Jimmy Carter will do anything for $200

The only thing standing between me and a giant piece of cake was the poet professor Kevin Cantwell. And he wasn’t really standing in my way, just off to the side enough that I could talk to him and stare at the cake. My landlord, Dr. Mary Wearn, stood on the other side, framing it. As they spoke and I nodded, I wondered if the autumnal brown frosting tasted as caramel as it looked.

As I finished up the cake, which initially barely fit on the little clear plastic plate, my lady meandered over and I randomly blurted out that I’d conned my way into the Jimmy Carter speech at Mercer. A ‘con’ because I was with ‘the media’—and yes, Tina Fey’s Sarah Palin is correct, there is a ‘liberal elite media’ and a ‘regular liberal media’. Kevin even snickered when I said, “I snuck in as the media.”

He tried to cover saying, “I’d love your job. I’d love having your job, but I wouldn’t want to do it.” And I agreed that I love having my job but I don’t like doing it. Then I sort of groaned because that piece of cake was really too big for one man. Even a man like me.

Sitting in the Willingham chapel at Mercer, next to friend and former editor/occasionally-current editor Jessica Lanier Walden, I listened to Jimmy Carter speak, as I thought to myself, “Holy shit! That’s Jimmy Carter!” Off and on, I had other thoughts, but it usually went back to the whole, “Like whoa! Jimmy Carter!” feeling.

Jessica’s dad and uncle helped get Jimmy Carter elected with a big assist from Southern Rock, which was the musical equivalent of Jimmy Carter. That is, as Jimmy represented a progressive South both proud of its culture and embarrassed to the point of change of its bigotry bands like the Allman Brothers represented a turn from the politics of prejudice as they embraced their storied roots. Like it or not, there was no throwing the baby out with the bathwater in the South, and because of that delicate little bridge, guys like me can wear the snap-button western shirts of our fathers and not be ashamed.

While this prodigal former president basically gave the abridged “History of Jimmy Carter” (like a thoughtful, narrative resume), the most important thought to cross my mind is how overvalued something like experience is. And conversely, how overlooked something like tone is.

The best thing a great leader ever does is with the strength of their personality, not necessarily their brains. Boil it down, the most beloved leaders of any time were really just mascots that we looked up to. Granted, in many cases, it has something to do with their experience and their smarts, but to lead well means setting a tone. It means saying, “We’re going to end racism,” or, “We will be a peace-building nation,” or whatever—not necessarily, “This is how we’re going to end racism,” or, “This is how we become a peace-building nation.” It is about projecting an idea before plans.

I’m not trying to be an advocate of style over substance. I just think that the reason we, the people, pick leaders—elected and anointed—is that we want someone to look up to, someone who’ll help us know what to feel and how to act. And truthfully, there are so many people who know how shit works that it doesn’t take a genius to be president (e.g. – 2000-2008); it just takes someone who knows how to pick (and listen to) smart, stable people with whom they can be surrounded.

That said, Jimmy Carter probably is a genius. Driving away from his speech, I again took note of the dropping price of gas, rejoicing in that way about the next time I need to fill up—almost excited by the prospect now that it’s well below $3/gallon. Then I remembered the stupid Myspace bulletin/email forward that went around accusing gas companies of inflating the price to a point when people would consider the mid-$2 range cheap. It made me think I’d fallen for something, especially when I thought about the energy crisis Jimmy Carter presided over.

Back then, he made predictions and proposals that could’ve kept us out of this, instead, the price of gas dropped again and people kept driving like there was no tomorrow. That was during a time when the suburbs were really about to flourish because people could afford to drive an hour, if they wanted, to and from work. That’s one reason our communities devolved into satellite pockets of paranoid people revolving around an abandoned core. If gas had stayed high, we’d be driving electric cars by now. Maybe the same has happened here. Gas is still expensive—more than 2.5 times higher than when I started driving 14 years ago—but it doesn’t feel that way because it sat so close to $4 for so long. So, we’ll pile back into our SUVs and shit soon enough. But the hybrid kind, just in case, right?

My favorite portion of Jimmy’s visit was the Q&A at the end. Though pretty much every question was good and thoughtful—the first one was a personal request for guidance in resolving tension between a student’s Muslim friends and her friends in the armed forces—there was one question that seemed capable of derailing his charm as the “cute”, liberal grandfather figure. (*Note: I heard more than one female gush at how “cute” Jimmy Carter is.)

Echoing Carter’s Jesus name-dropping, a gentleman stood up and said, “I’m asking this as a practicing Christian”—and you knew it could mean trouble. It’s so easy to like Jimmy Carter because he’s a walking contradiction—at least in accordance with our modern stereotypes—as a Southern, evangelical Christian liberal. Anyone who has read his memoir-heavy books—or old, white, Baptist civil rights activist Will D. Campbell’s “Brother to a Dragonfly”—should know that the social history of the South isn’t as cut and dried as folks like to make out to be. For every bloodthirsty clan member, you had someone like Carter’s mom who crossed over racial taboos “with impunity”. Well, most liberals like him as long as they don’t have to think long about him being an evangelical, and most evangelicals like him when they don’t have to think long about him being a liberal. And that’s why I liked the way he handled this particular question.

To paraphrase the question: “I, a practicing Christian, want to know how you can justify all the attention you give to saving the 300,000 kids who die from starvation and disease a year when abortion has killed millions of babies.” It was poised in a way that would either make Carter a hypocrite, or would ruin his rep with one of the aforementioned groups. For me, it just cemented the high opinion I have of him.
He said, in essence, that he doesn’t like abortion—never has—and he doesn’t think Jesus Christ would either, but as president he obeyed the law and instead decided to focus on reducing the demand for abortion. That’s why we have WIC. He figured a pregnant woman in dire straits would be less inclined to abort a child, in order to avoid bringing a baby into a bad situation, if the government made it easier for the infant to be more properly nourished. Basically, he viewed abortion the right way: recognizing it as a choice that no one makes for fun and trying to eliminate the reasons for using it. Having explained it that way, I loved him even more.

It is not that hard to find Southern Christian radicals, but it’s getting harder to find them in my generation or younger. The progressive Christians are too “Christian” to be radical. The radicals are too liberal to put stock in a faith tradition. And Southerners are being simultaneously assimilated into the larger culture, or dumbed down in the effort to financially capitalize on the resistance of some to be homogenized. In other words, most Southern folks who are too smart to fall for Larry the Cable Guy are eschewing their accents to avoid being associated with dumbasses, and for some of the dumbasses, being educated means having outgrown your raising. There aren’t many choices in between for the native of the American South now that fewer choose the path that Jimmy, the Walden brothers, Dr. King, and Will Campbell took.

I don’t know how to end this tirade, so I’m just going to say that I’m getting ready to attend my first Lamar Memorial Lecture Series talk. It’s something Mercer has done for ages, bringing in an academic who talks about the South. I’ve been collecting the books from it for about three years, but now I get to be at one. Monday and Tuesday, November 3 and 4, Paul Harvey, Ph.D.—not that Paul Harvey… Good day!—will be presenting his lectures around the theme “Moses, Jesus and the Trickster in the Evangelical South”. And I am stoked about that. It sounds so interesting. One of his talks will be “Religion, Race and Southern Ideas of Freedom,” and the other will be “Jesus of the South.” This is so up my alley that it isn’t funny.

And neither are balloons, but that’s for another time.