NOV-A-7
MID-TERM
ELECTIONS BRING CHANGE TO MARYLAND,
REVERSING THE USUAL OFF-YEAR
ELECTIONS NATIONALLY
AS WELL AS IN MY OWN STATE AND DISTRICT,
AS I CONTINUE IN DERWOOD,
ASSEMBLING A YEAR-END REVIEW
AND STRUGGLING
TO KEEP THE TECHNOLOGY OF COMPUTERS WORKING
November 6, 2002
This is “the morning after” for a number of people who have been very much involved in the local and national off-year elections, and I can say I might have served as a pundit, predicting outcome. I had suggested that, contrary to usual form, the incumbent party would make gains in the Congress it controls and retake the Senate majority, while the atypical district in which I live, overwhelmingly Democratic but usually selecting liberal Republicans (Gil Gude and Connie Morella) while assuring a Democratic Governor would reverse this trend. This was the result of some clever gerrymandering to make the contested seat of District 8 a sure win for Democrats and unseat Connie Morella from her Republican minority (including me) being subtracted. I now live in Congressional District 9—by about a few blocks. I had typed into the year-end review letter my opinion on the outcome a few days before the election the following assessment:
“Joe and I made a few modifications to our usual running routes in the days before the November 5 elections, since he is the Republican precinct captain for Maplewood, and we ran through each of the streets of his precinct for me to see if the lawn signs and political posters were out in force on his beat. In a district of 2:1 Democratic dominance, it is only the rare or courageous who would identify themselves as the elephant-type “party animals,” yet this quixotic district has the habit of electing liberal Republicans for most of the last four decades, while also assuring Democratic Maryland governors. In a very contrived bit of gerrymandering, eight-term Congresswoman Connie Morella had her district redrawn to exclude some of her usual voters—me, for one, and a few of the pockets of Republican stalwarts that she could count on, so this year turned the tables: electing congressional Democrats and the first Republican Governor for 34 years in Maryland. All of this is a subject of great fascination to a minority of those who follow it, but I have the bemused disinterested view of it as a spectator, rather than participant, sport. Joe, ironically entitled a “poll watcher” is much more deeply involved, so the post-election analyses were grist for our discussions “on the run.”
So, given this proof of political savvy and prescience, I am as qualified as anyone of the professionals to make predictions that are at least as randomly likely as any that they make! I also have little interest in the political process except that someone should do it and do it well and fairly, but I am a spectator and not a participant in this blood sport.
I also made it to the Surgery Grand Rounds early in the new GWU Hospital to attend the first Paul Shorb Lecture given by one of our own residents who had made good—Paul Columbani, chief of Pediatric Surgery at Johns Hopkins. I was there for a tribute to Paul Shorb, but also to see Paul Columbani, one of my own protégés as well. I did not expect the accolade he gave from the podium, that he was made into the careful operating surgeon he was today by two of the people here present, and he was chief of transplantation because of how he was taught by me, and he teaches his residents the same way in honor of who had taught him. So, even a long and distant echo of all the hours and days I had put into the old GWU Hospital have come back to me in the from of the newer shakers and doers of the new ones.
Immediately after, Paul Columbani and I got to much more serious business, and he invited me, and I reciprocated with Craig Schaefer, to get together in quite a different venue, a duck blind on the Eastern Shore to do a bit of wing shooting.
I have the sensation of “marking time” in these rainy day fall interval weeks—with a few of the backlog of everyday life events at least being caught up—such as the water table rising to assure that the Derwood well does not run dry, and the landscaping and other chores around the Aurora Drive house have been completed before it enters the hyperbole of the puffed up bubble of the Montgomery County Real Estate market.
I keep expecting other shoes to fall, such as the formerly urgent, now on hold, consultation trip to Kuala Lumpur Malaysia, which will probably resurface as a newly urgent rush right in the middle of my commitments to many other things, like Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays, marathon runs and year-end travels to visit family and friends. Because I know that such an atypical “lull” is sure to be interrupted by all-points-bulletins and the claxon call to hurry up to do something for which I may have been prepared a while ago and postponed, I have moved forward on a very long and labor-intensive task—the construction of the multiple steps in my usual year-end annual review letter. It is still two months until the end of the year, but it is quite possible that I will be at some other places on earth or above it, so I have assembled all but the last end of it, knowing that it is a project that is taking an increasingly large number of days from the year in order to complete it. In the future, unless a few technologic improvements occur from all the digital doodads not yet aligned, I may cut back to a post card to say “Yep, shore ‘nuff! I’m still here and doin’ more of the same!” This may decrease your quota of end-of-the-year reading matter.
But just such techno-glitches as invariably creep into this process is what I am sidestepping here now, since my hard drive on the desktop has been fried and I am awaiting a repair or replacement before I can get back to using the principle means through which I have related to a good deal of the world, and as I am increasingly dependent on this technology, I become more vulnerable to its perverse unreliabilities. I have upgraded and repaired each of the older systems (defined as “What? You have had this two months already? Why, it is already obsolete!”) so often, that it may be the time to make a big transition to another millennium—in my case, to “Boldly enter the Twentieth Century!”
So, because I have no way of getting this message to you out of the laptop into which I am typing it as the desktop computer is frozen in a nosedown crash position, I will hold this on disc until the message it contains is also no longer news—and perhaps the still-celebrating congresspersons who have just been declared victors in the elections of the evenly split electorate may already have been seated, made their first mistakes or betrayals, and may have already been impeached by the time this “news” arrives as I await the servicing of my obstinately suicidal machines. Well, you might have heard it first here!