Editorial
Tyrrell, R. Emmett Jr.
EDfTORIAL R. Emwurtt Txrredl, Jr. The Wonderboy at Midpassage In an earlier era Jimmy Carter of Plains, Georgia would be devoting himself to procuring his eight-year-old daughter's...
...The old Southern values were a tragedy...
...Two years ago, when he kissed his morn bye-bye and struck out for the 1976 Democratic nomination, his luck remained golden...
...LBJ was a cauldron of passions, Henry Kissinger breaks from diplomacy to visit the Jeu de Paume, even the hellish Nixon battered Chopin on his piano...
...At day's end he would withdraw to the humid coziness of the local Coca-Cola parlor, there to discourse upon the latest intrigues of the Popish camorra and to remain au courant with reports of frightening suicide rates experienced by misguided Negroes lured to the Sodoms of the North and taught to read...
...The Wonderboy at Midpassage In an earlier era Jimmy Carter of Plains, Georgia would be devoting himself to procuring his eight-year-old daughter's first pair of shoes, a bottle of Peruna for a fat wife, and a dusty fliwer for himself...
...Notifications that Jimmy immerses himself in Niebuhr, Wagner, and Dylan Thomas are so much claptrap...
...THE WONDERBOY AT MIDPASSAGE (continued from page 4) goody-goody, and speed reading...
...The morality-and-enlightenment claque, the fastidious moralists who banished Nixon, have taken as their own a second-generation Babbitt, dismissing from their formidable consciences the blatancy of his fibs and the tedious philistinism of his hollow character...
...but his competitors were unhorsed by their own party's reform mania, and Jimmy--unblack, unyoung, and unfeminine-was sole beneficiary...
...Thus, the most highly visible components of a nation's military strength may never be used, and may thus come ultimately to be taken for granted...
...He was a child of felicity...
...In "1966 he launched a preposterous campaign for the governorship of Georgia and was so easily defeated that a candidate less blessed by the good fairy would be esteemed for life as a laughing stock never to be taken seriously again...
...for the trickier questions of governing Georgia were then being handled by the federal courts...
...Truth to tell, he harvests very few pearls from his noodle, and he made a pathetic spectacle of himself on numerous occasions...
...for in 1976--as in 1972--all the major contenders had again forgotten to study the abstruse nominating procedures of their party...
...He sought renewal in the stock cars, but the races always ended...
...Such blatant dissimulations were rarely practiced so successfully before Jimmy rose up from the Georgian boondocks, but he had the good fortune to hold office in one of the first states governed by mandamus, and he quickly learned the usefulness of this democratic innovation...
...Ambiguity is today the essence of Carterism...
...111 Sarkes Tarzian Inc...
...If ever one needed evidence that mere power is the moderns' only serious value, their endorsement of the Wonderboy provides evidence in profusion...
...Jimmy had studied them for months, and halfway through the primaries he was being touted as a political genius...
...He had energetically thrown himself into making it...
...More importantly, however, he was able to assume ambiguous responsibility for governmental acts, while the courts did the dirty work...
...She urged Jimmy to accept Christ into his heart...
...Some of the chapters are marred by the constant use of the first person singular, and one Congressman-essayist got so carried away that he labeled some banal and wordy paragraph "Steiger's Law...
...He would compose diatribes about Demon Rum or the abominations comitted by hyphenates swarming into New York City...
...In the face of proposals for national health insurance, he praises our present system for its success in keeping America healthy at a relatively low cost, and urges Americans to examine the deterioration of health care in Great Britain since that country adopted its National Health Service...
...That this philistine is the candidate espoused by the New York Review of Books and promoted by all the modern sophisticates is the most amusing spectacle since the Catholics discovered JFK's randiness...
...But when Sister Ruth elucidated her secret to Brother Jimmy, he saw its possibilities at once...
...There is some repetition...
...The streets are paved, flivvers abound, the hookworm has been thwarted, and electric-powered gadgetry eases his worldly woes...
...Congressman Floyd Spence's concluding essay on defense is an exceptionally good summary of the pro-defense point of view...
...The essential Jimmy is the automaton who criss-crosses America serving up his laodicean banalities in a set discourse that is unique to all American political rhetoric...
...Power to gratify a ravenous and ridiculous ego is the moderns' most holy sacrament, indeed their only one...
...Yet modernity overwhelmed Plains, and Jimmy has been sanitized...
...the Wonderboy's scramble for power had begun, and it was to be astonishingly swift...
...Yet few pols have ever been more banal, more tedious, and more stupendously uninteresting...
...Yet, four years later, the grinning dunce of 1966 was again tramping through the Georgia back country...
...Eventually, he might even buy a judgeship from local Prohibitionists and so, midst the dust and the peanut vines, age in dignity until felled by a necrotic liver...
...As judicial despotism overtakes the federal government doubtless many elected officials will emulate the Wonderboy's technique, but history will duly record that this was his discovery, a discovery made possible mainly by his fortunate origins...
...Yet he is bestirred by vast yearnings...
...Yet Jimmy Carter is with us today, thirty years into the palmiest era of economic growth known to man...
...He would be a Democrat...
...Pretending helplessness in the face of a despotic judicial system, he has suavely assumed both sides of vexed issues like abortion and busing, apparently to the complaisant satisfaction of large numbers of voters...
...Grinning Dunce Happily, the Great Emancipator had been a Republican, and when Jimmy chose his party the choice was both effortless and auspicious...
...Such is the colossal good tuck that seems to have hovered about him from the moment he foresook the bowling temples of Americus and took up public service...
...but once he made it, life lost its old lilt...
...Solemnly he would declare himself "basically a redneck, 6 and fib one in the audience would pause to question him about the fivemillion-dollar Carter fortune...
...And issues of varying importance are treated equally: questions of energy policy and civil service reform, for exampie, are each given one chapter...
...Once in the Governor's mansion, his time was essentially his own...
...Think of it...
...According to Ruth, she had drunk of the blood of the Lamb and become a Bible-pounding evangelist learned in the ways of supernatural chiropractorship...
...The Pope's siege has "been lifted, and all those mysterious scoundrels who denied him the fellowship of his black brethren gratefully vanished years ago...
...But the spectacle of it also illuminates the barrenness of our era...
...Even an American politician has his limits...
...He is the Democrats' Nixon, a ruthless, relentless pursuer of power...
...He ~ook up square dancing, but it edified him not at all...
...The book is a useful tool for both junior and senior politicoes and it deserves wide readership...
...Jimmy had time to indulge his darker side by bickering with the state legislature and impersonating various Old Testament eminences...
...Our Jimmy is a case to be inoculated against...
...Search the record, you will find not one diverting anecdote, nor one piquant quality in this essentially vacant man...
...Now all he faces is a party" that has been decapitated, bleeds profusely, and is bereft of ideals and ideas...
...Something there is about the spiritual and the political that summons forth the petty tyrant and gives him large opportunities to work his philistine will upon his fellows...
...In 1955 Jimmy was at one with thousands of other middle-aged American men: rich, saucy, ignorant, and boreal...
...All in all, a better Jimmy Carter, one more intellectual, more principled, intrinsically more interesting, and far less menacing to the Republic...
...Folks would take note, andmif he were as gifted as he is now-one day he would hit pay dirt with a speech identifying Jesus Christ as the first Elk and be raised up to high public office...
...As the years ambled on, and his wife fattened, he would feel the itch of public service...
...In his lifetime he has seen the wizardry of indoor plumbing come to his Plains, Georgia manse...
...He has no more capacity for the higher intellection than for baking soufflds...
...Biographers tell us Jimmy and his wife even sought refuge from their existential travail in Americus, Georgia, where bowling alleys were plentiful, but the cosmic questions still swelled up, begging to be answered...
...only this time everyone knew his name, and he had the endorsement of such worthies as the Honorable Lester Maddox and of such respected citizens' groups as the Georgia Ku Klux Klan...
...Agreed, it is revolting to listen to that limp, desiccated rhetoric and to witness his bald position-taking, but it is amusing to observe such moderns as Norman Mailer as they fabricate from mere nothingness an interesting, decent, pleasant man, a Protestant JFK...
...He also took up politics, and so with these two mighty heaves illustrated that the Founders knew what they were about when they remonstrated against the mingling of Church and State...
...No pol since William Jennings Bryan has thrown both Holy Writ and Democracy into an assault on the citizenry...
...Perhaps had Jimmy not so recently and thoroughly been deKluxed and debumpkinized there might be more to him...
...The days became dull burdens...
...Bloomington, Indiana The Alternative: An American Spectator November 1976 33...
...He might not be the near vacuum who now leaves almost every writer maundering...
...and that is the whole of him...
...He felt a jolt and shortly thereafter became the peppiest species of Christian...
...Progress has invaded Plains, and with it has come the modern American system of values, a system esteeming only wealth and power and then only when amassed by those who pontificate against them...
...Congressman Philip Crane's views on health care are especially timely...
...So they will hold their noses and spout for Jimmy...
...Though hailed as the political marvel of the hour, not one pol has aped his appallingly insipid sermonic, and my guess is that not one will...
...No pol in this century has been so favored by sheer luck, a matter that surely has not escaped the notice of Sister Ruth...
...The writing is a bit uneven...
...There,s opportunit y "America...
...They have been replaced by a farce...
...Finally there was that historic reunion with his sister, Ruth Carter Stapleton, wherein she explained that idiotic smile then coptinually disfiguring her face, causing dark speculations amongst the local Pharisees, and giving her family many alarums...
...He is all go-getter, (continued on page 33) 4 The Alternative: An American Spectator November 1976 at decreasing unemployment, increasing capital formation, and stabilizing prices...
...As I see it, they are attempting to turn swine flu into an aphrodisiac...
...This book of essays contains an additional weakness: it is written by politicians, who by nature tend to strut...
...Today the deterrence of war is as important a function of military strength as the capacity to fight wars and win them," Spence writes...
...Even when he honeyfogled the most exalted strata of Georgian society, luck covered for him...
...The book's weaknesses are those common to most collections of essays...
...Materially he longs for very little...
...But enough criticism...
Vol. 10 • November 1976 • No. 2
