One U.S. President conducts his life differently

Hail to Jimmy Carter!

By Moristotle

Former President Jimmy Carter has written 33 books since leaving office in 1981, according to this article in yesterday’s Washington Post: "The un-celebrity president Jimmy Carter shuns riches, lives modestly in his Georgia hometown" [Kevin Sullivan & Mary Jordan, photos by Matt McClain].

Fish for Friday

My favorite cartoonist is a genius named Dan Piraro. He draws a one-square strip named "Bizarro." Don is a vegetarian and often writes gags with a vegetarian theme. I saw this one today and thought of Jim Rix, whose article "What is the cause of Heart Disease?" was published on Moristotle on November 20. [personal communication]

Another word game from Hitch-22

Indeed, that index entry on  p. 435 of Christopher Hitchens's memoir ("word games, ... 264-266") was good for another web log. It's from the chapter titled "Salman."

At all events there came a time when someone arrived late at a dinner party, complaining of having been stuck at an airport with nothing to read but a Robert Ludlum-style novel. This didn't seem worth pursuing until the complaint was refined somewhat: "I mean it's not just that the prose is so bloody awful but that the titles are so sodding pretentious...The Bourne Inheritance, The Eiger Sanctioni; all this portentous piffle." Again, not a subject to set the table afire, until someone idly said they wondered what a Shakespeare play would be called it if were Ludlum who had the naming of it. At once Salman was engaged and began to smile. "All right, Salman: Hamlet by Ludlum!" At once—and I mean with as much preparation as I have given you—"The Elsinore Vacillation." Fluke? Not exactly. Challenged to do the same for Macbeth, he produced "The Dunsinane Reforestation" with hardly a flourish and barely a beat. After this it was plain sailing through "The Kerchief Implication," "The Rialto Sanction," and one about Caliban and Prospero that I once knew but now can never remember. [pp. 265-266]

    This chapter follows the one in which 9/11 figures prominently. And, in his chapter on Salman, there's much more to talk about in the way of theocratic religion. Hitchens, who I trust I've already demonstrated seems to have been on hand for everything politically major during his seniority, was dining with Edward Said one evening "in late 1987 or early 1988" when

a courier came bustling up from the Andrew Wylie Agency in Midtown. He bore a large box, which contained the manuscript of a forthcoming novel by Salmon Rushdie.... [p. 267]

    The note that came along with the manuscript asked Said for his view on what would be published as The Satanic Verses, for Rushdie thought that it might upset some of the faithful. My readers don't need to be reminded that the book's publication provoked Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini to issue a fatwah sentencing Rushdie to death for blaspheming the Prophet Muhammad and his wives.
    My readers should be able to predict what Hitchens said to the Washington Post when they telephoned for his opinion about the fatwah.

I felt at once that there was something that completely committed me. It was, if I can phrase it like this, a matter of everything I hated versus everything I loved. In the hate column: dictatorship, religion, stupidity, demagogy, censorship, bullying, and intimidation. In the love column: literature, irony, humor, the individual, and the defense of free expression. Plus, of course, friendship—though I like to think that my reaction would have been the same if I hadn't known Salman at all. To re-state the premise of the argument again: the theocratic head of a foreign despotism offers money in his own name in order to suborn the murder of a civilian member of another country, for the offence of writing a work of fiction. No more root-and-branch challenge to the values of the Enlightenment (on the bicentennial of the fall of the Bastille) or to the First Amendment of the Constitution, could be imagined. President George H.W. Bush, when asked to comment, could only say grudgingly that, as far as he could see, no American interests were involved... [ellipsis Hitchens's; p. 268]

I've been trying to think of a good example of the title word game. What The Satanic Verses would be called it if were Ann Coulter¹ who had the naming of it: "Blasphemy: Liberal Lies about the Religious Right"?
    Well, it's an example anyway.
_______________

1. Titles of her books:
   • High Crimes and Misdemeanors: The Case Against Bill Clinton
   • Slander: Liberal Lies about the American Right
   • Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism
   • How to Talk to a Liberal (If You Must): The World According to Ann Coulter
   • Godless: The Church of Liberalism
   • If Democrats Had Any Brains, They'd Be Republicans
   • Guilty: Liberal "Victims" and Their Assault on America
   • Demonic: How the Liberal Mob Is Endangering America

Thanksgiving what-if

All day yesterday, even as I was enjoying our company for Thanksgiving, enjoying the bright afternoon (after a foggy morning), enjoying the turkey, the candied sweet potatoes, the Brussels sprouts and carrots, the fruit salad, the stuffing, the cranberry sauce, the Vouvray, and the whipped-cream-topped pumpkin pie [I didn't take the photo shown here, by the way; we didn't have any green beans and tomatoes], I was bothered by something just not quite right about Thanksgiving.
    What could it be? It's a good holiday, a day off from work (for many people, though by no means all). Most families that are able to, get a few of their members or some other relatives or some friends together for an unusually plentiful table and the pleasure of convivial feasting.
    It's a solid tradition in America; perhaps no ritual is more "American." The fact that Thanksgiving is a ritual was emphasized to me in the afternoon. We went walking after dinner, my wife and I, our two guests (a friend and her little boy), and our poodle Siegfried, and I asked a woman also out walking (by herself) whether she'd had dinner yet.
    "Oh, no," she said, "we had Thanksgiving on Sunday."
    She and her lot had already done the ritual, which didn't even have to be performed on the official National Day of Thanksgiving.
    And, of course, there's the ritual of a Presidential Pardon for that lone turkey, who doesn't know to be glad not to know that millions of his brethren weren't so lucky.
    By the way, according to Gail Collins, in her op-ed piece, "A Tale of Two Turkeys," yesterday in The New York Times, the turkey pardon "only goes back to George (the Good One) Bush and 1989." That particular ritual isn't so solid that President Obama couldn't have just skipped it and restored a bit of gravitas to the Office. Pity that he didn't.

Over night, as I lay sleepless at times from a stomach suffering from the unwonted plenty (or possibly just the wine), I think I figured out what bothers me about Thanksgiving. And a comment from my wife at breakfast this morning captured it synecdochially.
    She tapped a picture on the front page of one of our local newspapers. "Look at this," she said, "those poor people having Thanksgiving dinner off tiny paper plates."
    The caption says:

...eat Thanksgiving lunch Thursday at First Baptist Church in Mebane. More than 200 people visited First Baptist for the annual holiday meal.

    According to an article in The Washington Post on November 17,

a new federal report...shows that nearly 50 million people—including almost one child in four—struggled last year to get enough to eat.

What if We the People (the powers that—through our elected representatives—be in this country) were to abolish Thanksgiving and establish a program for ending unnecessary hunger in the United States?
    Surely We (and our elected representatives) are resourceful enough to come up with a program that wouldn't be too liberal, or too conservative, or too Christian, or too Jewish, or too Muslim, or too secular for a majority to buy into.
    Under such a program, everyday would be a day of thanksgiving. We'd no longer limit ourselves to just the one, official national day for those hungry millions not to go hungry because a local church provides some turkey and stuffing on a small paper plate.
    What if?