Column: Not quite Nietzsche
I don’t floss. And, honestly, I don’t think you floss either.
Sure, we all talk about flossing and let on in oh-so-subtle terms that dental hygiene is of the utmost importance; but when we finally come home at the end of the day we brush our teeth and go straight to bed. And with good reason. It’s common knowledge that flossing originated in the twelfth century as a form of self-mutilation.
All right, I may have made that up. But I stick to the principle: sane people only floss when they’ve done something wrong and want to punish themselves.
Look at your flossing history – the week after you had that cavity filled (If only I hadn’t eaten that whole bag of gummy bears…), the weekend of flossing after your first – and last – date with you-know-who (The garlic bread was a bad idea), and the beginning of every new school year (I’ll do better this semester, I swear).
It’s nothing to be down on. We probably deserve flossing for some of the things we do, but it’s not like jabbing your gums with a waxy string contributes to dental well being.
Cave men didn’t floss, and you don’t see cave paintings of tooth extractions and root canals, do you? They knew, as I know, that teeth aren’t worth the trouble. That no amount of gum jabbing will preserve them. That, in short, they’re defective.
I brush three times a day. Notwithstanding, about a month ago, I was eating a granola bar when a slab of molar came barreling off of its mother tooth and onto my tongue.
This is what initially led me to believe that there is something wrong with teeth. We don’t need to glorify them.
They are, after all, little more than naked bones and can you imagine the chaos that would erupt if your femur shattered every time you tapped it with a granola bar? The doctor would call it by some impossible name, we’ll say “femubrakatosis,” would prescribe a medicine with a futuristic name designed to make you feel as cool as David Hasselhoff in Knight Rider, and would then proceed to make millions by marketing it in a brilliant ad campaign that promises love, wealth, and happiness without ever mentioning femubrakatosis.
It’s ridiculous, isn’t it? We would never take that kind of performance from our femur. But we not only take it from our teeth, we make excuses for them.
We blame it on our own eating habits, decry our poor dental caretaking, and even go to the dentist to further our self-punishment.
I mean no offense to those with their D.D.S., but dentistry is a dead end. When a machine doesn’t work, we don’t create a whole set of mechanics designed to repeatedly dig out, drill, and otherwise numb the defective parts until there is nothing left. Instead, we create a machine that works.
As I have amply shown, teeth don’t work. And no amount of drilling, shot giving, and filling will change that. Instead, we need to rally around the example of our founding fathers and just get rid of them.
It’s common knowledge that George Washington sported a set a wooden teeth. Why do you think he cut down the cherry tree? And if wooden teeth were good enough to lead the Revolutionary Army, pen the Constitution, and run this country, they’re good enough for me. Dentures aren’t only a good idea; they’re an expression of patriotism.
They’re an American institution that needs to be preserved. And, when all is said and done, they’re better teeth than the set we came with.
Zach Pendleton is a junior majoring in English. His column appears every other Wednesday in the Utah Statsman.
Comments can be sent to
zpendleton@cc.usu.edu