V-2nd, why dentists?

[Ian Livingston]

P. has some impressively large front teeth. Speaking from some
association with a certain unnamed person who has some pretty crooked
teeth, I can say that people who grow up with irregular teeth in
American culture, do so with a sense of disfigurement and a certainty
that they are unappealing and insufficient (often counter to all
indications). Dentists tell them over and over that they should "get
them fixed," as if they were broken, and their owner therefore
deficient. So, my point is, it may have less to do with the physical
pain dentists cause than it does with the existential pain they
inflict.

That's not to say toothaches don't suck. I once pulled my own tooth
with a pair of channel locks because I couldn't talk anyone else into
doing it for me and I couldn't afford a dentist. Required some
whiskey.

On Sat, Sep 18, 2010 at 5:15 AM, Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Why are teeth portals of bad news in P? Why are dentists bad guys?
> 1) it is not like he spares other docs like head docs either...
>
> 2) Dentists. From childhood associated with pain by so many of us. Like
> a toothache, once again, known to most of us. A toothache is a quotidian example
> of existential pain--perhaps, to bloviate toothsomely , a personal example of
> mysterious 'evil' in the universe.
> Why, O Lord, am I suffering?
>
>
> That Nicholson-Corman movie caught our perhaps-latent feeling that dentists,
> with that drilling, at
> least seem sadistic and easily can be. The power to abuse while we are helpless
> is structural.
>
> That teeth go bad from use, especially misuse, is their inherent vice, so to
> speak. If we take in
> nothing but sugar and don't clean, they rot. The Golden Fang brings rot into
> America?
>
> There is an incredible example of self-surgery on teeth in Tinkers. Gunter Grass
>
> used them and dentists
> metaphorically in his seventies novel Local Anaesthetic. Solzhenitsyn has
> written,
> "a man with a toothache is a completely different person from a man without
> one.
> Or close to that.
>
>  Geo Washington had soft teeth and lifelong problems, making
> wooden ones for
> his mouth. The founding father of America needed lots of dentistry
>
>
>
>
>



-- 
"liber enim librum aperit."