Jimmy Carter

The first thing that pops into my brain when I think of President Jimmy Carter is inflation (bear with me, my memories of Carter improve significantly. I promise).

 Kim and I had just gotten married in 1980 and within a year, we were looking to buy our first house. The trouble was, inflation was running at 14 percent at the time. I think most mortgage interest rates were hovering around 18 percent, if memory serves (this was, after all, 44 years ago).

We finally heard of a program offered by a local financial institution where first-time home buyers could purchase a house for 16 percent interest over 30 years. We jumped on it. Over time, we were able to refinance a couple of times to lower the interest rate, and eventually we paid off the mortgage ahead of schedule.

At the time, I thought the Carter presidency was unremarkable. It was also in 1980 that saw the failed hostage rescue attempt ("Operation Eagle Claw") that left eight American servicemen dead in the Iranian desert.

It seemed America could do nothing right. High inflation, coupled with the failed rescue attempt, hustled Ronald Reagan into office later that year, seemingly booting Carter to historical oblivion as a one-term president.

But when Carter died last month at the age of 100 and the retrospectives began poring in, my ever changing perspective of Carter's presidency changed even more.

Carter actually inherited the high inflation rate when he took office in 1977. In an effort to curtail inflation, Carter appointed Paul Volcker as chair of the Federal Reserve. Volcker raised interest rates, eventually knocking down inflation just in time for Reagan's first term.

Most of us might regard the Camp David Accords as Carter's crowning achievement, bringing a peace between Egypt and Israel that still exists. Carter also continued to normalize relations with China after Nixon first opened doors.

It was during the Carter administration that negotiations brought about the release of the hostages in Iran on the day that Reagan was inaugurated.

Carter, a principled man of faith, was also a social visionary who long pushed for civil and human rights.

He was also a dedicated environmentalist, placing 56 million acres of land in Alaska under federal protection and soon signed into law the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act, which included protections for the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

Carter also tried to clean up government with ethics reforms in the wake of Nixon's Watergate adventure by putting independent inspectors in every department. He attempted to make government more representative of the country itself by appointing more Blacks, Jews and women to political positions than all previous presidents combined.

He also created the Department of Education, the Department of Energy and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).

Carter's post presidency and his work with Habitat for Humanity showed us the innate decency of the man, as if we could ever forget. He did, after all, win the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002 for "decades of untiring effort to find peaceful solutions to international conflict, to advance democracy and human rights, and to promote economic and social development.

We are about to embark on an era that will inaugurate a convicted felon (who is also an adjudicated rapist) to the presidency and whose first inclination is to pardon hundreds of insurrectionists who violently tried to change the will of the American people with a damned lie. 

This fact alone makes the Carter years seem like it happened in a different country.

 

 

 

A Complete Unknown

 

The first time I became aware of Bob Dylan was probably around 1966. I was working a summer job as the municipal swimming pool's custodian. Yeah, I was the guy who was responsible for turning on the chlorine tank every morning and tossing in shovel loads of alum to make sure the daily pH levels of the water met public safety standards with the litmus paper tests I took.

Yep, your summer health depended on the responsible nature of a 16-year-old nonscientist high school sophomore throwing chemicals into your germ-infested community pool.

I was also the guy who cleaned out the locker rooms with Pine Sol and every evening picked up the trash you left behind on the grounds with a spear stick and a baggie.

But I had the place to myself. It was the best job I ever had.

Anyway, I'd amuse myself by turning on the PA system and listen to either records (we had a pool turntable) or the radio while I was working. And my music tastes were changing. I was slowly graduating from The Lettermen and the Tijuana Brass to The Beatles and Rolling Stones.

That's probably when I first heard "Blowin' in the Wind." Only it wasn't Dylan singing. It was Peter, Paul and Mary, who often served as a more commercial vehicle to Dylan's gravel-voiced delivery. And it was the lyrics that hit me like an arrow to the heart. In 1966, we were moving deeper and deeper into the anti-Vietnam War era and I was approaching draft age. The Civil Rights movement was also taking foot, so for me, Dylan's transformative lyrics – the ether of his words – truly meant something.

I bring this up in the wake of the current Dylan movie biopic, "A Complete Unknown," which traces the early years of Dylan's influential life.

You have to be careful with movie biopics: they edit, delete, change and/or invent stuff to move the narrative. You need to know that going in because movies only have two hours or so to tell a story. Having said that, there's been some really entertaining biopics out there. My short list includes "The Glenn Miller Story," "The Buddy Holly Story," "Coal Miner's Daughter," "Walk The Line," (directed by James Mangold, who also directed the current Dylan flick), "Elvis" and "Bohemian Rhapsody."

You can add "A Complete Unknown" to that list.

The cast is astounding. Timothée Chalamet portrays Dylan so well, you can't even understand all his mumbles. (which might be a technical issue with the production. Or not). Monica Barbaro is brilliant as Joan Baez, and Boyd Holbrook nails it as Johnny Cash. But perhaps the best supporting nod, I think, goes to Edward Norton as Pete Seeger as he tries to mentor the youthful and rebellious Dylan through the bohemian hills and dales of the early 1960's folk music culture. I didn't know Seeger was that influential.

I was further taken in when I learned that all the primary actors did their own singing and played their own instruments. That, to me, is worth the price of admission alone. Some critics have suggested that Chalamet does Dylan better than Dylan. And Chalamet's duets with Barbaro were remarkable. All done live. No dubbing.

It's hard to determine what the plot of the movie is. Again, some critics have asked why this movie even exists at all (kind of harsh there, I think). There is some triangular conflict when Dylan's girlfriend, Sylvie Russo (a pseudonym for the real life Suze Rotolo, who shared the "Freewheelin' with Bob Dylan" album cover with Dylan) and Baez that comes and goes with some feelings getting hurt, so bad on you, Bob.

But through it all, the movie seems to be taking us to the place where Dylan (Is he folk? Is he rock? Is he blues? Is he country? What exactly is he?) abandons his acoustic guitar and goes electric. This iconic moment apparently happened at the chaotic 1965 Newport Folk Festival, and drew the ire of fans and festival organizers alike, including Seeger). Shouts of "traitor!" littered the stage, as well as some actual litter thrown at him during his performance.

There is some question about that. YouTube video clips don't make it seem all that bad. There is some booing, but to my ear, not much. And were they booing because of a poor sound system, or were they booing the short three-song set he played? It's your call. A year later, in Manchester, England (and not shown in the movie), someone shouted "Judas!" and Dylan replied with "You're a liar!" and asked his backup band to play even louder.

I came out of the theater simply amazed and with a warmly renewed awe for Dylan, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2016 "for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition."

Before 1961, nobody, absolutely nobody, heard lyrics like Dylan's in music before.

It kind of made me wonder to whom does Dylan, now 83, pass the folk tradition torch? Woody Guthrie handed off to Pete Seeger, who handed off to Bob Dylan, who handed off to ... Bruce Springsteen? Jason Isbell? Taylor Swift? Pfft.

Who raises our consciousness now, especially when we need it most? 

The times they are a-changin'... still.

 

A holiday story

I'm going to tell you a story that my workout buddy from the J. Smith Young YMCA told me recently.

It's a great story for the holidays. Actually, it's a great story for anytime, so I hope I get it right.

Johnson's Drive-In in Siler City.

 My buddy's name is John Pacific (Yes, that's his real name. It's not a pseudonym to protect the innocent, or a stage name to make you laugh. It's real. As such, I'm considering changing my name to Bruce Atlantic, figuring that between the two of us we'd pretty much have the whole world covered). 

Over the last couple of years, John and I have become good friends, working out side-by-side on our recumbent bicycles. We talk about everything from sports to politics to becoming old men.

The other day, we talked about cheeseburgers.

I don't remember how this particular conversation got started, but I'm pretty sure it involved food right from the get-go. We'd serendipitously bumped into each other at The Dog House in High Point not too long ago, which is a place where they serve really great hot dogs. I think that memory somehow morphed into me asking him if he'd ever had cheeseburgers from Johnson's Drive-In in Siler City, just off Rt. 64.

He said he had not.

"OMG! You've got to go!" I said, involuntarily salivating down my chin as my voice rose. "Best cheeseburgers ever! They use Velveeta cheese! You gotta go!"

Mmm, mmm, good

 I gave him some particulars about the place. It's been in business since just after World War II. It's smaller than your average cedar closet, with maybe six booths and perhaps another eight seats at the counter, so you need to get there early before the line gets too big. They close the place down when they run out of meat for the day. And you need to be on a mission to go there because it's about an hour from Lexington. But the place has been written up in Our State magazine and it's been the subject of numerous TV segments, even here in Lexington. It's a special place.

The other day, I got a text from John telling me that he and his wife, Jane, had finally stopped at Johnson's, and they loved it.

But there was more to the story.

"When Jane and I got there, we saw an empty booth and went right to it," said John. "When we sat down, I looked up and saw there was a cluster of people by the door that I realized were there before us. I told Jane we can't sit here, there were people waiting ahead of us.

"We got up and I apologized to the people waiting and told them this was our first time here and we didn't know how it worked. They told us it was OK, don't worry about it, but don't leave.

"While we're waiting, I notice the people who were leaving with their take-out orders were paying with cash only," said John. "I didn't have any, and I asked Jane if she had any cash on her. She looked in her pocketbook and said she had six dollars.

"I told her, 'That's not going to cut it. We need to go. We'll just come back another time.'

"We started to leave when this fellow behind me put his hand on my shoulder and said 'You're not going anywhere. This is your first time here. This is my treat. Order anything you want.'

"I couldn't believe it," said John. "I tried to tell him he didn't have to do that, but he insisted. So we waited a little bit until two seats opened up at the counter.

"It was great. We sat next to a guy who's been coming to Johnson's three days a week for 35 years," said John. "And we sat in front of the grill watching them make the burgers. They take these balls of meat, put them on the grill and then flatten them with a spatula.

"Then they cover them with Velveeta cheese," said John. "Jane said hers was the best burger she'd ever had."

John said when they got up to leave, Jane asked the waitress for the name of the guy who paid for their meal. He's a regular several-times-a-weeker, too.

"I told the waitress the next time we're here, I'm going to leave an envelope with money in it and could she give it to the man who paid for our meal? She told me she'd make sure he got it.

"This was one of the most amazing things I've ever seen," said John. "I don't know if it was because it was the Christmas season, or what. But I'll never forget this. Wow."

We seem to be living in strange times these days. There sometimes seems to be a veil of wariness around us, a sense of caution about the things – or people – we've never seen before. What John and Jane experienced, I think, is how a random act of kindness – even in a burger joint – can be a continuing work of art that defines the nature of our better angels.

It's a great story.

 

 

Here We Come A-Caroling...

When I was a kid taking piano lessons (There's another whole blog here. My parents had a piano when I was growing up and they thought it would be great discipline for me if I learned how to play the durn thing. Trouble was, I was 6 years old and didn't want to practice for an hour every day. I wanted to be with my friends at the playground across the street. It took my parents about a year to figure that out before they eventually said I could stop. Consequently, I can't even tell you where Middle C is these days. Even more consequentially, I really wish I could play the piano now).

Anyway, when I was a kid taking piano lessons, we had a songbook that had a section full of Christmas carols in it. They were the traditional tunes like "O Little Town of Bethlehem" or "The First Noel" or "Hark! The Herald Angels Sing." Even "Deck The Halls." My favorite was "O Come All Ye Faithful." You get the point.

I loved those songs. They were my introduction to the season and most of them ran parallel to my Moravian upbringing. I even memorized the lyrics and I would sing them for hours, entirely off key.

As I grew older, (and thanks to listening to the radio) more Christmas songs joined my mental catalog. Some of them were OK. Some were atrocious. Most of them couldn't keep up with my piano songbook.

Here, in no particular order, is my list of flawed-to-horrible Christmas songs that I would never play on the piano even if I knew how to play:

I don't think I've ever been more annoyed by a song than "The Chipmunk Song." I don't even know if that's the real title. It came out as a novelty song in 1957 – when I was 6 and learning piano – and I hated it. I hated it then and I hate it now.

Tied for first place in my world might be "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer." What a stupid story. Santa always had eight reindeer. You could even look it up. Clement Moore's classic poem, "A Visit from St. Nicholas," lists the original eight flyers. Eight. No more, no less. Rudolf, the song written by Johnny Marks in 1949, was made famous by a cowboy, Gene Autry, to sell records. Rudolf was never a real reindeer like the others were/are.

Also tied for first as the worst in my world is "Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer." Oh, please. You're gonna hit-and-run my drunk grandmother at Christmas time?

I don't want to hear "Jingle Bell Rock" by Bobby Helms, especially after I've just come from a Moravian love feast of yeast rolls and coffee and where a pre-teenager wonderfully sang "Morning Star" to me.

In a similar vein is "Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree" by Brenda Lee. You should be rocking on New Year's Eve, not so much on Christmas. 

"All I Want for Christmas is My Two Front Teeth." Yikes.

I liked Burl Ives. I don't like "A Holly Jolly Christmas."

"I saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus." I didn't used to mind this one so much until I read a review that I can no longer unsee, so I'm going to ruin it for you, too. On the surface it's a song about a child watching his mother being sexually assaulted by an elderly home invader until you realize that mom isn't really cheating on dad but that both adults have a Santa fetish.

I love The Beatles. None were ever better. But John Lennon's "Happy Xmas (War is Over)" and Paul McCartney's "Wonderful Christmastime" makes you wonder how "In My Life" and "Yesterday" evolved from the same brains. Subpar Christmas tunes for both of them.

I never got into "Santa Claus is Coming to Town." It gave me too many rules to follow in a season meant for happiness, brotherhood, reflection and for being a kid.

There are, no doubt, hundreds of other no-worthy Christmas tunes out there, some of which I've never heard because they are recent and I don't listen to the radio as much as I used to. But they're out there.

Besides, it's probably too late for me to start learning the guitar.

Merry Christmas.

 

It just gets better, doesn't it?

I was thinking about writing another Christmas-themed blog as we head toward the Big Day, but then I saw a chyron crawl across the bottom of the TV screen the other day that said RFK's lawyer has petitioned the Food and Drug Administration to revoke its approval of the polio vaccine.

What the bloody hell...?

Here we go. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is president-elect Donald Trump's nomination to head up the US Department of Health and Human Services. Aaron Siri is the lawyer affiliated with Kennedy who filed the petition in 2022 on behalf of the Informed Consent Action Network, a nonprofit that challenges the safety of vaccines and vaccine mandates under the guise of "medical freedom."

The key word here seems to be "informed."

I am 73 years old, soon to be 74, and I remember back in the 1950s – probably around 1956 or '57 –  when we were given little pink sugar cubes in elementary school. The sugar cube was the delivery device, and the pink coloring was the actual polio vaccine. Mmm, sugar. I probably would have ingested the whole tray if they hadn't told me to take just one.

And now, decades later, we know what sugar can do for us, right?

At any rate, it must have worked. I didn't get polio, and neither did millions of others. I take that as empirical evidence that the vaccine worked.

So now along comes Kennedy, an acknowledged vaccine skeptic, and his lawyer 70 years later indicating that further testing of the inactivated polio vaccine is needed. The inactivated vaccine is different than the oral vaccine in that it is injected and doesn't use a live version of the virus like the oral vaccine did. It doesn't stop the virus itself, but rather helps the immune system to recognize and fight the virus. The inactivated version has been in use for decades with startling success, but Siri is arguing that there were no placebo-controlled clinical trials to prove the safety of the inactivated vaccine.

The thing is, most placebo-controlled trials are considered unethical because there is a percentage of the participants who would not get the shot – and thus be susceptible to contracting the disease.

Mitch McConnell, the Senate Minority leader and a polio survivor himself, stated on Friday that "the polio vaccine has saved millions of lives and has held out the promise of eradicating a terrible disease. Efforts to undermine public confidence in proven cures are not just uniformed (there's that word again), they're dangerous."

The FDA is reviewing Siri's petition, but if Kennedy is confirmed as the head of HHS, he could intervene in the petition review process. Great. A nonmedical person making uninformed medical decisions for us. This is the kind of government nearly 50 percent of us voted for because they argued price of the eggs was too high.

As it is, vaccination rates have been falling in this country, which might correlate to a rise in whooping cough and measles. One of the vaccines Siri wants to withdraw is for hepatitis B.

I don't know if Siri's petition will succeed. It very well may not. But after decades of success, why are these vaccines even being reviewed at all? And if they are being reviewed, there's a chance that under an autocratic government with a politicized Supreme Court, these life-saving vaccines could disappear, just like Roe v. Wade did. It's just another form of control, and it's happening right in front of us.

Merry Christmas.

Hallmark holidays

I was surfing through my 2,000 TV channels the other day trying to find something mindlessly different to watch because I wasn't in the mood for critical thinking. We'd just finished with the presidential elections, which proved to me at least half of the nation wasn't into critical thinking, either.

Kim was on the phone with a relative so I knew I had at least 90 minutes of my own.

I made my way through several offerings until I came across the Hallmark Channel. It doesn't get any more mindless than that, so I stopped surfing. I'd already missed the first half hour or so of this particular Christmas flick, but I stopped because one of the actresses, Danica McKellar, had a vaguely familiar face.

Just at that moment, Kim walked in and sat down. She was  89 minutes earlier that I expected and I was halfway embarrassed because, you know, I was watching a Hallmark movie, Crown for Christmas, and not Field of Dreams or Saving Private Ryan or even It's a Wonderful Life.

"Who's that?" asked Kim when McKellar's face came on the screen. "She looks familiar."

So I Googled Danica McKellar. It turns out that she was Winnie Cooper on The Wonder Years back in the late 1980s and early 90s.

"Winnie! It's Winnie!"

My Google research told me that she was something of a math wizard, having published several best-selling children's books on mathematics, specifically targeting young girls to help build their confidence.

My mind immediately drifted to Mayim Bailik, who played Amy Farrah Fowler on The Big Bang Theory. Bailik has a PhD in neuroscience.

And then there's Brian May, the lead guitarist for Queen, who earned his doctorate in astrophysics from Imperial College in London 33 years after he first applied. It took him that long because, you know, he was busy touring the world. Stars with other lives, who knew? We will rock you, indeed.

Anyway, back to Hallmark.

As much as we enjoyed watching Winnie, Hallmark's hallmark production values kept getting in the way. At least it did for me.

"All the Hallmark movies are the same," I told Kim. "It's about either a bookstore or bakery or bed and breakfast that is in financial trouble. A beautiful female CEO who recently lost her job or who is an author with writer's block somehow gets involved with the handsome owner of the failing business in an effort to help. He's usually a widower with a precocious child (never more than one kid, though). They fall in love in spite of themselves and seal the deal with a long anticipated kiss in the final 60 seconds of the movie."

Most of these movies are filmed in Canada, I think, and there's always a dusting of snow which makes everything look like a Norman Rockwell Christmas card. You want to live there because everybody is so happy and helpful, which really doesn't explain why the bookstore or bakery are failing in the first place.

I'm already revealing too much about myself here.

I don't know. Maybe there's something to be said for mindlessness. Then again, I guess I'm grateful there's 1,999 other channels to choose from.

Winner, winner, turkey dinner

We are in the midst of eating season, and if you don't believe it, just ask your waistline.

Or your scales.

In my world, the eating season begins Oct. 31 with the annual sugar grab on Halloween. It continues 27 days later with Thanksgiving before waxing high tide at Christmas with cookies and cakes. It then reaches its denouement on New Year's Day with a pork and sauerkraut meal supplemented by collard greens and black-eyed peas designed to make you stop eating forever.

Stacy's incomparable table setting is an art form.

In between, there are virtually two solid months of picking, sneaking, and cheating with M&Ms, potato chips and dip and Cheez-its because we have endless football games in front of us that require mindless snacking as we watch power sweeps and post patterns. Maybe even flag plantings. You probably don't even know you're doing it.

The eating season.

My eating season includes a stretch of a couple days around Thanksgiving where I have to sample my favorite food group: turkey. Usually, I search out a local restaurant that offers a Thanksgiving meal the day before Thanksgiving. It's become something of a tradition in my house.

Sure, it's usually processed turkey and dressing that came out of a box, but, hey, it's the holidays. You make concessions.

Anyway, this year, we had a bonus. Southern Lunch prepared its turkey meal on Tuesday as well as Wednesday, so that gave me an extra day to get a head start on my white meat fantasy.

Thanksgiving with the Wests and Wehrles.

Here's where I give owner Herbie Lohr his props. Tuesday's meal was delicious. I had generous slices of white meat turkey with dressing on top and underneath and swimming in gravy. I ordered mac and cheese as my side, along with a sweet potato casserole that was so good it could have been dessert. Thanks, Herbie. Mission accomplished.

On Wednesday my pre-Thanksgiving meal came from Village Grill. I don't remember VG preparing this holiday dinner before, so I gave it a shot. Their turkey was cut into bite-sized pieces and mixed into their dressing, and then piled high on my plate like an offering to the gods. I also had a side of mac and cheese, along with baked apples. Mmm mmm, good.

I was off to a good start.

But the piéce de résistance came on Thanksgiving day. Because my family is scattered to the four winds and are hundreds of miles away from each other (one brother is in Pennsylvania and another is in Oklahoma), our next door neighbors – Billy and Stacy West – have invited us over for Thanksgiving for several years now.

Billy used his grill to create a moist, delicious bird while Stacy went nuts in the kitchen, making mac and cheese (there's a theme here), an addictive sweet potato casserole, roasted cauliflower and roasted broccoli, collard greens and a pear salad assembled with fresh greens from our shared garden. Oh, and pumpkin pie, too. Kim contributed with an asparagus dish, mashed potatoes and her magical family dressing that she learned from her mother and for which she doesn't even have a recipe. It's somehow summoned from her DNA.

Oh, my.

This was the best meal of all because it was a meal culled from camaraderie. Both of the West's kids were home from college (Emma is in grad school at the Longy School of Music of Bard College in Boston and Sam is a freshman at the University of North Carolina) which fully completed our circle. The conversation at the dinner table was easy, the neighborliness was enhanced. I guess it's why Billy blows the leaves out of my yard every week. I guess it's why I wheel his garbage containers back to their respective spots every Friday. I guess this is what agape love is.

Anyway, the meal was so good we had it again the next day. As leftovers. In front of a football game.

And Christmas is just 24 days away. Pass the cookies, please.