I wore my “Koch Brothers Exposed” T-shirt to the dentist a couple of weeks ago and it started a very interesting conversation with the hygenist in charge of my mouth.
Watching Rush fall, I was feeling the vibe. We had a rare, sunny late-winter day out here in Cascadia, and I wanted to bear witness to our refusal of evil. So I wore my opinions on my chest and went to get my teeth and gums scraped by a person of unknown political affiliation. (If this person lives in my city, there’s a better-than-likely chance of a kindred progressive heart beating within her ribs. But like all urban areas, step two feet outside the city limits and it becomes a reverse Oz: we go from a vibrant appreciation of color to a land where its inhabitants prefer their reality rendered in Black and White. Or White and Black. See? Diversity!)
This gentle woman in her late twenties, early thirties, commented on my shirt’s graphic as she pushed the ‘recline button’. Her gotcha question came as she covered up my neck and chest for the bite-wing X-rays. “What’s on your T-shirt?” (Because I spend way too many hours by myself, when given the chance to converse, I’m prone to verbal diarrhea. And when the subject is the Koch Bros, to quote the joke from my childhood, “He’ll never get that cork back in the pig’s ass.”)
I’ve been asked this before and I’ve found that the simplest way to describe the KBs is to call them “the money behind the Tea Party.” The reaction this generates is enough to tell me if I should talk more, or not. However, not this time. Her demeanor did not change at all. All she said was, “I did not know that.” This was uttered devoid of infliction. I don’t know how to react to her lack of reaction. OK, do I exercise some self-control and not relax the sphincter on my ideological rectum? Are you kidding me? Within three, possibly four nanoseconds of her response I was off and spewing like a ruptured sewer pipe.
She waited patiently, a small plastic thing in her hand poised to be shoved into my mouth when/if it stopped moving. The shadow on the wall told me I had wasted enough of this person’s life with my sermon, and, eventually, the examination continued. Following irradiation and the removal of my lead shield, the KBs were again prominent and I guess this created an atmosphere of self-disclosure that she found comfortable. “My parents are, I guess you would call them, T Partiers.” This person has just blasted my face with Gamma rays. (Does the side of my face feel warm to you? Do you smell hotdogs?) As the chair leans back and my nostrils greet the lamplight streaming down, I see that her gloved hand now holds “the Pick.” We all know the Pick. We accept the Pick as a necessity of healthy living, but only a few fetishists among us actually like the Pick. And the Pick placed in less-than-benevolent hands in a perfectly deserving mouth could be the makings of a very funny scene in the mildly entertaining sitcom that is my life. But if this professional ever entertained notions of using my poor dental habits as a way of sanctioning political zealotry, unlike the idiot under her beatific gaze, she stayed her impulses admirably.
We had just finished the bottom row when she, perhaps taking my silence as petulance, threw me a lifeline. “My husband and my dad can’t talk about politics.” That little haiku absolved –in my head anyway- about 97% of my previous rudeness. Her next line sent my heart to soaring like a fucking dove, “That’s why we moved here. It’s a bit more...accepting…than where I grew up.”
I had to ask, “And where was that?”
“Chandler, Arizona.”
“Arizona huh?
“Yup.”
We talked a bit about Jan Brewer and then I had to explain who Otis was on the Andy Griffith show. But we were pretty much finished with all we had to say when she offered up the Yup.