67
The newly reelected president of the United States of America stood on the Capitol steps and looked out over the hundreds of thousands of inaugural attendees. It was an amazing spectacle, a sea of people stretching as far as the eye could see, to the reflecting pond and down the mall all the way to the Washington Monument. It was a cold, sunny day, the temperature hovering just below freezing.
The president felt marvelous. He had won the election. The American people had affirmed his wise governance. His legacy was assured. He felt light, strong, and capable. Since the heart operation and the installation of the pacemaker, he had experienced an almost inexplicable feeling of well-being and self-assurance flowing through his body. It was both a physical and a mental sensation. Once again he marveled at the extraordinary change in him since that high-tech “SmartPace” German pacemaker had been installed. It was the latest thing: integrated circuitry, magnetically shielded, MRI compatible—totally indestructible. Smart, too. They’d told him it contained a microprocessor as powerful as the one in the latest iMac. It went beyond “rate-responsive” pacemaking. It didn’t just listen to his heart rate; it listened to everything. The can itself, only the size of three stacked silver dollars, contained accelerometers, blood oxygen sensors, and a GPS—all of which sensed his level of activity and adjusted his heartbeat accordingly, faster or slower. Instead of crude electrodes inserted into the ventricles of his heart, the device had spiraled electrodes that wrapped around the tenth cranial nerve, also known as the vagus nerve (the “wanderer”). This was, his doctors had explained, a little spaghetti string of tissue that exited his brain and, traveling deep in his neck, branched out into his body. It was, so they said, the highway that controlled the information between his brain and his body’s organs. Not only did this all-important nerve control his heart rate, it governed how often his pancreas would squirt out hormones, and it regulated his breathing, his bowels, and even how active his white blood cells were. That, and it listened. From his pupils to the lining of his ureter, the vagus nerve kept the brain informed about all the inner workings of his body. The interplay was an ongoing feedback loop, a symphony of electrical and chemical signals. By controlling and stimulating the vagus nerve, his doctors said, the new pacemaker did more than just regulate his heartbeat: it also kept his body finely tuned at all times, no matter what his activity level. A feedback electronic that controlled a feedback physiology.
What a miracle! Since they’d embedded the pacemaker in him, he’d felt transformed in body and in mind. He felt a good twenty years younger. So extraordinary was the change that it was difficult for him to remember how tired, out of breath, irritable, and logy he’d felt before the operation. Who would have thought a pacemaker could have produced such a change? And not just in his physical vigor but also in his mental acuity. Especially in his mental acuity. That, in fact, was where the real miracle had taken place.
His thoughts were interrupted by the chief justice as he took his position in front of the president. The two exchanged a smile and a nod, and then the president raised his hand to take the oath of office. A great hush fell over the multitudes. The chief justice remained silent for a few moments, letting it build, and then he spoke:
“I do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute…”
As the president recited the words, he could see his breath.
“… the office of the President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability…”
A stillness gathered in the air, a stillness beyond silence.
“… preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.”
It was done. The chief justice reached out and shook his hand. “Congratulations, Mr. President.”
The silence dissolved into a long, slow roar of applause, like distant wind, growing in power and force. The president stood there, basking in the wonderful sound of approbation. When it died away, he turned and stepped to the podium to give his inaugural address. The silence returned. The sense of anticipation was high. He looked into the teleprompter and saw the words of his speech cue up on the glass.
As he readied himself to read the speech that his top speechwriters had so carefully prepared, that he had then rewritten, with every word crafted and shaped, he had a feeling of disappointment. The speech he was about to give, that he had worked on so hard, wasn’t good. It seemed to be a lot of words that didn’t mean very much. In fact, it wasn’t at all what he really wanted to say. It had been written before the new pacemaker, and it seemed as tired and old as he had felt at that time. He felt a surge of confidence as he realized that he had a much more important message to give, one that his country, and the world, needed to hear—and wanted to hear. His mind had never seemed so brilliantly lucid.
“My fellow Americans,” he began, “and all my fellow human beings. I had prepared an address for you today, but I am not going to read that address. I have something far more important to say to you. I will be speaking not just to my fellow Americans but to all the citizens of this beautiful and fragile world we live on, what Carl Sagan called ‘this mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.’”
He paused. Another silence had fallen, one even more profound than the last. He didn’t need a teleprompter. The words just flowed from his heart into his head and from there out of his mouth to all the world. And they were good words. They were true words. They were the words the world desperately needed to hear. And on this day, the entire world was listening. He knew now what needed to be said and what needed to be done. Once he had spoken these words, once people had heard the amazing message he had to give, this mote of dust would never be the same again.