Get Carter!

As a member of the Baby Boomer generation that commenced shortly after We, the People double-tapped the Japs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and wanted to get busy boomin' out babies like we had endless optimism for the future as victors in a war we "reluctantly" entered. The men were home again, frisky and frolicsome, and manly wafts of Old Spice came at their wives' nostrils and made them swoon wiff ecstatic expectation of peace dividending nights ahead. Yes, the nuclear family was safe and secure.

But Jimmy Carter came before we started naming our generations (unless I missed something). He was a child of the Great Depression, which provided my childhood with some of the most iconic and poignant black and white photos of American economic insecurity, including shots of soup lines and that great photo by Dorothea Lange that depicts a migrant mother in despair, surrounded by her young, presumably starving children, after their father had died. The suffering in the mother's eyes is almost unbearable.

John Steinbeck wrote of this era in his prize-winning novel, The Grapes of Wrath, of which he writes in Chapter 25, "[A]nd in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage." Jimmy's family knew the suffering, which was partly alleviated by FDR's New Deal, and he knew how much more his near neighbors, African Americans, suffered, with diminished prospects grown dimmer. The New Deal helped millions of Ameicans survive, with the establishment of the Social Security Administration and its programs that protected against lost wages, as the result of retirement and disability. No doubt the young Carter would have considered the era's Problems and observed how the government provided Solutions.

It's a tough task to evaluate the presidency of Jimmy Carter. He was a one-term president, squeezed between two evil men, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, both of whom were involved in serious scandals (Watergate and Irangate) that rocked the integrity of the American Democratic Experiment. His biggest achievement, perhaps, came in his delicate handling of Middle East issues, including brokering peace between Egypt and Israel, and for boldly criticizing Israel's role in coming to a two-state solution with the Palestinians, which led to his eventually being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002.

On the other hand, he was roundly blamed by rightwingers for the debacle that eventuated in Iran with US hostages held for 444 days, and, for, in essence, invoking the Carter Doctrine to defend against Soviet aggression in Afghanistan, which, he argued, could destabilize the region. This approach led to an extraordinary confrontation in August 1980, on the border of northern Iran between the Soviets, who were poised to invade Iran and claim its oil. Daniel Ellsberg writes of the under-reported incident in his memoir, The Doomsday Machine, in which he describes the near-use of tactical nuclear weapons, and cites a source who said the White House saw the incidents as "the most serious nuclear crisis since the Cuban Missile Crisis."

Carter seemed to have drawn the enmity of rightwing nutters who saw his policy aimed at the Soviets as too soft and seemed determined to get him out. Reagan would harden the posture. But first he had to be elected, which resulted in the notorious criminal behavior of the CIA, and other neocons, in dealing with the Iranians behind a sitting president's back and offering them incentives for holding on to the American hostages until after the election when they would have better negotiating power -- a move reminiscent of Henry Kissinger's secret derailment of the Paris Peace Talks. (Kissinger leaked information about the Paris peace talks to Nixon's campaign. Nixon's campaign then urged the South Vietnamese to delay the talks, which could have helped Nixon win the election.) The word treason comes to mind.

Kissinger would go on to become a major influence in the Nixon Administration and, later under Reagan, at least implicitly responsible for the American-funded coups in Latin America in the 1980s. His query about Chile could conceivably be a doctrine that is with us to this day, both in foreign and domestic affairs:

I don't see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its people. The issues are much too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves.

'Issues too important' seem to be how the Republicans have treated the electoral process in America since 2000.

Kissinger, in turn, emboldened the CIA, including the nutjob Duane Clarridge, who made it his personal mission to drive the CIA toward more and more operations derived at taking down leaders of other countries, such as Salvador Allende in Chile, admitting, on tape, the CIA's involvement and praising the heroic merits of Pinochet. Clarridge arrogantly promised to make such interventions in the world on behalf of American "national security" a regular occurrence, and told viewers that they could "lump it" if they didn't like it. Carter didn't stand much of a chance against these kinds of barbarians at the gate. In 1984, Reagan had famously told a sound-check joke about bombing the Soviets in five minutes that resulted in a Red Alert in Russia. Neocons yuckled for days. Carter was seen as too nice for such slapdick humor.

On the other hand, who hadn't been surprised when Carter agreed to be interviewed by Playboy magazine, just before the election, in October 1976, during which he admitted to having "lust in his heart." Yes, his interview was there before and after erotic photos of women posing in the nude. You wondered, who was Carter's strategist? If it was supposed to drive peanuts envy, instead it nearly derailed his election chances as pundits and neocons went hyena on his ass.

More recently, the Carter legacy featured more head-scratching' stuff in the form of a documentary that highlighted his musical chops -- Jimmy Carter: The Rock and Roll President (2020). It begins with the old geyser putting on a scratchy sounding album -- Bob Dylan's Bringing It All Back Home, track: Mr. Tambourine. Instant street cred.

One way many ordinary people judged Carter in a pleasant way was by how decent and well-spoken his activist daughter Amy was. She seemed to bear his earnestness of purpose and authentic concern for bad American governance, especially foreign policy. One incident she was involved in that heated the cockles of my heart was her teaming up with Abbie Hoffman, and 13 others, in 1986, to protest the recruitment efforts of the CIA at my graduate school UMass-Amherst. The CIA was illegally up to its long-established tricks in Central America, helping juntas and banana republicans to hurt and kill ordinary people under the cover of US support.

Tuck that shirt, said Abbie and Amy, and refused to let the CIA recruit. They got arrested for trespassing. They came to trial in Northampton, Massachusetts, in the spring of 1987, and brought all kinds of witnesses for the defense, including Howard Zinn and Daniel Ellsberg. They successfully employed the Necessity Defense, claiming their actions were justified in order to stop a much greater crime being committed by the CIA. Check out this post-trial wrap-up with rare footage of the young, gum-chewing Amy and aging Abbie Hoffman. What a hoot!

Many people will remember Carter for his post-presidency years when he and his partner, Rosalynn, spent quality time in the Habitats for Humanity project, which quietly advertized the value and practical purpose of community coming together to build and join hands. It's cool, but strikes me as kind of hokey.

Carter was 100 years old when he died. His time in existence included some of humankind's most amazing moments, trials and tribulations, from an old paradigm to the new one involving AI and quantum and new questions about the viability of the human species. Carter lulled many of us back to sleep after Nixon was chased from town, like the crook that he was. F*ck Tricky Dick. I hope he's on the rotisserie in Hell. Or at least in the long line.

I like what Greg Palast wrote on his blog site about Carter's passing. Palast writes that he was never a big Carter fan, seeing him largely as a "goober." However, Palast recalls a moment at the Georgia governor's mansion four years ago that changed his mind:

But then, while staking out the current Governor, the vote-suppressing racist Brian Kemp, I did a little re-con outside Kemp's office. I had my face to the wall, pretending to study the official portraits of the State's governors. I was struck that only one, James Earl Carter, refused to have his photo taken with his own state flag fully visible because it included the Confederate flag's Stars and Bars. In Georgia, at that time, 1971, that took immeasurable courage.

You could do worse than be remembered for your courage in a life full of moral ordeals and missing answers to life's purpose.