Remember the movie “Miracle”? One of the last great Disney movies?
For a lot of us, the opening credits were intensely evocative:
These credits were as concisely effective a history of the 1970s, especially the Carter Administration, as I’ve seen.
I was 13 when Jimmy Carter took office, and 17 when he left.
I’m not going to pretend that I was an especially well-informed teenager about politics. More well-read than most of my classmates? Perhaps, but even then high schools didn’t spend a ton of time on political philosophy, for better or worse.
But it’d be fair to say I leaned toward whatever passed for the left as a teenager. My parents were both Democrats – Dad was a union guy, Mom had muted hippie tendencies – so it was the water in which I swam. Jimmy Carter was “the good guy” in my house. Not that Ford was the “bad guy”, necessarily – but the white hat/black hat dynamic of the two parties was kinda understood.
Or at least I understood them that way, and certainly saw politics that way. In 1980, I went to “Boy’s State”, a weeklong mock government program put on by the American Legion. Somehow, I got elected state party chairman. I wrote a platform that would have made Bernie Sanders gush with pride. I think I knew then what Ken Martin and Governor Klink know now – satisfying peoples surface desires gets you votes. And it did – we swept the statewide offices.
That fall, I wasn’t old enough to vote. I certainly wasn’t voting for Reagan.
But I wasn’t going to vote for Carter, either.
While I was not yet an especially well-read or -informed person, I could read the room around me. A few years before Boys State, I’d listened to Jimmy Carter’s infamous “Malaise Speech”.
And I started to get angry. The message to me – probably 14 or 15 at the time – was “my generation got ours, but sorry, you young ‘uns, you’re gonna have to suck it up and deal with less”.
And it kinda infuriated me. And unlike a lot of things that pissed me off as a cranky teenager, it still does.
There were a lot of things that started me toward pulling the lever for Ronald Reagan in 1984, and becoming a conservative talk show host in 1986.
The Malaise speech, and the economic, moral and social malaise that had in fact swept the nation.
The foreign policy impotence that allowed Iran to hold Americans hostage with impunity (or, given the post-Vietnam atrophy of the US military leading to the failure of the rescue mission, even worse than impunity)
Meeting Vietnamese and Polish refugees – and, in fact, watching the Poles’ fight for freedom unfolding in real time.
Reading – at the urging of my English major advisor – Dostoëvskii, Tolstoy, Paul Johnson, PJ O’Rourke, Buckley and all the many other writers who were able to break through my adolescent inertia and show me the corrosive futility of statist utopianism and the power of freedom.
And seeing America find it’s feet – first slowly…
And then picking up speed:
And then definitively. For a decade or so, anyway.
All of those episodes were either direct result of Jimmy Carter’s America, or repudiations of it.
There’s a part of me that wants to study Carter and his supremely checkered legacy in more depth than the above (which is about as deeply as I’ve actually gone, ever). He’s a fascinating mass of contradictions.
He was considered a knee-jerk liberal by the standards of the time – but smarting from the humiliation of the hostage crisis, the Annapolis grad and 10-year Submarine officer actually started the military modernization that Reagan continued and accelerated.
He took over the presidency at one of its peacetime low points – and kept things at a depressing, dare I say “malaise-ridden” plateau.
He was broadly considered a “good man” – the past 40-odd years have been an endless series of Habitat for Humanity photo ops for Carter. But he also spent much of the past 44 years trying to impart moral equivalence on some of the world’s worst dictators.
For my part? He’s no longer the worst president of my lifetime; all three Obama terms were much worse, for the nation and the world.
There are signs – tiny sparks, really – that the generation burbling up through high school and universities today are as sick of this nation’s post-Obama moral confusion and malaise as I was of the post-sixties, post-Watergate, post-Vietnam jumble of miseries. If I can do anything to foster that, I’ll consider it a mission.
RIP, Jimmy Carter.
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