Talk about the penny taking time to drop. Back when Earth was cooling, during Jimmy Carter’s rise to the top of the Democratic Party, for two semesters I took linguistics. Either in the textbook (Ronald Langacker’s Language and its Structure) or of my professor’s own volition, I first read-or-heard the scientific term for a phenomenon I’d often observed in vivo: “migrating toward the prestige dialect.”
For instance, taking one’s drawl to the awl, to reshape it as a flat, midwestern drone. Which (it now dawns on me), Carter never bothered to do. (By the way: right around that time, in a lit class I learned that an old, archaic meaning of “prestige” was “deceit.” Aside to the politically minded: does that not speak volumes, and then some?)
To peg him more genuine than some of the Chiefs we’ve seen since he left office would belabor the obvious to the point of gross understatement. That he wound up taking flak for his relatively exemplary (though inevitably doomed) crusade to never lie does not speak well of our political arena (or anyone’s).
In effect, he naturally became the ‘un-Nixon.’ That is, a nice guy. In 1976, that seemed to work well (politically) for him and his party. Since then, not so much.
In this brief space, let’s give him credit where due in two realms. One, the environment. Two, the economy, stupid. (Spoiler alert: both came to involve what you might call the un-Carter. I won’t say his name, but his initials are Ronald Regan.)
With what turned out to embody no small prescience, Carter installed solar panels on our White House. From then on, the fossil fuel industry did everything in its vast power to paint him Public Enemy Number One; Big Media did all it could to assist.
Enter Reagan. In Gipperland, trees caused more pollution than cars. Never mind Pulitzer laureate Elizabeth Kolbert reports that a single tree can store as much as seven tons of carbon; I think that we shall never see a car so harmful as a tree. (Would Ronnie and I lie to you? Of course not!)
But seriously. In 1986, he tore down said solar panels. Today- as predicted from 1959 on, by physicist Edward Teller and then others- our planet looks to be in tear-down mode. To maintain some semblance of habitability, we’re going to need a bright, shiny, green economy. That is to say, one presaged not by the sainted actor/corporate pitchman, but by the farmer/nuclear engineer/Sunday school teacher from Plains.
While Carter began to hit the national stage, an economist by trade who’d become a university president pointed out some basic, nonpartisan etiology. In an interview, John J. Deutsch all-too-aptly blamed the Vietnam War for sending the US economy to hell in a handbasket full of hand grenades. Like a string of booby traps, it progressively stumped Richard “Not A Crook” Nixon. And Gerald “Whip Inflation Now” Ford. And, yes, Carter.
Then came Reagan. On the stump in 1980, he effectively vowed to cure all by balancing the budget. What a concept! Trouble was, he did no such thing. In truth, while his hydrogen-filled, top tier tax-cutting budgets floated off into the ozone, stagflation stalked the land to the point his approval ratings swooned, in early 1983, to 35%. (And most of those were fans of “Death Valley Days,” and/or “Bedtime for Bonzo.”)
Good thing for him Election Day fell some 20-21 months off. Great thing for him, the Fed at last had begun to slash interest rates.
Never mind Reagan had done nothing of real import. For the economic ‘miracle’ that in fact bespoke an economic cycle, Ronnie and his party were pleased as punch to expropriate credit everlasting, amen.
In a nutshell, Carter was a creditable, decent Chief. Reagan wasn’t. To this day, all day long, the Reagan Legacy machine cranks out dissemblance and deceit. Better late than never, loud and lively, let’s make bold to differ- and to keep in our hearts-and-minds his foresight and his great work re Humanity (especially, perhaps, in terms of our housing crisis).