Thursday, January 20, 2005

"If we despise our own government we have no future"

The words of Jimmy Carter, from his inaugural address, January 20, 1977.



Carter's administration wasn't "progressive," or even particularly "liberal," as the terms were understood in the United States of the mid-70s, which is the last time those terms really meant anything in America. (To anyone who wants to champion the liberal bona fides of the Carter White House, I have two words: Zbigniew Brzezinski.) Carter himself was the safe, "centrist" choice of the Democratic establishment. And that says much about where America's middle was 30 years ago, and about the scary, dark place to which it has since been absconded.

I'm old enough to remember the Seventies as a decade of disappointment in North America. Lots of promise, extinguished. Carter began well, but faltered. And as a young Canadian on the left, I was perpetually frustrated by Pierre Trudeau's half-measures.

To think that there's a very good chance now that the Seventies might have been the high-water mark of social democracy, liberal policy and industrial-age civilization - well, I can't begin to tell you how that depresses me.

From Carter's address:

You have given me a great responsibility--to stay close to you, to be worthy of you, and to exemplify what you are. Let us create together a new national spirit of unity and trust. Your strength can compensate for my weakness, and your wisdom can help to minimize my mistakes.

Let us learn together and laugh together and work together and pray together, confident that in the end we will triumph together in the right.

...

Let our recent mistakes bring a resurgent commitment to the basic principles of our Nation, for we know that if we despise our own government we have no future. We recall in special times when we have stood briefly, but magnificently, united. In those times no prize was beyond our grasp.

But we cannot dwell upon remembered glory. We cannot afford to drift. We reject the prospect of failure or mediocrity or an inferior quality of life for any person. Our Government must at the same time be both competent and compassionate.

...

We have learned that "more" is not necessarily "better," that even our great Nation has its recognized limits, and that we can neither answer all questions nor solve all problems. We cannot afford to do everything, nor can we afford to lack boldness as we meet the future. So, together, in a spirit of individual sacrifice for the common good, we must simply do our best.


Now it's Midnight in America, Carter's words sound like a faint transmission from a galaxy far, far away. George Bush's inaugural dragon breath - his vow to bring the "untamed fire of freedom to the darkest corners of the world" - is rhetoric worthy of Pyongyang. Just not nearly as amusing, because unlike Kim, Bush has the means to act out his mania, which is forever being fanned by his Straussian cadres. "Fortunately for the oppressed, America’s influence is considerable and we will use it confidently in freedom’s cause." Katie, bar the door!

How they must laugh, away from the microphones. How often then do you think their much-abused word, "freedom," passes their lips?

I'm sure it plays well to his doped-up, ditto-headed base, who can't wait for the flat-screen spectacle of "Showdown: Tehran." For everyone else, this headline in The Scotsman should do: "A Shiver Runs Round the World."


19 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

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12:59 p.m.  
Blogger erlenda said...

Thank you for the quotes from the Carter speech. They made me cry. He is, or at least at those times was, a true Christian. Humility and the ability to see oneself as person with limits and failures is a true Christian trait. He even is an Evangelical. So they have gone a long way too; in direction of the dark side, of course.

What I heard from Bush and Cheney today made me cry, too. But this time in frustration, anger and desperation.
And, yes fear.
And I thought I´ve gotten over it, gotten cynical enough for these times.
So Israel will attack Iran, Iran will retaliate, America will protect Israel, and we German cowards will finally stand strong at the side of our beloved Big Brother Nation walking with them into sundown or into the "clash of civilisations", slaughtering Muslims abroad, probably incarcerating our own.
(One CDU oposition leader, the speaker for foreign politics, already expressed his sympathy for the American cause in Iran. And those dirtbags from the CDU will probably lead the government after the next elections.)
And I´m praying for a miracle.
Nothing short of a miracle can stop this unprecedented slaughter ahead of us. If this will be a World War as the Neocons are planning, more people will get killed than in the last one.
When I saw the face of Bush looking at me from the newspaper frontpage this morning, I thought about "the banality of evil".
Yes, I know, evil is a word the intellectual call manichean. So what?
I say it loud:
Bush is the frontman of a governemnt of pure and unadultered evil:
massmurderers, war-criminals, criminals against humanity and planners of mass-genocide.
And our mass-media journalists are either accomplices in those crimes, or cowards and turncoats with no backbone and so are most western politicians.

5:24 p.m.  
Blogger erlenda said...

This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

5:24 p.m.  
Blogger Jeff Wells said...

Thanks for the remarks, erlenda. Praying for a miracle sounds like a good idea.

10:54 p.m.  
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Anonymous Anonymous said...

who cares what that peanut haid said.he presided over the closing of soem of the heaviest indsutry we had (steel)work was scarce and minimum wage of 75 a week take home for 40 hours was a luckie thing to have,he sold indonesia weapons so they could massacre east timorese,zbigneiw and kissenger were still raging,and carter of course broke his "promises ' he said if you see these men in my cabinet you know i am a bozo., he knew his role and played it like a good peanut planter.pol pot ate at the white house then, served dish of fricassseed intellectual over rice.

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