Over the last 72 hours, night had become day, day was night, and there were plenty of odd and unidentifiable time anomalies in there as well. Sleep, while it did come, was fitful, uncomfortable, full of wall-to-wall weirder than weird dreams.
Familiarizing myself with both of our bathrooms to the extent I had was not in any planner for the new year.
Viral gastroenteritis sounds nasty. It is.
Like a good many other things evil, though, it did bring some good.
I got to watch inaugural coverage for hours on end. In the end, it was roughly nine hours of me and the TV.
And I had a revelation of sorts. I began to remember...
I remembered the day Jimmy Carter was inaugurated in 1977. That noontime, I sat transfixed while my 19" Philco B&W portable flashed scenes that made me feel pretty darned good about America. We were coming out of very difficult times.
That light at the end of the tunnel was, by golly, the light of a new day in the USA. I was young, 27. At that age, wonder and awe come without much effort.
Watergate and all of its blowback had divided a nation, a nation further polarized by the good intentions of a good man, Gerald Ford, when he pardoned the disgraced ex-president. Jimmy Carter, I thought, was the guy who was going to set things right with America.
Very quickly, all went into the tank, as history will attest. Without dissecting the presidency of James Earl Carter, Jr., we all pretty much know and accept that he didn't have a good go of it. Whether wholly his fault or not, his presidency was in tatters very early on.
It wasn't until this past week that a few lights went on and the Carter failure began to focus for me. It was during coverage of the Statuary Hall Luncheon for the new president that I realized how long one very telling characteristic about Carter had slipped right past me. Maybe it had simply bounced off of me a hundred times and never stuck once. Now, sitting and staring, it was poking at me, knocking to see if anyone was home.
Jimmy Carter failed as president mostly because he tried to be something he was not. The man worked overtime at portraying himself as someone, some person, who he was not at all.
It was the mention of sandwiches at Carter's Inauguration Luncheon. That was the menu in 1977 - sandwiches. From there, it got worse. In the Carter White House, booze was out, with the only exception being wine on certain occasions. The Carters made The White House a monastery. The nearby Georgetown Jesuits were bad boys compared to Jimmy and Roselyn.
Americans don't expect their president to act Amish. If the day should come when we do elect an Amish, then we're allowed weighty expectations of behaving Amish.Americans want their president to, at the very least, act like they act. We might want a president to behave a little better than we do at times, to carry themselves with a bit more dignity than many of us can muster, but we want real people doing real things.
Americans don't want sandwiches at fancy affairs, and by and large, Americans drink during leisure.
Americans didn't like Jimmy Carter acting like he was better because he presented himself as a man of very modest means, humble, just plain folk. Leave the plain to the plain.
Jimmy Carter wasn't plain. He was no "good old-boy dirt farmer" borne of the red Georgia clay.
Jimmy Carter was a very wealthy man, an agri-businessman, whose family had made a fortune in peanut farming, peanut marketing, peanut wholesaling. He was also a nuclear engineer, Annapolis educated. Despite not being able to properly pronounce "nuclear," the man was one indeed.
I voted for Jimmy Carter because I believed him to be good and decent human being, which is something I continue to believe to this very moment.
Jimmy Carter's motives, most assuredly, were pure. He wanted to set that good example for the rest of us. He embraced the idea vigorously, that he should know better, act better, be better.
The problem was, Americans are better than he thought. They can spot the genuine a mile away. Jimmy Carter wasn't genuine.
And do any among us like judgmentally annoying tut-tutting and finger-wagging? No, we do not, it's not in us, it is clearly un-American to tolerate such unsought chastisement.
Given that he meant well changes nothing. We're still left with a president who failed to meet his promise. He was a man not comfortable in his own skin, which seems pretty apparent through that looking glass of time we all use so very often. He wasn't comfortable because it wasn't his skin, he'd assumed the cloak of someone else, probably one whom he believed to be a near perfect man. None are such.
Instead of trying as he did to hide his brother Billy, Jimmy should have brought him along wherever he went.
Thirty two years later and I'm just now getting it. I still like Jimmy Carter. He should have known better.
