Yet Another Capitulation in Our Ongoing Cultural Suicide

In two days it will have been twenty years since the senile theocratic leader of a foreign state, Ayatollah Khomeini, sentenced to death a British citizen for the crime of writing a novel. It was Salman Rushdie upon whom the fatwa was placed, and the reward for his death, were he have been offed by a Muslim, was to be a monetary prize and a blessed afterlife. Gratefully the sinister plot failed, though he was forced to spend a better part of the subsequent decade constantly hiding and moving, and various booksellers, publishers, and translators associated with the offending text, The Satanic Verses, were disemboweled, stabbed, or blown up.

Now on the eve of this disgraceful anniversary the UK has banned from passing through its otherwise rather porous checkpoints the Dutch MP Geert Wilders, who was to present his short film Fitna in London at the invitation of a member of the House of Lords. The film is apparently a clumsy and ill-mannered diatribe against the Koran, and comparisons are made between that book and Mein Kampf. But the content of speech is never relevant because it is the very act of speech that is protected. Our culture has made freedom to express oneself sacrosanct, and so it should have after the bloody outrages of our past and the undying temptation some have to silence opinions with which they disagree.

Every observer of this fiasco knows why Mr. Wilders has been banned from the UK. The government wants to be seen as sensitive to the concerns of Muslims. Balderdash! No one should spend a second worrying about the sensitivities of anyone else. To do so debases and infantalizes public dialogue. A letter signed by 127 Iranians protesting their government's bounty on Mr. Rushdie is worth quoting here. They wrote, "We insist on the fact that aesthetic criteria are the only proper ones for judging works of art." Let Muslims and their obsequious liberal patrons criticize Mr. Wilders and his film as they please, but don't let a government deprive him of his right to communicate a political idea.

The Israeli Election

The results are in and the centrist Kadima edged the conservative Likud 28 seats to 27. But parties of the right took 65 seats in the 120-seat Knesset, while the left took 55 (if you count Kadima among the left). The party most associated with the founding of Israel, Labour, sank to fourth place with only 13 seats. The far-right Yisrael Beytenu placed third with 15 seats. In this election the left was eviscerated and the right triumphant. The only thing that might prevent a conservative rejectionist government is if Kadima can cobble together a loose and tenuous alliance of Labour and some smaller right-wing parties. Otherwise Benjamin Netanyahu will likely be prime minister, and the forward movement that might have been available to a peace initiative from President Obama will be squandared.

Hitchens on the Self-Deluding, Playtime Left

At a rancorous debate in Manhattan three and half years ago with fascist stooge and jihad apologist George Galloway, Christopher Hitchens quipped,

There are probably some people among you here who fancy yourselves as having leftist revolutionary credentials, so far as I can tell that you do from the zoo-noises you make--and the scars you can demonstrate from your long underground twilight struggle against Dick Cheney. But while you're masturbating in that manner, the Iraqi secular left, the socialist and communist movements, the workers' movement, the trade unions, are fighting for their lives against the most vicious and indiscriminant form of fascist violence that any country in the region has seen for a very long time.

The imbroglio over the Iraq War, I think, showed the decadence and frivolity of the anti-war left.

Dolly Parton in D.C.!

"Somebody said to me, 'Well, you know what — you've got such a big mouth and you know how to talk to people, did you ever think about running for president?'” the country singer told an audience at the National Press Club. I said, 'I think we've had enough boobs in the White House, but hopefully [President] Obama ain't gonna be one of them.'"

Election Season in Iran Off to Troubling Start

Last week Mohammad Khatami declared he would be a candidate for the presidency of Iran in the June elections, setting up a race against Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. He served as president from 1997 to 2005 and was known as a pro-Western moderate. Yesterday a wild mob attacked him at the 30th anniversary celebration of the Iranian Revolution, shouting, "Death to Khatami. We do not want American government." This takes negative campaigning to a new level!

Ideological Warfare and Guantanamo Bay

One is increasingly forced to confront the psychotraumatic fact that most of the world loathes and fears rationalism and science, fervently clings to paranoid cults and Jew-hatred, and would delight in the destruction of the open society. People who aren't moved to form mobs or death squads and who aren't inflamed by ethnic or sectarian demagogues are under an evermore lethal threat from people who do these things.

Take the example, mentioned in the previous posting, of the Polish engineer slaughtered in Pakistan by the Taliban. There can be but one response: the verminous rabble that beheaded him should be hunted and exterminated without compunction. And if any rise to replenish the ranks of jihad they too should suffer relentless pursuit and destruction. The message should be unmistakable: we have no objection to making war on beheaders and amputators, oppressors of women, and ethno-religious supremacists.

The time should have long ago ended when the enemies of the Enlightenment could count on the US and its allies to behave squeamishly and allow themselves to be subjected to squalid victimology and moral blackmail by Islamic fascist imams and mullahs and their fellow-traveling associates in the anti-war movement. It should also be clarified that the argument that killing jihadists only creates more of them can be inverted; the jihadists should know that their attacks have the potential to create waves of resistance, recalcitrance, and retribution. After the Gaza war Hamas declared victory despite their utter devastation, yet the Israeli electorate has proven just as obdurate and steadfast. Parties of the Israeli right (those determined to eliminate Hamas rather than tolerate its continued existence) have come out of today's election stronger.

It is essential to note that this civilizational struggle is about the ideology of the combatants, not the tactics used to fight it. For example, the pathetic outcry about Guantanamo Bay represents a disastrous miscontstrual of the terms of the war. I believe the prison camp there should be closed for the same reason President Obama evidently gave to a meeting of the families of victims of 9/11 and the attack on USS Cole: it had become associated in world memory with the horror show at Abu Ghraib and it was being used for the recruitment of jihadists. This is is a shrewd assessment of public opinion, corrupt and hypocritical though it is.

But the reality of Guantanamo Bay is rarely discussed because a loud, insufferable mentality prevails, which insists America has betrayed its core values and shown itself to be no better than the terrorists. It is rarely mentioned only three people have been waterboarded. One of them, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, was the mastermind of the 9/11 calamity and the man who sawed American journalist Daniel Pearl's head off on web video after forcing him to admit to the crime of being a Jew. Further, Guantanamo Bay is probably more sanitary and safe than any maximum-security prison in the Muslim world, monitors from human rights NGOs are there constantly, and prisoners are allowed their religious practices. It should also be noted the legal framework governing the treatment of non-state, non-uniformed, wartime enemy combatants was unclear when al-Qaeda terrorists commandeered planeloads full of civilians and smashed them into buildings full of civilians.

As I said, this war is about ideology. The combatants' systems of thought should be evaluated to determine which is more ethical and defensible. I claim that the people who prate about Guantanamo Bay do so in order to postpone, evade, or parse the larger issue. By and large they prefer not to deal with serious, complicated questions that at some point might demand criticism of another culture (gasp!). It is to succumb to cultural relativism to idly denounce US policy on Guantanamo Bay when an epochal war over the very notion of human rights is afoot.

All the energy and time that were devoted to campaigning against Guantanamo Bay should have been spent exposing and excoriating gender apartheid in the Muslim world, public floggings and hangings, the disenfranchisement of women, the criminalization of adultery, the censorship of the press, the banning of political parties, the stealing of elections, the looting of public coffers, the endemic corruption, the promotion of suicide-murder and jihad, the intimidation and murder of apostates, freethinkers, and polytheists, primordial delusions about human sexuality, the incitement to genocide against Jews, the demonization of America, mass illiteracy, and religious extremism and bigotry.

Until the public dialectic shifts its crippling focus from the tactics of the war to the content of it, we cannot expect any lucid critique of this world-historical contest.

Thoughts on the News and the Pessimism It Elicits

Something struck me as I was sifting through news articles on various websites today: they all made me disoriented with indignation. These include:

1. The decapitation of a Polish engineer in Pakistan by disgusting, lower-than-low Taliban curs.
2. The planning of the 85th birthday celebration of Robert Mugabe to include thousands of lobsters, prawns, ducks, bottles of champagne, portions of caviar, and boxes of Ferrero Rocher chocolates (gross) in a country where, according to The Times, "seven million citizens survive on international food aid, 94 per cent are jobless and cholera rampages through a population debilitated by hunger."
3. A poll of respondents in several European countries showing widespread belief in anti-Semitic conspiracy theories.
4. The so-called "Joe the Plumber" is still alive.
5. There is a piece in today's Red & Black, "Choose happiness, regardless of situation," by opinions editor and sob-sister Shannon Otto, that enjoins readers to be cheery, banal, and vacuous.

Reports like these make my blood boil (perhaps not the last two). I'm not deliberately pessimistic, but one comes to expect most people are dangerously ignorant. Would it be banal of me to say "The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity"?

Immiserated Zimbabwe Rots as Diplomats Fecklessly Negotiate; Parallels Are Drawn to Auschwitz

This article was rejected by the parochial obscurant who controls the opinions page at The Red & Black.

Merely to read the reports coming out of Zimbabwe is to feel helpless, ill, and outraged. Unimaginable destitution and misery prevail. The World Health Organization reports 56,000 cases of cholera and nearly 3,000 deaths; the fatality rate is eight to ten times higher than usual. Abduction, torture, and murder are official tools of the state.

The Times of London quoted a priest who operates a countryside clinic as saying, “People are starving here. The extent of the suffering has reached Auschwitz proportions.” This absolute collapse in Zimbabwean society is attributable to one man: President Robert Mugabe.

Mr. Mugabe has led Zimbabwe since its 1980 transition from white-minority-run Rhodesia. In 2000 he began seizing white-owned farms and handing them over to his political supporters, who pillaged the land and ruined the agriculture. He explained, “Our party must continue to strike fear in the heart of the white man, our real enemy.”

This land theft transformed what had been known as Africa’s bread basket into a country ravaged by malnutrition and dependent on emergency food aid. In eight years the cereals harvest has declined from 4.5 million to 800,000 tons, according to the Times. It is one of the many cruel ironies that define Zimbabwe’s recent history.

Nine years ago 92 percent of children attended primary school, but that figure is estimated to have fallen below one in four. Last year there were but 27 days of school; most teachers were on strike or could not afford food or transport. More than 20 were murdered by the state for their political activities. Recently it was announced their monthly salary would be the equivalent of one American dollar.

The economy is predictably in a state of devastation. Hyperinflation has wiped out people’s savings. A paper published by the Cato Institute last November calculated Zimbabwe’s annual inflation at 89.7 sextillion percent. The reserve bank just introduced a ten trillion dollar note and has plans for them in 50 and 100 trillion dollar denominations.

Amidst this debacle an election was held last year. International monitors agree the opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai won, but Mr. Mugabe has refused to concede and has instead become more deranged and intransigent. Mr. Tsvangirai has sporadically been driven into exile in South Africa and Botswana and once had to seek refuge in the Dutch embassy, government thugs having hunted him down.

A delegation from Physicians for Human Rights recently visited Zimbabwe, and in their report they described “added proof of the commission by the Mugabe regime of crimes against humanity.” They also noted worryingly that due to interrupted and inconsistent antiretroviral treatments for AIDS sufferers, it is possible drug-resistant strands of HIV may develop. The public health crisis emanating from Zimbabwe could quickly become a regional disaster.

Because of the stealing of elections, the jailing and murder of civic leaders and journalists, and the humanitarian catastrophe (famine, epidemic, economic disintegration), a multitude has called for Mr. Mugabe to step down or be removed militarily and brought before an international criminal court. It includes Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the Washington Post editorial board, the Primate of the Church of England John Sentamu, and Kenyan Prime Minister Raila Odinga.

Mr. Mugabe had the effrontery to respond, “I will never, never, never surrender. Zimbabwe is mine.” A vile statement like that needs to be repudiated in the most forceful and decisive terms, and the way to do so is for an international force to draw to a close this senile kleptocrat’s misrule. The terrorized, beggared people of Zimbabwe deserve better than the world’s dithering and inaction.

The Public Evaluates Obama

According a recent Gallup Poll the American people approve of most of what President Obama has done thus far, with the noteworthy exceptions of closing the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay and repealing the Mexico City Policy, which governs American funding of international family planning groups.

This Needed to be Said. And Repeated. And Repeated.

A Labourite on anti-Semitic violence in Britain. Unsurprisingly, the left demurs and looks away.

We Can't All Be Insiders: A Review of "Political Fictions" by Joan Didion

Published in The Georgia GuardDawg, November 2007

Having come “to understand… the mechanism of fear” in El Salvador in 1982 and reported on Cuban exiles living in Miami, “where Havana vanities come to dust,” Joan Didion spent the 1980s on the tropical periphery of American politics. Her three novels of international intrigue, Democracy about Vietnam and A Book of Common Prayer and The Last Thing He Wanted about Central America, evince a suspicion of imperial bureaucracy and an interest in confronting its provenance, Washington, D.C. But besides a few condescending pieces on the Reagans, Ms. Didion’s foray into domestic politics did not begin until The New York Review of Books dispatched her to report from the campaign trail in 1988. She writes of being asked to cover the campaign, “…a presidential election was a ‘serious’ story, and no one had before solicited my opinions on one.” In the years between the election of George Herbert Walker Bush and the election of George Walker Bush, Ms. Didion confronted this subject in eight essays, collected in 2001 in Political Fictions.

It is Ms. Didion’s economy of words in Play It As It Lays that won her prose so many accolades. In Political Fictions the author maintains this piercing style while subsuming a mountainous quantity of quotations from major daily newspapers, cable and network news, political memoirs, weekly magazines, press conferences, interviews, and transcripts of meetings and hearings. What Ms. Didion found is that “it was clear in 1988 that those inside the process had congealed into a permanent political class, the defining characteristic of which was its readiness to abandon those not inside the process.” This is the narrative she uses to aggregate the stories of post-Cold War American politics: the mysterious, to her at least, adoration of Ronald Reagan; the bizarre marriage of scholarship and self-help and how-to books in Newt Gingrich’s works; the impeachment of Bill Clinton despite the public’s apparent desire he remain in office; and the infusion of religion into the 2000 election.

Ms. Didion does not so much state her opinions as reveal it in how she writes about her subject. Her method is one of unmitigated condescension and can be funny, even hilarious. There is a passage in “Newt Gingrich, Superstar” in which she notes, “‘Outlining’ or ‘listing’ remains a favored analytical technique among the management and motivational professionals whose approach Mr. Gingrich has so messianically adopted.” She provides evidence of this tedium and repetition:

In Window of Opportunity, Mr. Gingrich advised us that “the great force changing our world is a synergism of essentially six parts,” and offered “five simple steps to a bold future.” On the health care issue, Mr. Gingrich posited “eight areas of necessary change.” On the question of arms control, he saw “seven imperatives that will help the free world survive in the age of nuclear weapons.” Down a few paragraphs the seven imperatives gave way to “two initiatives,” then to “three broad strategic options for the next generation,” and finally, within the scan of the eye, to “six realistic goals which would increase our children’s chances of living in a world without nuclear war.”

It may seem petty to criticize Mr. Gingrich’s arithmomania, but Ms. Didion sees it as symptomatic of a facile, hucksterish approach to politics. His image as an ideas-driven politician prompted Rich Lowry, the editor of National Review, to call the former Speaker “a one-man think tank.” Ms. Didion addressed similar claims in 1995 with particular condescension: “absent an idea that can be sold at Disney World, he has tended to lose interest.”

Mr. Gingrich is not alone in suffering this pointed belittlement. Of Bob Woodward’s oeuvre Ms. Didion writes, “These are books in which measurable cerebral activity is virtually absent,” and “these books are ‘about’ nothing but the author’s own method, which is not, on the face of it, markedly different from other people’s.” Of Bill Clinton: “No one who ever passed through an American public high school could have watched William Jefferson Clinton running for office in 1992 and failed to recognize the familiar predatory sexuality of the provincial adolescent.” She goes on to note his “reservoir of self-pity… [and] quickness to blame” before fitting his impeachment into the narrative of the political class’s detachment by contrasting its nonchalance at his indiscretions during the election with its outrage at them in 1998, all while the public elected him and seemed to oppose removing him from office.

This detachment is made quite clear in the way the country at large is spoken to by the political class. Ms. Didion has Howard Fineman on MSNBC in 1998 analyzing conditions in the country and citing as sources “calls he had made to ‘a lot of Democratic consultants, pollsters, media people and so forth.’” She has a Republican strategist that same year quoted in The Washington Post saying, “Who cares what every adult thinks. It’s totally not germane to this election.” She has Alan Simpson, a former Republican senator, dismissing in December 1998 the prospect Americans will hold the impeachment against his party in the 2000 elections: “The attention span of Americans is ‘which movie is coming out next month?’ and whether the quarterly report on their stock will change.” Statements like these elicit insiders bemoaning “the beltway mentality” and extolling “the need to get outside the beltway,” but it is hard to believe this is nothing more than a slogan repeated often enough to convince television audiences that the political class has perspective.

It is an oddity to relive the 1990s now that we inhabit the age of terror, but the process is still with us, churning toward the 2008 elections in a campaign notable for its longueur and inevitability. The narrative is in place for what will inexorably be called “the most important election in a generation” — a regurgitation from 2004. The issues will be tailored to those subsections of the population deemed most likely to vote by polling and consulting firms, and the differences will be narrowed in the general election, as distinctions are already being erased by the frontrunners in both parties to blunt their opponents’ appeal. Ms. Didion uses the reaction of one pundit, Al From of the Democratic Leadership Council, to illustrate the fix: “the ‘true story’ of the 2000 campaign was that the Republican and Democratic parties had at last achieved ‘parity,’ which meant they were now positioned to split the remaining electorate….” When politics lacks division and contrast, it becomes something other than itself. The debate shifts to which Hollywood genre or dystopian novel most accurately describes our political process.

"Red & Black" editors fail to condemn violence against "The GuardDawg"

Published in The Georgia GuardDawg, November 2006

The theft of The Georgia GuardDawg’s newspapers and vandalism of its bins on September 14, 2006, was an affront to the free exchange and dissemination of ideas. More than 1,200 issues were stolen, and the containers that housed them were smeared with terms of abuse. The perpetrators rejected thoughts and letters in favor of sabotage and intimidation. They circumvented public debate and flouted ethics and law. This act of vigilante censorship deprived the student body access to a specific publication and debased the political climate on campus.

And instead of unequivocally condemning the crime, the Editorial Board of The Red & Black opined rather ignobly that The GuardDawg brought this fiasco upon itself for being inflammatory. It’s very unbecoming and quite bizarre that the editors of The Red & Black would denounce the target of such of thievery and vandalism. When the target is a fellow student-run newspaper, then The Red & Black’s position seems even more lurid and perverse.

The Editorial Board, so horribly misdirecting its vitriol, managed to convey two points that are worth the rebutting: that The GuardDawg should examine itself to explain this crime and that this type of political violence is bound to happen where offensive and allegedly extremist opinions are concerned. To shift some of the blame for this crime onto the doorstep of The GuardDawg may seem to help explain it better, but the simplicity of this proposition fails to mask its fatuousness and dubious ethicality.

The GuardDawg neither deserved to have its labor desecrated and pilfered, nor does it now need to search for reasons to explain what has occurred. That’s because there are no legitimate reasons. Certainly there are honest and rational disagreements to be had, but that these differences were not sorted out through argument demonstrates the philistinism of the perpetrators. For The GuardDawg to change its ways in light of this incident would be to capitulate to vandalism and intimidation. This would undoubtedly give credence to this nefarious method and subject all future purveyors of unpopular opinions to these gangster tactics.

No one should ever expect, especially in a liberal democracy, to have their published opinions answered with barbarism and subversion, even if the ideas happen to be of a hateful or malignant nature. There can be found no justification in any legitimate system of morals for responding to political speech with lawless force; to believe otherwise is simply antidemocratic. To avoid or even tread lightly on sensitive subjects is the way of incurious and craven minds, and it is the path to complacency and subjugation. Writers have the responsibility to say what is unpopular and speak the truth regardless of the consequences. That those on the Editorial Board seem not to realize this is a grave and appalling pity.

So if you engage, as the editors did, in apologetics for this political hooliganism, then you have abdicated the right to condemn any future acts of its kind, no matter who the target may be. Are you willing to give tacit approval, if not to the crime, then to their motivations? Because if you believe that what was leveled against The GuardDawg constituted well-deserved chicanery and nothing more serious, then you will have no right to be outraged if a liberal paper is ever stolen or if progressive activists are ever harassed and threatened. To sympathize with the sabotage of the free press is to be, like the ignoramuses who committed this crime, hopelessly covered in shame.

Notes on the Carter Conference

Published in The Georgia GuardDawg, February 2007

It has become axiomatic that Jimmy Carter was a president whose good intentions were despoiled by the crudities of international politics. His detractors blame his naïveté for weakening America; his acolytes praise his idealism and rue the events that swept him from power. Jimmy Carter’s idealism has been a point of great debate, but in retrospect it seems, as William F. Buckley Jr. said, the costs became prohibitive as it approached reality. So prohibitive were they that when the former First Couple joined old friends and colleagues, distinguished guests, members of the press, and other politicos in Athens last month there was just a single term in office about which to reminisce. So I joined the Carter family and its entourage as we indulged in a wistful mixture of memory and desire: memory for all the tributes and anecdotes, some of which were quite touching; desire for the revision and what-ifs that occurred less than I anticipated but still too frequently for the conference to be considered truly objective. I didn’t really mind that though, because, despite what it was promoted as or intended for, the conference felt much more like a reunion than a symposium.

The Carter Presidency: Lessons for the Twenty-First Century was held at the Georgia Center for Continuing Education during the weekend January 19, 20, and 21—the thirtieth anniversary of Jimmy Carter’s inauguration. The tagline read “a dynamic, bipartisan dialogue on the lessons learned from the carter presidency and how those lessons apply to the major challenges facing our country today.” The luminaries in attendance I found particularly interesting were Madeleine Albright, Stephen Breyer, and Jon Meacham, all for different reasons and some unrelated to Jimmy Carter. Ms. Albright, adorned in her signature golden dove brooch and fresh off a book tour, delivered anti-Bush one-liners that delighted the crowd, including some I had heard her say on television. I could have quoted the rather silly phrases along with her, and I felt deprived of the suspense and glee that seemed to have struck much of the audience. Bush needs to take the road map to peace in the Middle East out of the glove compartment; “you have to have a president who actually knows where the place is”; we can’t say God is on our side because we have to be on God’s side. This last zinger, a rephrasing of the same fatuous idea, elicited applause which seemed almost cathartic and predictable: the audience yearned to clap in opposition to President Bush, and Ms. Albright played it like a virtuoso.

Justice Breyer was more cerebral and convincing. He dominated a panel entitled The Economy, Budget Issues, Deregulation, and the Role of the Federal Government with expertise and an anecdote to go along with every proposition. Jon Meacham, the editor of Newsweek, moderated a discussion on the Middle East. Flanked on stage by huge screens displaying photographs of President Carter alone and with Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin, Mr. Meacham was a quick wit who at once asked the panelists if they had read Jimmy Carter’s new book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid. Only one had, Zbigniew Brzezinski, the former national security advisor. Later Mr. Carter jokingly admonished the other three, whom he said had been furnished with copies. It was a light note in a discussion that otherwise facilitated grim assessments of Iraq by Mr. Brzezinski (“sliding step by step into a deeper and deeper quagmire”) and excuses for the Clinton administration’s inaction in Rwanda by Ms. Albright (“you make decisions with the information you have”). I thought this was reprehensible, but then I thought again that maybe she didn’t know where the place was.

The luncheon honoring Rosalynn Carter on Saturday afternoon took place in the Magnolia Ballroom, and the floral theme was not lost on any who attended: the room was resplendent with the color of pink roses, from the upholstered chairs to the table setting to the silk napkins, folded intricately to resemble a blossomed rose. The former First Lady delivered the keynote address after a meal of wheat barley salad, chicken amaretto, marquis potatoes, a bougatiere of vegetables, and cappuccino torte for dessert. Her speech was filled with endearing stories about her married life and the four years in Washington. She spoke of picking up the phone at the White House and being able to speak to anyone in the world. When she told the operator to put Jimmy on the line, he replied, “Jimmy who?” Mrs. Carter relished the immunization of children she promoted, regretted the failure of the Equal Rights Amendment, and recalled, her voice tremulous with affection, how one of her and Jimmy’s elementary school teachers used to say that anyone in the classroom could be president one day. These were very fond memories for her, and the audience appreciated them with sincere standing applause.

The Town Hall Meeting with Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter later that day was the only unscripted part of the weekend, a time when the public was invited to ask questions of the pair. Brian Williams, the anchor of NBC Nightly News and an intern in the Carter White House, moderated for the afternoon. Watching him converse with Mr. Meacham, Michael Adams, and others before the event commenced, it struck me that every pose he strikes seems taken from a Superman movie or comic strip. Instead of a posture that any other person would adopt, he stood with his right arm akimbo, his left hand gallantly removing his eyeglasses, and his head turned toward the sky as if he would fly away and leave Messrs. Meacham and Adams behind with the rest of us non-superheroes. It never happened, of course, so Brian Williams introduced the Carters and read from a Sally Quinn article published in The Washington Post on January 21, 1977 describing the gala on the eve of the inauguration.

As the audience eagerly queued up to ask their questions, Mr. Williams threw the former president a curve ball to be answered as the final question: “What is something you can tell us that we don’t know that will enrich the historical record?” All the questions that flowed from the crowd were fairly predictable and mundane. Do we still function as a republic? “I was hoping Rosalynn would take that one,” Jimmy Carter quipped before adding that President Bush “has parted from basic Constitutional principles.” Why have the Georgia Democrats fallen into decline? Jimmy Carter, remembering the Solid South as “the good ole’ days,” attributed the Republican ascendancy to Barry Goldwater’s 1964 campaign. He called Hummers “disgusting automobiles,” agreed partly with the No Child Left Behind Act, praised leftist Congressman Dennis Kucinich for being “on the cutting edge of heroism,” urged the Democratic Party to adopt the recommendations of the Iraq Study Group, and remembered 1980 as “the most grievous year of my life.” Unsurprisingly yet dramatically the controversy of Mr. Carter’s new book was raised several times, once by a Holocaust survivor and Polish underground fighter and another by a German-born woman who loathed her country’s Nazi past. The man who lived through the Final Solution upbraided Mr. Carter for his use of the word “apartheid;” he answered that he meant it not in a racial way. The German woman wondered why he had not mentioned the Palestinian record of hate-mongering and indoctrination; he answered by saying Palestinians support a two-state solution more than the Israelis do and by condemning brainwashing and hatred.

The time was up, and Mr. Carter had had an hour to come up with an interesting, unknown piece of information. He conceded his story was not unknown but rather underreported. During the Camp David Accords of September 1978, then-President Carter sequestered the Israeli and Egyptian leaders at the Maryland retreat to broker a peace treaty. After three days, Mr. Carter separated President Sadat and Prime Minister Begin. The situation seemed to have no resolution, and so Mr. Sadat, clad in a leisure suit, called for a helicopter to take him back to Washington and from there back to Egypt. The American heard of this breakdown in negotiations, went into his cabin and changed from his casual clothes into a suit and tie, and knelt in prayer. Mr. Carter asked God for strength, he told the audience as his voice shook with emotion and tears streamed down many faces in the crowd. He got up, determined his efforts should not fail, and demanded Mr. Sadat remain: it would be a personal betrayal if he left, and American-Egyptian relations would fall under great stress. History records how this trying affair was resolved, with peace finally achieved between Israel and Egypt after many more days at Camp David. Mr. Carter is the only one of those three men not to have been gunned down or blown up, and his moving narration visibly affected the audience.

The pièce de résistance of the weekend was the Inaugural Anniversary Dinner on Saturday night at the Classic Center in downtown Athens. It was the most extravagant occasion I have attended, and it appeared the conception of the evening—recreating the bleak and icy blues and whites of winter in Washington, D.C. thirty years ago—obliged the facilitators of the gala to spare no expense. The bars were made wholly of ice slabs, and snow lightly tumbled from the ceiling as you entered the ballroom—even the urinals in the men’s restroom were filled with ice cubes. Portraits of the Carter family and friends adorned the corners of the reception hall, surrounded by placards with quotes regarding the blistering cold of that inauguration day.

On the walls were projected lights in the form of snowflakes, made bright by the long shadows of the dim, opulent scene. On tremendous monitors film footage was running quietly of the First Family and its guests at the various ceremonies in January 1977, grainy and warm in its hues and unmistakably like a home movie. On stage behind the podium stood a replica of the Arch, its dark form delineated by fluorescent lights. The settings of the round tables were resplendent with stemware and cutlery and sylvan candelabra that resembled bare branches in the dead of winter. We were served chilled shrimp cocktail on hexagonal sheets of ice complemented with a miniature white orchid. The main course consisted of bacon wrapped quail, filet of beef Danielle, haricot verts bundles, stuffed Roma tomatoes, rosemary herbed potatoes, and sweet potato and petite angel biscuits. This dazzling and delicious meal was crowned by a mango coconut mousse torte. While we sated ourselves, The University of Georgia Opera Ensemble performed songs in a set called American Medley Performance.

Former Vice-President Walter Mondale introduced his old boss in brief, cordial remarks, and Jimmy Carter took to the podium in a black-and-white checkered blazer amidst uproarious ovation. He delivered his speech comfortably and conversationally, although in an occasionally halting manner that seemed to preclude contractions and natural cadence. He touched on many subjects, some political, some personal, and he wended through funny and touching stories about trips to Japan and China, botched jokes and humanitarian successes, and his relationships with other presidents: superb with Ford and the first Bush, polite with Reagan, unfriendly with Clinton, and antagonistic with the current one, although he and Mrs. Carter were among the very few Democrats at President Bush’s 2000 inauguration. He spoke of the establishment of the Carter Center in 1982, his travels around the world, and the institution’s efforts at alleviating poverty and sickness. Jimmy Carter closed with a shining vision of what he thought the United States should strive to be: a beacon of peace, a protector of international law, a champion of human rights, and a defender of democracy. I was gladdened by his words, but they are only words, and, without the vision for achieving these noble ambitions, mentioning these lofty concepts becomes facile and mundane.

The weekend celebrating Jimmy Carter’s inauguration thirty years ago was filled with reminiscence and nostalgia and largely sheltered from the controversy over Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid or the larger debate, raging twenty-six years now, over the Carter legacy. There was plenty of discussion, but it appeared the panelists were more intent on rehabilitating the thirty-ninth president’s record than presenting opposing views. I didn’t really mind that, though. What was most valuable to me about this rare occasion were the stories that brought the audience and the speakers to tears, the pieces of information shared fondly by the Carters that gave you a hint of what four years in the White House was like for an unassuming peanut farmer and his wife.