Friday, August 31, 2018

Eponymous Physicians

There is an advertisement on a bus stop bench I see every day on the way back from the Y.  Under the picture of a dentist it says Dr. Don Tooth, a dentist for children.  The sign has bothered me for years. I mean, there are so many questions.

Was this guy born with that surname?  Maybe he was originally named Don Dentifrice and he decided to change his name for professional reasons.

If Tooth is, in fact, his surname, did that compel him to choose a career in dentistry?  Does he come from a long line of dentists?  Do they have a scholarship in their name (The Tooth Scholarship) at some local school of dentistry?

Does the guy dress up as a tooth when he gets a new client in his chair.  I think it would have terrified Franny if Dr. Arendt had dressed up as a bicuspid.  It also would have made me think twice about walking into his office.

There are many things I refuse to do.  Ordering any sandwich called a Yumbo or a Whaler is one.  Going to a dentist named Dr.Tooth is another.

I'm also a little afraid that other physicians will see Dr. Tooth's ad and follow suit.  The possibilities are horrifying.

Dr. Rick Rectum coming from a long line of proctologists is ready to listen to you. He changed his last name from Anus for professional reasons.

Dr. Vance Vulva ready and willing to fill all your gynecological needs.  I can see the bus bench ad now, adorned with a Georgia O'Keefe-like drawing of a thinly disguised flower petal.

I would encourage everyone to avoid eponymously named doctors.  Their waiting rooms are bound to be just too damned cute.



Monday, August 6, 2018

We've Come Full Circle


Going to Regis in Northwest Denver did not put me in ideal position to be a political activist in the late '60s.  I started observing student unrest when I was in high school.  I continued to observe when I was in college.  The closest I got to actually doing something, other than the day I went out and bought a pair of tie-dyed jeans, was being instrumental in putting the first 3.2 bar on a college campus in Colorado.  We called the bar Beliel, after the devil in Paradise Lost in nominal charge of drunkenness, and put it where the pool hall used to be.  It wasn't as cutting edge as the students protesting outside of Sproul Hall, but for Regis it was tres avant garde.

Mostly, I did my observing from the confines of my English and Theology classrooms.  And during that time, I learned that if you want to get people to move nearer to your side of things, you should make your starting position so extreme that they'll have to get closer just to understand you.  Picture Langston Hughes, large, black, caped, imposing, standing on a stage in front of a largely white college audience hissing menacingly the last line of "A Dream Deferred."  "Or does it explode?"  Or Abbie Hoffman indulging in some street theater designed to blow minds.  Or James Baldwin in NOTES OF A NATIVE SON chanting,
"God gave Noah the rainbow sign.
No more water.
Fire next time."

The world did change and all that posturing helped speed up the inevitable.

But there was an underlying premise to all that activism, the idea that those holding different views were open to arguments, thus making it possible for minds and opinions to change.  And the premise seemed to hold true.  Opinions, if not outright changed, at least were modified.  The center held.

I don't see that happening again.  Outlandish positions, instead of forcing compromise, are the norm and are countered with equally outlandish opposing positions.  What is left of the center is quickly disintegrating.  

Here is kind of a nice case in point, nonetheless maddening.  At the gun control rally in downtown Denver yesterday, both sides of the issue were represented, but instead of getting into loud confrontations, everyone was encouraged to seek out someone from the other side and simply talk to one another, trying to find some common ground.  Kind of refreshing huh?  Of course, this rally was organized by high school kids, so it was bound to be more adult than anything organized by aging partisans.  At the end, folks from both sides were surprised at how much they had in common.  One lifelong NRA member actually discovered that the gun control movement was not really intent on taking ALL guns away from everyone.  Others were happy to learn that most NRA members would welcome longer waiting periods, stronger background checks, and keeping guns away from people with mental illness.

The problem is that those partisans holding the extreme-take-no-prisoners-positions are the ones making the most noise (read:  Hannity, Limbaugh, LaPierre, Fox and Friends).  Unless you are willing to do the work necessary to weed out fact from fiction, the extreme positions are the first ones you hear in the  morning and the last ones you hear at night.  

These messengers are not attempting to understand the other side.  Instead, they are attempting to paint the other side's position in the same extreme colors.  For example, since Republicans see no future in running on their tax giveaway to corporations, they have decided to make Nancy Pelosi a focus of their midterm campaigns.  In at least one swing state, their attacks on a young Democrat running for Congress center around a connection to Pelosi, who, the attack states, voted to cut 80 billion dollars from Medicaid/Medicare.  Of course they fail to mention that it is Pelosi's vote for Obamacare they are referencing.  That strikes me as fundamentally dishonest and polarizing, something that drives people away from the middle.  And for at least 45 percent of the population, it seems to work.

In my lifetime, we have gone from little girls in white pinafores and patent leather shoes being led to their classrooms by federal marshals while crowds of screaming, red-faced white racist stereotypes stood by with clenched fists, to a changing of attitudes that led to ground breaking civil rights legislation, to now, crowds of of screaming, red-faced white surpremacists seeking out immigrants to terrorize.  

We've come full circle in less than seventy years.