The World According to J.C. (Jimmy Carter)
http://www.opinionjournal.com/la/?id=110007490
The World According to J.C.
"Tedious" doesn't begin to describe the new book by America's worst
ex-president.
BY BRET STEPHENS
Wednesday, November 2, 2005 12:01 a.m. EST
Jimmy Carter's 20th book is a tedious meditation about the appropriate
uses of moral values in political life--as wisely and humbly
exemplified by Himself--and of their misuses under the current Bush
administration.
But tedious isn't quite the right word here, because it suggests mere
boredom while Mr. Carter's prose manages to be irritating as well. Is
there an English-language equivalent to the German Rechthaberei, which
loosely translates as the state of thinking and behaving as if you're
in the right and everyone else is in the wrong? Yet even such a term
doesn't quite capture the sanctimony, the self-congratulation, the
humorlessness, the convenient factual omissions and the
passive-aggressive quirks that characterize our 39th president's
aggressively passive world view. Mr. Carter is sui generis. He
deserves his own word.
Everything about "Our Endangered Values" is wrong, beginning,
obviously, with the title. The values Mr. Carter says are "ours" are
certainly not mine and probably not yours and therefore, necessarily,
not ours. In fact, it is not at all obvious that the things Mr. Carter
speaks of even qualify as values, properly speaking, unless you
believe that "economic justice" is a value, or you subscribe to
Marxist liberation theology (Mr. Carter considers the Catholic priests
who practiced this theology to be "heroes"), or you would like to pay
your "personal respects" to Syria's dictator (never mind that he just
had the prime minister of Lebanon assassinated), or you can think of
nothing bad to say about Saddam Hussein except, perhaps, that he is
"obnoxious."
Subtracting "Our" and "Values" from the title, then, the reader is
left with "Endangered," the form of the verb here characteristically
rendered in the former president's favorite voice. Who, or what, is
doing the endangering? Mr. Carter's animating concern is the rise of
fundamentalism in religion and politics, but don't suppose that this
has anything to do with Islamic fundamentalism. What chiefly exercises
Mr. Carter's indignation are neoconservatives, the Southern Baptist
Convention and their allegedly converging and insidious influence on
government. Together, Mr. Carter believes, they have contrived to set
America loose "from the restraints of international organizations"
like the United Nations and "global agreements" such as the Kyoto
Protocol, apparently for the purpose of eradicating the separation of
church and state and creating "a dominant American empire throughout
the world."
This is an odd complaint, given the source. Mr. Carter admits that as
president he worked "behind the scenes" with the head of the Southern
Baptist Convention to develop a program called Bold Mission Thrust,
"designed to expand the global evangelistic effort of Baptists."
Weirdly, Mr. Carter offers this anecdote in the context of his
ostensible opposition to the "melding of church and state," which, he
gravely notes, "is of deep concern to those who have always relished
their separation as one of our moral values."
As for neocons, Mr. Carter is nearly one himself, so obsessed does he
claim to be with human rights. But much as he may hate the sin, he
loves the sinner. Think of his view of various world figures from his
White House years: Yugoslavia's Josip Tito ("a man who believes in
human rights"); Romania's Nicolae Ceausescu ("our goals are the
same"); the PLO's Yasser Arafat (a "misunderstood" figure for whom Mr.
Carter once moonlighted as a speechwriter). And then there is Kim Il
Sung ("vigorous," "intelligent"), whose relationship with Mr. Carter
is reprised in this book.
"Responding to several years of invitations from North Korean
president Kim Il Sung . . . Rosalynn and I went to Pyongyang and
helped to secure an agreement from President Kim that North Korea
would cease its nuclear program at Yongbyon and permit IAEA inspectors
to return to the site." Leaving aside the interesting question of why
that Dear Leader would be so solicitous of this one, what's chiefly
notable about this sentence is that it is one of the few here that
isn't demonstrably false or misleading in respect to U.S. dealings
with the North.
In Mr. Carter's telling, the 1994 Yongbyon Agreed Framework--in which
Pyongyang agreed to trade its nuclear-weapons program for oil
shipments, security guarantees and the construction of two light-water
reactors--was generally going according to plan, only to be
gratuitously upended the moment the Bush administration arrived in
Washington. "Shipments of the pledged fuel oil were terminated, along
with construction of the alternate nuclear power plants," writes Mr.
Carter.
In fact, North Korea violated the Agreed Framework almost from the
moment it was signed by pursuing a secret, parallel weapons program.
For its part, the Bush administration continued to honor the
framework's commitments; in 2002, a State Department official even
attended the groundbreaking for one of the promised reactors. Only
later, when the U.S. presented the North with evidence of its
cheating, and the North admitted to the cheating, did the fuel
shipments and reactor construction stop.
There is more of this--personal slurs, particularly against U.N.
Ambassador John Bolton, factual omissions (Mr. Carter accuses the Bush
administration of making hardly any effort to reduce nuclear-weapons
stockpiles but doesn't mention the 2002 Moscow Treaty, which involves
the most dramatic nuclear cuts in history), trite sophistries ("a
rising tide raises all yachts") and the invariable, habitual,
irrepressible blaming of America first for everything from degrading
the environment to alienating Syria. At a certain point it all begins
to ooze and blur, in the way the speeches and doings of Al Sharpton or
Michael Moore ooze and blur. Past a certain point, you just stop
keeping track.
Mr. Carter, however, is no gold-plated race hustler or quack
documentary maker. He is--as he constantly reminds us, as if our
memories aren't still vivid--the 39th president of the United States
and winner of the 2002 Nobel Peace Prize. Bill Clinton may have the
heart of the Democratic Party, but Mr. Carter captures the Zeitgeist
of the global left. "Our Endangered Values" is a distressing piece of
work for many reasons, most of all because it cannot be safely ignored.
Mr. Stephens is a member of The Wall Street Journal's editorial board.
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Posting and reading from alt.politics.usa.constitution OR alt.education
You are invited to check out the following:
The Rise of the Theocratic States of America
http://members.tripod.com/~candst/theocracy.htm
American Theocrats - Past and Present
http://members.tripod.com/~candst/theocrats.htm
The Constitutional Principle: Separation of Church and State
http://members.tripod.com/~candst/index.html
[and to join the discussion group for the above site and/or Separation of
Church and State in general, listed below]
HRSepCnS · Hampton Roads [Virginia] SepChurch&State
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/HRSepCnS/
[Its not just Hampton Roads folks who are members, there are members from
all over the U.S. and a couple from overseas as well]
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.. . . You can't understand a phrase such as "Congress shall make no law
respecting an establishment of religion" by syllogistic reasoning. Words
take their meaning from social as well as textual contexts, which is why "a
page of history is worth a volume of logic." New York Trust Co. v. Eisner,
256 U.S. 345, 349, 41 S.Ct. 506, 507, 65 L.Ed. 963 (1921) (Holmes, J.).
Sherman v. Community Consol. Dist. 21, 980 F.2d 437, 445 (7th Cir. 1992)
.. . .
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THE CONSTITUTIONAL PRINCIPLE:
SEPARATION OF CHURCH AND STATE
http://members.tripod.com/~candst/index.html
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