The Worst -ist of All
The evil is everywhere.
It’s so easy to be preoccupied with the irritants of current events: war, dictatorship, planetary ruin, the Los Angeles Dodgers. Every hour of every day, the alarming, terrifying, nauseating headlines scroll before our eyes. So we’d all be forgiven for forgetting that there are evils greater than some orange, special-needs golem who has appalled the world by somehow being both a supervillain and a breathtaking imbecile.
No, I’m not speaking of fascists, or terrorists, or communists or satanists. I speak of the most loathsome -ists of all. Yes, dentists. Perhaps there are a few good ones, who no doubt are a credit to their waiting-room tropical fish tanks and 37-foot cabin cruisers and $3,000 crown whose markup follows the formula of movie-theater popcorn. But I believe we can agree that as a group they are society’s most insufferably shallow conspicuous consumers and narcissists. Yeah, yeah … I know: Jeff Bezos. But there is only one Jeff Bezos, and in the United States alone there are 202,000 dentists.
By contrast, there are only 30 species of venomous snakes.
You ask, “What does this have to do with anything?” Ah! What it has to do with is: no mere civilian has the time and emotional stamina to monitor the daily tsunami of bad news, select an especially infuriating example and then belabor the obvious for 1,000 hyperventilating words. Moreover, that heroic sacrifice requires the agony of sifting through the raw sewage to find just the right news item to deconstruct for maximum reader discomfort. Can you imagine my delight, can you imagine my relief when I locate one that doesn’t involve Clarence Thomas, pedophiles or Republicans in Congress? There is a word in English for that feeling:
Bliss.
And so I introduce you to Dr. Daniel Domagala, pictured above, who came to my attention via the following headline:
Footwear heir at war with Midwest dentist for walking along beach in front of the medic’s boathouse
I saw it on DailyMail.com, and also on USNews.com, but I’m not sure who stole it first from the Wall Street Journal. The internet is a vast Duty Free shop for other people’s content — which is a bit ironic, because the issue in this story is the question of what constitutes public property. To be specific: Dr. Domagala’s waterfront property in the Lake Michigan resort town Shorewood, Wisconsin.
Under the laws of Wisconsin, and a handful of other states, waterfront property is private right up to the waterline. This means, absurdly, that pedestrians are free to swim by, or walk in the barely damp tidal sand, but not in the dry sand. I say “absurdly” for three reasons: 1) the legal boundary demarcating right-of-way trespass literally changes every moment with fluctuations in the tide. 2) Pedestrians lose access to the entire body of water, in this case with a perimeter of 1,640 miles. That is the distance between the Empire State Building and Colorado. 3) Detection and enforcement of trespassing would require a landowner so obsessive, literal and soulless as to devote his entire waking life — plus electronic surveillance — to beach vigilance. In short, a total douchebag.
Meet Daniel Domagala. Here I turn the story over to the Daily Mail, US News and, ultimately, reporter Mariah Timms of the Wall Street Journal:
For his part, Domagala argued in court that people constantly ignore his signs and absentmindedly lounge on his property all the time, which is a frequent source of frustration.
‘They sit around like they own the place,’ he said, testifying that he had to complain about pedestrians trespassing around 50 times just last summer.
The biggest thorn in the dentist’s side was a retired university professor named Paul Florsheim (yes, like the shoe-store chain) who repeatedly and abusively walked his dogs along the waters’ edge. Ignoring the private property signage altogether, he just loafed across the dentist’s personal duchy with his border collie and German shepherd. O, the humanity!
The dentist also said that he never permitted Florsheim to walk on his property and likened the retired professor’s actions to a home invasion. ‘Imagine somebody is in your house saying this is not your house,’ Domagala said.
I’ve seen Straw Dogs, and, truthfully, I’m not quite buying the comparison. But never mind. Those 50 calls to village police eventually obliged the authorities to take a deep breath and issue a citation to the antisocial menace, who does happen to be the great grandson of the shoe magnate. The fine was $313. So Florsheim reacted as would anyone, ahem, in his shoes. He took the dentist to court. As he told the Journal, “My personality is such that if I’m confronted with it I don’t back away from that.”
Such personalities, those well-to-do Wisconsinites! But you know what they say, “Good litigation makes good neighbors.” Alas, the professor lost his appeal, owing to a 1923 Wisconsin Supreme Court decision explicitly affirming the private-property law. Ruling for The Crown, you might say. The expectation, however, is that Florsheim will persist, as the presiding judge in the trespass case broadly hinted the old precedent may not survive modern Supreme Court scrutiny.
Meantime, I wonder if the Wisconsin Law might be applied to similar disputes involving home invasion by lawless nepo babies. Obsessive dentists of Greenland, take note.