By Ron Rapoport
Stephen Miller’s time as a latter-day Iago whispering poison into the president’s ear concerning new and diabolical ways to keep immigrants from coming to America is coming to an end. And what a record he has to reflect on.
The travel ban from Muslim countries? Miller.
The ban on the industrious young people known as “dreamers” residing in this country? Yes again.
Kids in cages? That too.
And so much more. Seldom, I would suggest, has so much evil been packaged into one sinister package. He must be so proud.
Lately, though, I have been entertaining a more prosaic image of Miller. It has to do with him returning to his home town of Santa Monica and, now that he is a man of leisure, perhaps using some of his spare time to catch up on a few long-delayed doctors appointments. I bring this up because of an experience I had a while back that may be relevant.
The only doctor I see who never gave me any trouble — and when you get to the shady side of 70, you see many more doctors than I’m sure Miller, a mere lad of 35, does — was my cardiologist. You’re fine, he always said, after taking a listen and hooking me up to an EKG. See you next year.
Until one Tuesday a couple of years ago when he didn’t.
I’ve been having this small feeling around my heart, sort of a low burn, when I’m riding on the bike path along the beach near my home, I told him at our annual appointment. It always goes away after a few minutes. I’m sure it’s nothing. I just thought I’d mention it. His eyes widened and within half an hour he had put me on a treadmill, taken an ultrasound of my heart, told me there was a 90 percent blockage and said he operates on Wednesdays.
Less than 24 hours later, I was in a bed on a ward in Santa Monica Hospital, having received a shiny new stent, a stern lecture about the importance of taking a blood thinner and a realization of something that made me smile and think of Miller.
I had dealt with four doctors in the hospital—one who told me about the procedure, two who performed the operation, and one who checked up on me after it was performed—and dozens of nurses, aides, attendants and all the other people who keep a hospital running day and night.
And here’s the thing. Not a single one of them was an Anglo-American male.
All of my doctors were Persian or South Asian with the exception of the woman who stopped by after the surgery. All of the nurses were Asian or Latino or African-American. As were the woman who brought food from the kitchen, the guy who wheeled me down to the lab for some post-op tests and the woman who brought some prescription drugs to my bedside.
Now the hospital cannot have been more than a mile or two from where Miller grew up and went to high school and what I am wondering is if, some time when he is home paying a visit, he might not walk into a doctor’s office with a mild complaint and suddenly find himself whisked off to surgery and then to a hospital room of his own. It pleases me to think that the people who save his life and give him the best care possible will be some of the same immigrants and children of immigrants whose lives he has worked so hard to destroy.
Ron Rapoport is the author of a dozen books on sports and show business, most recently Let’s Play Two: The Legend of Mr. Cub, The Life of Ernie Banks. He lives in Santa Monica.
