Ten years ago, it was announced that Jimmy Carter had liver cancer. Silly me, I thought that meant the then-90-year-old greatest living ex-president would soon die. “Raise your glasses high for Jimmy Carter, Wonkers,” I wrote, “may he live forever.” And my lord he almost did!
And here we are, and it has been 10 years, and 13 months after his beloved wife of 77 years, Rosalynn, the old man has finally laid his burden down.
In September, his grandson told the Washington Post — do read that gift link — that Jimmy was staying alive in hospice to watch Kamala Harris win and be inaugurated. Her elevation to nominee heartened him. He began to eat and watch the news a bit. He reveled in the Democratic National Convention, delighted in it. As did we all.
It is a fucking crime that we elected Donald Trump again; for all of us. For the immigrants and the people of color and the women and the gays and the LBTs. For the librarians. For the teachers. But at this particular moment I’m saddest and angriest that we made Jimmy Carter live through it.
I hope they lied to him, maybe. But they probably didn’t. Like he promised never to lie to us.
I was a little girl when Jimmy Carter lost to Ronald Reagan. Reagan’s inauguration — they wheeled TVs in and showed it in our classrooms — was my first political memory, when I was almost eight. I explained to my parents that Reagan wasn’t mean; he had been nice to Jimmy Carter. My mother gritted her teeth and curled her lips and turned away. Later my father would opine that the ayatollahs sure were scared of Reagan to let the hostages go that very day. Regardless, he always was a Carter fan. All right-thinking people were. Carter was the kind of Christian who gave Christians a good name.
There will be lots of time tomorrow for a fuller picture of a great man, but I want this post to go up now so we can toast together. To a man who lived one hundred years. Who was mocked, and is still mocked, and who was succeeded by someone unworthy, as our terrific President Joe Biden is today.
How shitty things can be. How awful. Let’s be a light for each other, and do everything we can.
Just remember you’re a living organism in this planet, you’re very safe, you’ve just taken a heavy drug. Do you have any Allman Brothers?
