Yesterday I went to my Wingnut Dentist to get a crown. I don’t know why I haven’t switched dentists; this guy is so conservative, he actually has dead-tree editions of Newsmax in his waiting room. (Did you even know there IS a dead tree edition of Newsmax? I should leave a copy of Mother Jones in there just to fuck with him.)
But I really don’t want to find a new dentist, I’ve been going there for over 20 years, and I’ve got pretty healthy teeth, so 90% of the time it’s just pop in for 15 minutes twice a year for a cleaning and that’s it. But the wingnut shit is starting to bug me.
Actually, I really didn’t realize what raging wingnuts they were until rather recently. Once, a couple years into the Iraq war, one of the hygienists told me she was still convinced that Saddam had WMDs. She said one of her clients was in the National Guard and told her that they have WMDs now that are as big as an iPod. I’m no expert but I was pretty sure she was confusing WMDs with IEDs. Regardless, the idea that the U.S. could be threatened from Baghdad by something the size of an iPod defied credibility. But what do I know, even if that were true, wouldn’t said iPod need to be filled with enriched uranium and other shit that’s closely monitored by the international community?
Again, what do I know. But hey, no uranium enriched iPods have been found, so there’s that. Score one for the hippie.
I switched hygienists, but wouldn’t you know, I go in there for my biannual cleaning a couple years later and the new hygienist has switched the TV from the usual video of horrific dental implants to Fox News. I told her no way was I going to be subjected to having my gums poked while watching Fox News. I made her change the channel. “Oh,” she says, “I don’t watch it for the politics, just the news.”
Le Sigh.
And so this brings us to yesterday, where my dentist and his assistant are talking about how warm the weather is, like this is fabulous, and how we’ll be “in the clear” weather-wise in a month or two, all the while I’m screaming in my head (because I’ve got a mouthful of putty and can’t say a word) “don’t you remember the damaging hail storm of last March and the tornados of the year before that and the floods of three years ago? In the clear?! Give me fucking break!We’re never ever ever ever going to be in the clear!” I mean, here it is February and our daffodils and forsythia are already blooming. But yes, remind me again about how climate change is a liberal hoax so Al Gore can make money off his clean energy fund.
On Monday it was 60 degrees; today the high will be in the 40s and it’s getting down into the 20s tonight. You don’t get these wild temperature swings without a lot of strong winds, and indeed, yesterday saw a lot of limbs down in the neighborhood. But again: keep telling yourself that the crazy weather patterns are “cyclical” and completely unrelated to the billions and billions of tons of carbon we pump into the atmosphere every year.Even though they’re not.
I just don’t get the conservative mentality. They’re all agreeing how warm the weather has been for the past few years, they can see the daffodils blooming in February, we rarely get snow and when we do it’s gone in two hours, but they still think climate change isn’t real?
So, should I change dentists?