There are so many good things to say about him, so many superlatives:
He may have been the best human being ever to occupy the White House.
He may have been the greatest EX-President, having lived a long time and having thrown himself unselfishly into the service of others.
And, to the best of my knowledge, he was the only President to defeat a killer rabbit, although there is much we don’t know about Chester Alan Arthur.
Jimmy Carter’s actual battle with the Killer Rabbit of Caerbannog, was somewhat less dramatic than portrayed in the press.
The Onion reported Carter’s death as follows:
OK, that is hilarious. I do love Jimmy Carter though. A great humanitarian. Good president despite being a bit of a wimp but that Crisis of Confidence speech really said a lot about the bullshit we would be facing.
The Carter administration took climate change seriously, only for all their efforts to be undone by the Reagan administration. Those years were the last we could have changed things around without too much pain. Now our present and future is only pain.
Was climate change a concern during Carter’s presidency? I was only a kid when he was president, but I remember more concern about Earth entering a new ice age than worry about it getting warmer. I am sure if I look through my In Search Of with Leonard Nimoy DVDs I can find the episode about the coming ice age. I also remember (I think) a Newsweek or Time Magazine cover about a possible ice age. Then again, my memory may be faulty. I have enough trouble remembering what happened this morning.
I kinda remember there was a big eco push in those days. They didn’t call it global warming yet but they did bring attention to the greenhouse effect, and the concerns about hydroflurocarbons or whatever it was that was in hairspray that kills ozone. And I think even before Carter’s term there were calls to fight pollution and littering.
Yeah, the Cuyahoga had just burned, The Dickster, of all people, had founded the EPA, Carol Burnett was signing off every show with an anti-pollution plea. But when Reagan brought in Watt as Sec of the Interior that all got dialed way back.
I remember him for trying to get the US to convert to the metric system: I was in college journalism school when we were transitioning. It was a simple plan: Start with Imperial (Metric in parenthesis) then Metric with Imperial in parenthesis) then just metric.