I have to figure out whether I want to spend my last
years writing about this new country.
I celebrated the
Fourth of July this year by having a heart attack. All things considered,
watching fireworks would have been more fun.
I woke up at 2
a.m. on July 5th with raging pain in my chest and both arms. I was bathed in a
cold, clammy sweat, and my breath was coming short. I was slightly nauseous.
"Gee,"
I said to myself. "I wonder what's wrong?"
Apparently I was
waiting for a Western Union messenger to come to the door and say: "You're
having a heart attack, stupid. Call 911."
It went on like
that for a few hours until my wife woke up too and convinced me to get help. An
ambulance brought me to the emergency room, where a team of doctors, nurses,
attendants, and God-knows-who else was waiting for me.
It was like being
sent through a cardiac car wash. I went in on one end with a heart attack; I
came out the other an hour later with an unblocked artery, a stent, and an
optimistic prognosis.
They told me they expected me to return to close to 100
percent. (This was particularly good news as I haven't been close to 100
percent in years, if ever.)
I'm told that my
reluctance to seek immediate help is fairly typical of men. Even male doctors
often go into a state of denial when confronted with symptoms that can only be
a heart attack. They wait. It's a guy thing.
If you take only
one thing away from the newspaper today, let it be this:
If you start
showing symptoms of a heart attack, even if they're not as dramatic as mine,
don't screw around. Call 911 and have an ambulance take you to the hospital.
The treatment starts in the ambulance.
As a cardiologist
friend told me: "They say time is money, but in my business time is
muscle." The longer you take to get treatment, the more heart muscle is
destroyed — permanently.
The upshot of
this is that I've suspended writing this column indefinitely. (I can hear the
moans of anguish across the nation now.)
And there's a
real question as to whether I'll start writing it again when I feel better. (I
can hear the cheers and shouts of triumph drowning out the moans.)
I'm now 77 years
old. I've been doing this — writing columns — for nearly 50 years, 35 years of
it in Washington. I can tell you that things have changed, and not for the
better.
I've covered
fools, crooks, and charlatans over this half century. But for the most part,
they had some sense of seriousness about them — an appreciation for the
national interest as they saw it. Even rogues like Lyndon Johnson and Richard
Nixon did.
The current bunch
of miscreants is nothing like that. Centrist Democrats, who talk a good game
but don't do much about it, are battling increasingly radical Republicans, a
fierce tribe of Bible-thumping know-nothings fueled by money from modern Robber
Barons who want to sell the country off by the board foot and metric ton for their
personal profit.
Thus we
approximate the times described by the Irish poet W.B. Yeats:
"The best
lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity."
Does that
describe Congress or what?
Do I want to
spend my time left deciphering such people, trying to decide whether the
Republican leaders are as stupid as they sound or merely willfully ignorant?
We are well on
our way toward becoming a nation on the colonial model, where a few people own
everything and the rest of us play the lottery and watch football. That's not
the America I grew up in. It's not the America I spent my life writing about.
I have to figure
out whether I want to spend my last years writing about this new country.
I'll let you
know.
Columnist
Donald Kaul lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Please send your letters to Donald
Kaul via email to otherwords@ips-dc.org or snail-mail them to OtherWords, 1112 16th Street,
NW, Suite 600, Washington, DC 20036. Distributed via OtherWords.org