Piss on Pat Robertson’s Bible

My beloved husband had his first dental checkup in a year and a half today, only because I bugged him and bugged him and finally called and made the appointment for him. He’s had four dental checkups in his adult life, all at my urging. I am happy to report that he received a completely clean bill of oral health, with minimal plaque scraping. I admit that I am also a little jealous. He’s one of these people who never gets a cavity. Granted, he takes very good care of his teeth (he lives with me, so he kind of has to), but I visit the dentist twice yearly with a devotion that matches my dear departed grandmother’s daily trips to morning mass, and brush and floss with attendant zeal, and still every so often I turn up with a cavity. This is like a little death to me (and not the fun Renaissance kind of little death). And once you have a cavity filled, it’s only a matter of time before it breaks or falls out or gets loose, so one cavity could lead to any number of visits under the drill. Generally my semi-annual visit to the dentist is pleasant, and even kind of an ego boost. But every once in awhile, there’s bad news.

This actually rarely happens anymore. I’m what they call cavity-prone, but even cavity-prone folks usually stop getting cavities at some point during adulthood, provided that they take good care of their teeth. But I do so envy those lucky ones among us who never get cavities even when they take fairly indifferent care of their teeth and rarely visit the dentist. Still, I am happy for my dear and his good teeth. And I can only hope that O. has inherited them.

On another note entirely, I am currently teaching a gender studies class, and today we were discussing common misperceptions about feminists. I mentioned Pat Robertson’s famously insane comment that feminism is a “socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism, and become lesbians,” and the whole class laughed in an implicit consensus that the old man is a raving loon. One of my male students, a good guy with a healthy contrarian streak, suggested that Robertson might have been joking, since we didn’t know the context of his remark. I respect the impulse to investigate the context of a quotation, but given Pat Robertson’s track record , I don’t think he really merits the benefit of the doubt. (Even still, I did some research after class. The quotation came from a fundraising letter Robertson wrote in 1992 on behalf of the Iowa Committee to Stop the ERA.) At any rate, when I shared my student's “maybe Robertson was joking” comment with my husband, he snorted. “Pat Robertson is incapable of an ironic remark,” he said. “He wouldn’t know irony if it came up and pissed on his Bible.”

The image of irony personified sidling up to Pat Roberston and taking a leak on his Bible made my day, and I was already having a pretty good day.