I’m getting a WATCHMAN™ tomorrow morning, and I’ve been in a sort of denial about it. I have AFib – AFib is Atrial fibrillation, a heart condition that causes an irregular and rapid heartbeat in the upper chambers of the heart – according to Google AI – and although I’ve been through half a dozen procedures to get rid of it, the AFib keeps coming back.
However, the biggest danger of AFib is a stroke brought on by a blood clot generated in the heart, swirling up into the brain and causing a stroke. The fix for that is to have me take blood thinners – not just me, obviously, anybody with AFib – so that the blood doesn’t clot.
It turns out, however, that 90% of the blood clots come from an area lovingly called the LAA (Left Atrial Appendage). Big Medical, if there is such a thing, has invented a way to cover or plug the LAA as the sort of fascinating video below shows (if you can get through the pitch in the middle).
The entire procedure should take about 25 minutes, my doctor tells me, and I’ll spend 3 hours recovering. Prep starts at 5:15 AM, and I should be back home by noon.
There will be some on the left who will say Trump won because of the inherent racism, sexism, and authoritarianism of the American people. Apparently, those people love losing and want to do it again and again and again. David Brooks in an NYT editorial.
Voted Trump, but I like you and Bernie. I don’t trust either party’s establishment politicians. An anonymous voter answering AOC’s question “People who supported [President-elect] Trump & me OR voted Trump/Dem, tell us why.”
We are home; we had a great trip, and I want to write about it. But now that we are home, Trump and the election seem to be everywhere, crowding out everything else. Writing about our enjoyable trip to Japan without acknowledging the trauma caused by Trump winning the election seems insensitive. Still, that’s where Michele and I have been during the last month rather than experiencing the collective trauma.
I don’t say collective disparagingly, but only that it exists. Being in the US after the election is like seeing a horror show in a crowded theater, and being in Japan, wandering around Joetsu checking for results on an iPhone, is like watching the same horror show at home. Yeah, the plot is the same, but the emotional impact is very different. I feel guilty about that, guilty that I should be more upset than I am.
I don’t like Donald Trump; I think he is a lout, a narcissist, and a con man. He has failed at almost everything he’s tried; he’s incompetent. He failed at making money with a casino, he even failed at selling steaks, and he certainly failed at running the government the first time around. However, he succeeded at the hard job of winning the presidency (although with a lot of help from the Democrats). In the end, I’m more worried about the chaos President Trump will create than his successfully becoming a fascist.
I do like Kamala Harris; I was happy to vote for her and think she would have done a good job. Harris was the first candidate I voted for – rather than against the opponent – since Obama. I thought she was going to win. But she didn’t. She lost to a guy almost half the nation thinks is a fascist in waiting. It was shocking and very discouraging.
It is easy just to write the whole thing off as “Trump voters are just stupid.” But Trump voters aren’t stupid. They are pissed – I haven’t met a Trump voter who wasn’t pissed – not only do they think they have been screwed out of a lot of money, but – and this is probably more important – they feel they have been disrespected. And they have, and we’ve been complacent accomplices.
David Brooks theorizes that that disrespect started back in the sixties when the draft was changed to exclude men who were in college. I tend to agree. That sent a strong signal that the people running the country think college-educated men are worth more than working men. We elite even said as much when we justified taking fellow elites out of having to do a stint in the military. That preference for the college-educated by the college-educated snow-balled into the people’s President touting the outsourcing of manufacturing jobs to any place with cheaper labor and opening the borders to allow large numbers of very poor people willing to work for lower wages into the country.
We all saw the growing disparity in income and respect between the college-educated elites and the rest of the nation, sort of subliminally, but Donald Trump really saw it, and he also saw the discontent that disparity was sowing and the disrespect the college-educated elites had for anyone who wasn’t one of them. Still, very few lawmakers saw it on the left and right. And don’t forget that Trump ran against both the Republican and Democratic establishment. To be fair, it’s hard to see and relate to people who are outside of our socioeconomic class, and the average member of Congress is worth $7,888,502 (according to Ballotpedia).
When I read the postmortems, although there are still many people who blame the loss on racism, misogyny, and voter stupidity, it seems the Democratic Party is starting to ask what it did so wrong that Trump actually won. In my opinion, that is the only good news that has come out of this tragedy. Maybe this election will be a long overdue eye opener.
Japan’s very interesting. Some people think it copies things. I don’t think that anymore. I think what they do is reinvent things. They will get something that’s already been invented and study it until they thoroughly understand it. In some cases, they understand it better than the original inventor. Steve Jobs
Fushimi Inari Taisha Temple – founded 711 A.D. – on our last night in Kyoto.
We took the Shinkansen – a very fast train run by the JR line – from Kyoto to Tokyo, passing a clouded Mt. Fuji on the way. I was sorry we didn’t have more time in Kyoto, but the second we got off the train in Tokyo, it felt like home.
An interesting fact about Kyoto: when General Curtis LeMay, the Capitan Bob McNamara, and Secretary of War Henry Stimson picked targets to bomb in Japan during WWII, Stimson took Kyoto off the list because he and his wife had honeymooned there.
