The Rock & Roll President Who Appeared on the Game Show What's My Line?
Today President Jimmy Carter's Remains Will Be Transported to The Capitol Where He Will Lie in State Until his State Funeral on Thursday. A Video Reminder That His Remarkable Life Made Time for Joy.
Today President Jimmy Carter’s remains will move from Georgia to lie in state at the U.S. Capitol before his state funeral on Thursday. I want to share this video of President Carter appearing on the game show What’s My Line? when he then served as Governor of Georgia.
One of the What’s My Line panelists remarked that Carter exuded a “spiritual quality.” So true. An accomplishment from his Governorship that he mentions is the Georgia Film Office. It remains one of his many legacies.
Along with boosting Georgia’s revenue, this demonstrated Carter’s support of and appreciation for the arts and humanities. Years later Carter would become known as the Rock & Roll President. Carter also was an artist himself — a poet. His poetry can be read in his collection Always a Reckoning and Other Poems.
Carter notably dazzled Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, and I can’t think of any better endorsement. The documentary Jimmy Carter: Rock & Roll President can be watched on Max. Highly recommended. Nile Rodgers, Willie Nelson and Bono read some of Carter’s poems in the documentary.
A good action of peaceful rebellion against the incoming Mump-Nazi Reich now, until and after Inauguration Day is to explode financial donations to The Carter Center. This will further the Carter Center’s work in helping the world, eradicating disease and promoting peace.
What would be the ultimate rod for the Mump-Nazi Reich’s back is if donations surpassed the broligarchs' collective funding of this racist, misogynist, ableist, eugenicist, homophobic, transphobic, Islamaphobic, anti-Semitic, anti-Jewish, anti-worker and classist autocracy. (Nearly 700 million and counting.) Let's accomplish this goal by donating what we can in our means and widely sharing today's post.
But wait. There's more.
1.) Bust a move with me on Bluesky and Spoutible.
2.) I read Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America after his novel arrived in 2004 and watched the HBO limited series adaptation in 2020. I know the scene below from the HBO series, which people can watch on Max, will play out with a lot of family and friends who voted for the convicted felon and the adjudicated rapist once the swirling flames from the hell their vote unleashed hits the country, them, their friends and their family.
Indeed. Evelyn is a stupid person.
3.) Join Malcolm Nance’s American FAFO — Focused Action, Focused Objectives— opposition movement. Read about and implement his peaceful and creative plans for Inauguration Day rebellion. Among his proposed actions are ordering free Inauguration Day tickets from your U.S. Congressperson or Senator that you will never use and playing “The Imperial March” on a kazoo then sharing a video or audio of you doing so on your favorite social media platform before, during and after the Inauguration.
4.) Listen to an inspirational and galvanizing song by John Lennon.
Unfortunately all this is marred by the events of the last decade or so. Many of us have come to be deeply disappointed and horrified by the apparent desire of some one-third of our citizens to return to some very bad tendencies that our country has always fought against, but seemed to be overcoming. For whatever reason, the very things, (racism, misogyny, xenophobia, hatred, greed, hubris), that evil men used to kill millions of our fellow beings, and that our parents fought a world war to defeat seem to be back and here in our own country. Even after the warnings of the administration of 2016 to 2020, these citizens have seen fit not only to nominate a regime for their party that extols these things as worthy, under the false excuse of a post Covid economy or inflation or a misguided nationalism, but then managed to elect truly evil people and will try to impose autocracy and oligarchy on all of us. Worst of all for me at least is that the core of these people seem to be Christo-religious nationalists who seem to have forgotten the words of the Sermon on the Mount. I can only hope that as this next year goes on and they see the suffering of their fellow human beings as families are torn apart, and the blow to our freedoms that is almost unavoidable, that they will remember their faith and the promise of our Constitution that they seem to have forgotten.
Barbara and I are struggling to cope with this. We are trying to stay reasonably sane by avoiding media and negative news. Unfortunately it also means avoiding as much as possible those who brought this misfortune on us all by either voting for evil and hate, or not caring enough to vote at all. We will be working to do all we can to reverse this, though we fear that even two years more of this may do irreversible damage to the country.
So….This is a very negative letter for a new year, but we feel very strongly that it is the duty of citizens to speak out, as standing by and saying nothing is not an option. We are sorry if this is painful and may offend some of you. I find that I get some comfort and hope from reading “Notes on Freedom” by E.B. White and “What I Believe”, by EM Forster, both easily found on the Internet. There have been other bad times and these two authors were there at the beginning of the last time the world had an authoritarian crisis. Their optimism about the goodness of man prevailed. They had much to say about it that both of us agree with now. We can only hope that the goodness and promise at the heart of our Republic will see us through this and that we will come out of it an even better country at the end. On a positive note, we have been through bad things before, and our best instincts seem to be a dominant force that can overcome our worst ones, but it doesn’t happen on its own.
Sincerely and with love,
Messed up pasting in the above comment, but this was the last page of a letter to friends and family for the New Year. We may have lost some of them by sending it, but this needs to be said to anyone who supported the evil of the new regime.
Ron