I have to breath a heavy sigh when I read about the lack of dental care as the biggest root (bad pun) cause of these problems. It isn't. Neither is being poor. Education, perhaps, is. The best dental insurance money can buy costs about $1/month (probably less, if you really need to be economical). I'm talking, of course, about dental floss. (It also happens to be an excellent health insurance plan to defend specifically against heart problems, and possibly even obesity, but that's another thing altogether.)

Dental floss is so cheap, so effective, it's difficult to believe that insurers don't mandate that we use it (or somehow offer incentives, free floss, etc). It is the most horribly unappreciated personal hygiene product available. There is no better way to maintain your teeth (from tooth decay, anyhow--straightness is another thing, obviously) than to floss at least once daily. There's no amount of poorness that can't afford $1/month. Does anyone know if programs like WIC provide dental care products? If not, that's a difficult one to figure.

In Thomas Harris’s best-selling crime-novel series, the FBI consults the imprisoned serial killer and mastermind psychiatrist Hannibal Lecter in its search for ‘the Tooth Fairy’, a family-slayer who bites his victims with dentures made from a mould of his grandmother’s distorted, razor-sharp teeth. Years after that manhunt, the FBI again turns to Lecter for help; this time, the refined sociopath – a former philharmonic orchestra board member and mannerly purveyor of his victims’ flesh – finds it more interesting to analyse the agent than the latest case.

This is the kind of surface-level bullshit that infuriates me. The FBI consults with Hannibal Lecter in Red Dragon to find 'the Tooth Fairy.' Tellingly, Grandma Dolarhyde's "distorted, razor-sharp teeth" were her point of pride - she'd grown up dirt-poor and had risen through the ranks to be a southern belle despite her shitty teeth. So when, at advanced age, her teeth finally did have to come out, she insisted the dentist perfectly replicate her snaggletooth mouth. There are pages and pages spent in that book on the relationship between The Tooth Fairy, his grandmother and her teeth. It's fair to say that Thomas Harris shapes the whole narrative of the book around the symbolism of the southern belle grandmother and her underclass, over-aggressive smile and the impacts it has on the generations to come, eventually leading to her grandson becoming a serial killer.

Thomas Harris was a UPI journalist for 10 years before he decided to be a novelist. And he was a damn good one by all regards. His novels are researched to the hilt and carefully crafted to a fault. I read Red Dragon probably 25 years ago and those dentures have stuck with me ever since. In fact, Grandma Dolarhyde's teeth and triumph were great consolation for my own wretched snaggletooth mouth: my dentist revealed to me at the age of 13 that one of my canines would never descend.

And might, in fact, be growing backward into my sinuses. My father helped out by describing a friend of his with a similar problem who, at the age of 35, needed to have his face removed in order to extract all of his teeth as they were heading northward and causing him excruciating pain. So I spent my childhood with one weird little canine and overlapping front teeth and the knowledge that at some point, I'd need to pay a dentist to tear my face off. When my canine decided to descend after all I was overjoyed - didn't even care that it was coming straight out of the middle of my gums. Didn't give the first fuck that my college years were marked by my smile growing from four canines to five. Cared not a whit that my lip was bleeding half the time; at least my face wasn't coming off.

And I have the shittiest smile of anyone I know. And I've done okay despite that. And every now and then I think about going in for braces but it seems like surrender now. Me and grandma Dolarhyde, shitty smilers forever.

Here's the thing. Mountain Dew Mouth is real. Appalachia suffers from dental problems the way the poor southwest or working-class midwest simply doesn't. It's big business, too - I've done commercials for companies that exist solely to slap cheap dentures in 20-somethings trying to get a job. Their offices are east of the Mississippi and south of the Mason-Dixon line, all 400 of them. And that's worth discussing.

But calling yourself a genius and basing your argument on Orange is the New Black is a shitty way to do it.

Shared anyway. Because fuck.