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,...
...kmerican domestic policy wheezed and groaned as more and more flapdoodle was piled onto it...
...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...
...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...
...Admittedly, commissioning a Pulitzer-Prizewinning cartoonist for a presidential portrait is without precedent, but then having a cartoon presidency is without precedent also...
...He had dangled Baptist salvation before the aghast Park Chung Hee, South Korea's Buddhist dictator...
...Anon, with the plaster falling from the walls, the chickens refusing to lay, and the cow gone plumb dry, Jimmy consulted Rafshoon...
...After all should not lunatics, too, influence our civilization...
...Their subculture was American liberalism...
...Few would admit that Jimmy was an ignoramus...
...In the fullness of time he appeared at a press conference, his hair now parted on the left...
...American foreign policy became a ribald joke before the world...
...Does one need any more evidence of their capacity for self-delusion...
...Jimmy Carter was the worst president in American history...
...By 1976, it was only a blowsy likeness of its old self...
...Our culture seemed to proclaim most proudly the worst of fourth-rate vulgar...
...Remember the curious exculpation of such louts as John Dean...
...They even believed Jimmy had come out of the last debate unscathed...
...Europeans long given to patronizing us for our putative callowness suddenly fell silent...
...Self-respect, integrity, dignity, and intelligence had very little to do with making it in the 1970s...
...Remember the great leaps into Jugendkultur of such highbrows as Galbraith and Schlesinger...
...All depended on cunning and a prevenient nose for the fashionable pose...
...In any assessment of the Carter glory one must also indict the adepts of decrepit liberalism...
...James Earl Carter, Jr...
...By then he had used a canoe paddle to fight off a sea-going rabbit...
...In fact, in the first three years of his presidency, Jimmy personally experienced things that Grant, deep in the sauce, had only dreamt of...
...This time the journalists called him enigmatic...
...By the end of the 1970s this New Age liberalism had become illiberal, irrational, and inhumane...
...Here should have been a presentiment of all the loony episodes that lay ahead...
...Galoots and wretches manned our government...
...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...
...Reasoning like this was almost irrefutable in the late 1970s...
...Does MacNelly not capture the full puniness of the Carter era...
...Those who find that judgment harsh are quite simply without an historic sense, without judgment, and without character...
...no portraits...
...Let history record, however, that the giants of the press corps sensed nothing amiss...
...Doubtless there is justice in this...
...At the Venice summit he visited strange monks...
...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...
...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...
...Though by practically every measure he appeared a loser, the New Age liberals still believed Jimmy could pull it off...
...There was grumbling, but the great helmsman of the populist whim-wham stuck courageously to his guns...
...As late as early 1980 they called him enigmatic...
...They called him brilliant...
...Jimmy had embraced all the idiocy and idiotizing of their subculture, so they sealed their lips...
...Think of the influence of the rich and the powerful...
...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...
...Lost in their unctuous reveries they proclaimed Jimmy plausible, and by election time 1980 believed that the voters would perceive him as plausible too...
...A shapeless dynamic like this was bound to give great leverage to the balmy...
...1977-1981) Official White House Portrait by R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr...
...He experienced...
...By 1980 things had grown serious...
...Was that the sound of Soviet tanks revving up off to the east or was it just a growl from the Politburo...
...But their subculture had, after twenty years of self-indulgence, grown seedy and whistlebrained...
...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...
...He was the political genius of 1976...
...Go ahead, take another look...
...It had become a series of poses assumed by the precious and the opportunistic frantically attempting to stay on top...
Vol. 14 • February 1981 • No. 2
