a stupid, illiberal thing for Ms Cottle to write.  She learned of behavior on the part of a few individuals--snake handling--that with more or less justification she considers ignorant, and then generalized her charge of ignorance to all people who come from the same place as those individuals.  

The peer-reviewed surgical literature is replete with reports of foreign bodies removed from people's rectums and large intestines, generally HETEROSEXUAL men living life on the wild side in the privacy of their homes.  These cases happen all over the place, but suppose a particularly dramatic case made it into the news of the weird, some guy, name withheld, toughed it out at home for three days with a self-inserted screwdriver in his belly and by the time they pulled it out of him it had migrated across his diaphragm into his chest.  (This is possible.)  Now suppose this unfortunate--and entirely hypothetical--individual hailed from San Fransisco.  Would you consider it kosher to label all San Fransiscans rectal-stuffing perverts?

- aeromonas

November 10, 2007 at 1:38am

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RECTUM-stuffing perverts, I should have said

- aeromonas

November 10, 2007 at 1:41am

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'The point of the verse is pretty clearly "God protects believers," not "Go handle snakes." Even if you could handle snakes, why would you want to? What's the point?'

The point is to *prove* that God loves you.

No matter how much believers natter on about *faith*, they all want a sign, and some will even risk death to get it.

- nancyirving

November 10, 2007 at 3:42am

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Or maybe the point is to enter a state of religious ecstasy--though no snake handler would ever think of it in this way.  

In almost every religious tradition one can identify ecstatic rituals and cults whose adherents submit themselves to painful often dangerous ordeals.  Think of fire walking or those Hindus who hang themselves from hooks placed through their skin.  In most such cases the believers interpret their own behavior as "proof" that the Holy Spirit or its non-Christian equivalent has taken possession of them.  But from an anthropological perspective, the key is that the physiological changes associated with pain and fear are the things that enable the religionists to enter the ecstatic trance in the first place.

- aeromonas

November 10, 2007 at 4:48am

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aeromas is right about ecstatic rituals in religion. Cottle would do well to read Dennis Covington's 'Salvation on Sand Mountain' to better understand the meaning of the practice to its adherents. The book does not advocate the practice, it only explains it. It is a fascinating ethnography that is able to tackle a little understood, and to most people, bizarre practice, all without a hint of smugness.

Cottle falls into the easy trap of those of us that consider ourselves liberal and intelligent, and that is to reject out of hand anyplace or anyone that does not fit into our views of 'right thinking'. Granted, snake handlers are an easy target, but wholesale dismissals of huge parts of the country, and the population therein as 'ass-backwards', or as 'flyover country' show a level of self-satisfaction that prevents effectively understanding others. Maybe Cottle believes she is taking up the mantle of Mencken, but it does get boring. In much the same way as gchoward pointed out, it seems very Coulteresque.

Also, as such a smarty, Cottle should have explained that the passage quoted from the gospel of Mark is clearly marked in most Bibles as not appearing in the oldest and most reliable texts. Her devout friends, being as intelligent and erudite as she is,  would probably call her out on the nature of this passage.

- hepneck

November 10, 2007 at 3:15pm

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I come from a long line of ass-backwards poor people, and you know what, so has 99.99...% of the population of everywhere.

The only sad thing is that peyote can't be used in the practice of my religion, which is the church of getting shitfaced and watching sci-fi movies. You let me have peyote and not only will I converse with God, but I will damn straight think I am him

- blackton

November 10, 2007 at 5:09pm

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In both of which cases the hospital is being targeted for blame: About a year ago, Linda Long was attending the East London Holiness Church in London, Ky. That's one of a handful of churches...

- Anonymous

November 11, 2007 at 11:48pm

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Er, well, I have to disagree with nancyirving, who says that "No matter how much believers natter on about *faith*, they all want a sign, and some will even risk death to get it," on the grounds that I personally don't want a sign, and that apparently neither do a lot of other people, seeing as how snake-handling (or other similar practices) has never exactly been de rigueur in the Church. Most of us are content to natter on. Aeromonas is probably right about the ecstasy thing, though -- thanks for making the point, and thanks to hepneck for the rec of the Covington book, also for the clarification re Mark.

- Ivanova

November 12, 2007 at 12:15am

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