It is not to be unexpected that a centenarian has passed, but if there have been obituaries I might have, as the sobriquet goes, "read with great interest", this is one I write with rue. Everything I suppose I will read will be some version of: "a good man and a terrible president". He was, in the office of the presidency, well-intentioned but poorly suited--and I don't think seasoning and acquaintance with the ways of DC would have remedied his "outsider" status. As for his status as a man on this earth, he was always in the right place--in service to others, actively living his faith, housing the homeless, looking for social justice, fighting to eradicate tropical disease.
It's hard to take a view of the Carter presidency without the accumulated history of the last 40 something years. I'm not even going to try. He was born in a segregated state, his rise politically would always be admixed, but he tried to be on the right side. He was for human rights and included those of women. He saw the environment and health care as also being about justice.
So, while anyone might think on his politics, the skills he did not socially have for the job he set out to do, and the fraught four years that signify his most pivotal capacity to make things happen--I can't but be mindful of the time and the place, the weirdness of a Jimmy Carter even being in office.
But uh, he was like, the triangulating, outsider, congress-averse, southern governor that sort of presaged Bill Clinton. Except Clinton understood how to work with the hate of the bastards. (They both had great partners--imagine a Roslynn Carter presidency--her ambition and advocation with the same eye you would view a Hillary Clinton one.) Carter couldn't manufacture a kinship to LBJ, Truman, or whatever, and made dumb stands--the 1980 Olympics boycott. Failing to talk up what he tried to do in the energy crisis and asking Americans to really live up to "asking not what their country could do for them" in the energy crisis with his malaise speech.
Not understanding the "Me Generation" and how they would reject that.
He missed opportunities, and a-holes like Ted Kennedy didn't help, by peeling off progressives. Like that kind of motherfucker back when.
But how can I get mad about the long dead and the recently dead? What can I say?
If one is remembered as a good man, a man of service, a person who set a good example, has he not lived the best in life? And had a great love, raised a wonderful child, told his enemies to bite it? Stayed true to his principles and worked with his hands and heart to live them?
This was a good man. Don't anyone try to say he was not, for whatever his faults, because in the balance, he put in his hours and his days for humankind, and if anyone's heart should have been light as a feather, it was his. And if man and wife should exist in heaven, he and his should be --as perfectly as we saw them.
What a mighty good man he was.
2 comments:
This is beautiful.
Carter is to be lauded for his calling out Israeli apartheid. Some of his other foreign policy actions were not quite so benign as per Chris Hedges.
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