Recently I asked my dentist—with whom I have chatted about teeth and sports for years—how long he thought it would take his office to get back to normal in light of the COVID vaccines that are rolling out. He responded with a bitter tirade about how it might be OK fairly soon…. IF the pathetic Joe Biden, who can barely speak in complete sentences or walk without stumbling, does not screw it up… although maybe a Republican Senate can stop him from doing too much damage.
It is hard to gauge the value of debating with people who make such comments. It's harder if there is a prospect of follow-up conversations that include sharp implements inside my mouth.
Later he emailed me for feedback on my visit. Was it worth my trouble to push back? To switch dentists? The latter is the sort of thing I would do if this were like buying toothpaste or renting a hotel room. (I have boilerplate for businesses that screen FOX News, informing them that I do not come back to such places, given how FOX debases our culture and creates an atmosphere no less off-putting to me than noxious fumes.) However, I have a long relationship with this dentist that would be hard to switch. Anyway, most other dentists near me would not be any less Trumpy.
Between the appointment and feedback request, my intolerably ignorant senator Ron Johnson—a disgrace to our state—made news by inviting apparent quacks (they debated whether COVID is significantly worse than the flu, hyped likely dangerous cures, and in one case claimed that masks and social distancing do not work) to testify in the Senate against efforts to fight COVID.
The stunt was more pathetic than noteworthy—just another daily installment of our news cycle. Maybe its sole goal was to rile up people like me, then mock us for it. Still, it was a part of a pattern of denying science. (Eavesdropping on FOX recently, I "learned" that the Center for Disease Control had revised its guidance around COVID, which just went to show that climate change is a hoax.) Of course, it is of a piece with Republican efforts to undermine access to health care—especially for anyone who is not rich, over 65, and/or fortunate to fall among the people who have secure employment with benefits, although I would also stress how our health system is broken more generally.
Anyway, the risibly despicable Johnson riled me up sufficiently to write feedback for my dentist. Should I have wanted this to be anonymous, given those above-mentioned implements in my mouth? Whether or not I should have wanted this, or would have worried about it if we lived in a world with fewer “jokes” about harming liberals in the right-wing media, in fact I did want anonymity given the world we live in. I also wanted to be respectful and to make it clear that I was not a faceless person he didn’t know, unloading on him for no reason. Thus I spent quite a while trying for nuance.
Result? The feedback box in his form was too small to take my first effort. So I cut it back. Still too small. Cut it a lot more. Still too small. Finally when my thoughts were far less clear or nuanced, they had shrunken enough and perhaps still better than nothing. (One might even say they were exemplary compared to what passes for feedback in universities-- usually a number, 1 through 5.) Then the site wouldn’t take my comment anonymously anyway.
Here is what I first tried to say to my dentist, uncut:
Dear [first name], I have come to your office for years and before my current visit I would have given you 10 points of satisfaction out of 10. Even now I hesitate to write because I like to be civil and take a live and let live approach.
But during my visit I heard you berating Joe Biden–and I suspect by extension supporting Trump. I hope this “by extension” impression is wrong, and want to stress that I don’t love Biden. I thought he was among the weakest of all the Democratic candidates. But if there is some idea that he would be more incompetent or corrupt as compared to Trump, that is clearly unwarranted and, truly, almost out of touch with reality.
Trump, and by extension most Republican leaders, now stand for disregarding or corruptly undermining both basic science as well as the distinction between truth and falsehood, basic decency and pure corruption. They also stand for trying to take away millions of people’s health care without proposing anything serious as an alternative.
I get it that Democrats are not great on this latter front, either—mainly because Obama attempted a compromise based on the Republican “Romneycare” model, rather than on proven systems around the world that are far better. However, this is not an “equivalence” moment, a time to say “a pox on both sides.” On these issues Republicans, on balance, are greater evils by orders of magnitude. Thus, it is demoralizing to think that I support a business that supports Trumpism. Still, since I cultivate a live and let live attitude and no doubt have my own blind spots, by itself this would not have led me to write.
The bigger problem is that your comment begins to put a question mark over baseline professional ethics and scientific judgment. I'm sorry if that sounds harsh, but climate change and health care are immensely consequential and Republicans are doing immense damage. I hope that my suspicions that are creeping in are unwarranted, since I grant that my impressions are not conclusive. In any case, I urge you to reconsider what you said and some of the implications that seemed to come along with it. Thank you for listening.
To readers here, I want to say something different. I want to lament that this is how we live now.
If people we entrust with our health disrespect both the evidence of science and the integrity of our health care system, if they believe toxic propaganda that poisons them against even the mildest Democrats like Biden (center-right by global standards), and if a combination of fear-based inhibition and structural impediments make it hard even to have a conversation about it, then what can we do about it?
MBE standard notice: The time I spend on this blog is not in addition to a Twitter and FaceBook presence, but an alternative to it. If you think anything here merits wider circulation, this will probably only happen if you circulate it.