Ed)torial/J immy: At the End of the Revels
Tyrrell, R. Emmett Jr.
EDITORIAL JIMMY: AT THE END OF THE REVELS You hold in your hands the ultimate souvenir of the Carter Administration, the official presidential portrait of James Earl Carter,...
...They called him brilliant...
...If there is one key to understanding the preposterous vagaries of the 1970s it is the realization that during that decade celebrity and preferment generally went to those who could accurately calculate the drifts of the Zeitgeist and then intone the emergent solemnities without laughing...
...In fact, in the first three years of his presidency, Jimmy personally experienced things that Grant, deep in the sauce, had only dreamt of...
...By 1980 things had grown serious...
...Does one need any more evidence of their capacity for self-delusion...
...Jimmy had embraced all the idiocy and idiotizing of their subculture, so they sealed their lips...
...In any assessment of the Carter glory one must also indict the adepts of decrepit liberalism...
...Their subculture was American liberalism...
...Few would admit that Jimmy was an ignoramus...
...But their subculture had, after twenty years of self-indulgence, grown seedy and whistlebrained...
...James Earl Carter, Jr...
...Self-respect, integrity, dignity, and intelligence had very little to do with making it in the 1970s...
...Would he so readily have been accepted as a "writer" and "commentator" had he remained unrepentant and refused to affect the self-guilt, self-improvement, I-am-better-for-having-been-acreep soap opera that accompanied his conscience-raising...
...kmerican domestic policy wheezed and groaned as more and more flapdoodle was piled onto it...
...Remember the curious exculpation of such louts as John Dean...
...By the end of the 1970s this New Age liberalism had become illiberal, irrational, and inhumane...
...As late as early 1980 they called him enigmatic...
...Remember the great leaps into Jugendkultur of such highbrows as Galbraith and Schlesinger...
...Let history record, however, that the giants of the press corps sensed nothing amiss...
...He grew...
...They are in all likelihood the same people who through most of the past four years were moved to sophistry and euphemism while Jimmy grinned and tumbled headlong into the White House china...
...By 1976, it was only a blowsy likeness of its old self...
...Here should have been a presentiment of all the loony episodes that lay ahead...
...He had dangled Baptist salvation before the aghast Park Chung Hee, South Korea's Buddhist dictator...
...Jimmy Carter was the worst president in American history...
...At the Venice summit he visited strange monks...
...They even believed Jimmy had come out of the last debate unscathed...
...Thus with this one audacious stroke his administration came several thousand dollars closer to getting control of what was then a $358,000,000,000 budget...
...This time the journalists called him enigmatic...
...Reasoning like this was almost irrefutable in the late 1970s...
...Lost in their unctuous reveries they proclaimed Jimmy plausible, and by election time 1980 believed that the voters would perceive him as plausible too...
...It had become a series of poses assumed by the precious and the opportunistic frantically attempting to stay on top...
...Go ahead, take another look...
...Doubtless there is justice in this...
...Europeans long given to patronizing us for our putative callowness suddenly fell silent...
...Galoots and wretches manned our government...
...There was grumbling, but the great helmsman of the populist whim-wham stuck courageously to his guns...
...American foreign policy became a ribald joke before the world...
...Though by practically every measure he appeared a loser, the New Age liberals still believed Jimmy could pull it off...
...A shapeless dynamic like this was bound to give great leverage to the balmy...
...After all should not lunatics, too, influence our civilization...
...Was that the sound of Soviet tanks revving up off to the east or was it just a growl from the Politburo...
...Does MacNelly not capture the full puniness of the Carter era...
...He experienced...
...When the Wonderboy arrived in Washington four years ago, full of solemn oaths and clever plans for establishing the New Jerusalem right there on the ruins of Gomorrah, one of his first acts of genius was to end the government's lavish policy of commissioning cabinet members' portraits...
...Think of the influence of the rich and the powerful...
...Our culture seemed to proclaim most proudly the worst of fourth-rate vulgar...
...Admittedly, commissioning a Pulitzer-Prizewinning cartoonist for a presidential portrait is without precedent, but then having a cartoon presidency is without precedent also...
...no portraits...
...EDITORIAL JIMMY: AT THE END OF THE REVELS You hold in your hands the ultimate souvenir of the Carter Administration, the official presidential portrait of James Earl Carter, Jr., commissioned by The American Spectator, executed byJeffMacNelly, and donated by us to the government of the United States, the sole proviso being that the government accord it exposure and visibility commensurate with that which the French government has given the Mona Lisa...
...Those who find that judgment harsh are quite simply without an historic sense, without judgment, and without character...
...He was the political genius of 1976...
...Anon, with the plaster falling from the walls, the chickens refusing to lay, and the cow gone plumb dry, Jimmy consulted Rafshoon...
...The same critical standards that they had so recently applied to the Ford administration became mysteriously defunct until it was too late in the farce to matter...
...All depended on cunning and a prevenient nose for the fashionable pose...
...In the fullness of time he appeared at a press conference, his hair now parted on the left...
...By then he had used a canoe paddle to fight off a sea-going rabbit...
...1977-1981) Official White House Portrait by R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr...
Vol. 14 • February 1981 • No. 2
