Sunday mornings in Plains, Georgia, Mr. Jimmy wakes in his unchanged ranch home with the '70s appliances and same old Formica countertops at the usual hour of 5 A.M., and inevitably scribbles some Bible-lesson notes that he mostly never refers to, and then, after his ablutions and 7 A.M. breakfast with Rosalynn—oatmeal is a favorite—the Secret Service ferries him through town in a black car, past the gas station that was once his brother's, past his old campaign headquarters in a little warehouse, past the home Rosalynn was born in, to Maranatha Baptist Church.
The church is the bull's-eye of his stomping grounds—the verdant flatland upon which Plains sits, where he hunts and fishes. He receives vegetables from the farm where he grew up, a few miles outside town, which is now on the National Register of Historic Places. He visits every so often, and there's the old bedroom that belonged to Mr. Jimmy, with a model wooden ship and weathered copy of War and Peace, and there's the dining-room table at which the Carter family—two girls and two boys—sat to eat, or sat to read and eat, as Mr. Jimmy's mother, Lillian, insisted that her children always be reading. And there's the scrubby red-dirt tennis court built by Mr. Jimmy's daddy, Earl, a Sunday-school teacher himself, who employed a wicked slice to always beat his son.
About 40 Sundays a year, Mr. Jimmy materializes from thin air, flickering before us at Maranatha to lead Bible study, to say, No, the world's not going to end. Not just yet. Though he's elfin with age, you'd still instantly recognize him as our 39th president: with those same hooded ice-blue eyes, the same rectangular head, the same famous 1,000-watt smile. But when he teaches like this, he transforms from whatever your vision of Jimmy Carter is into someone different, some kind of 93-year-old Yoda-like knower, who in his tenth decade on earth still possesses that rarest of airy commodities: hope.
Hope is something that Mr. Jimmy thinks about a lot—and faith, too, from which hope rises in the first place. It's something that you're born with, faith, but also something you must re-apply every day, like a gel or cream. He says first you have faith in your mama, when you're suckling at her breast. And then you have faith in your people: the tight-knit circle of kin and neighbors in your town. Then—your country. He says what might be most important, though, is faith in a creator of some sort. Mr. Jimmy says you can fill in the blank: Muhammad, Buddha, Jesus…Gaia, Martians, T'Challa, king of Wakanda…
In front of the congregation—in spring and summer, autumn and winter—he perambulates the green carpet like old people sometimes do, as if on the deck of a ship on a rolling sea. He wears a turquoise bolo, somewhere between groovy and huh? His face is still elastic, the zygomatic muscles reflexively drawing his mouth into that smile, but his voice sometimes turns phlegmy without notice—and he starts coughing. His mind is a churning thing of wonder. His recall is sharp, his barbs of humor unexpected.
“So you didn't put 'em to sleep, right?” he says to the pastor, Brandon Patterson, on one April morning when he steps up to the lectern, flashing a mischievous grin. He turns to the overflow crowd. “You like our pastor okay?” Murmurings of assent. “Well, he just passed his 24th birthday and he got married and he got a dahwg.” Mr. Jimmy hangs on the word, and bends it, to laughter. “He and I used to argue about who loved their wife more, but now he's divided his love between a dahwg and his wife, so I think I'm ahead of him!”
Among ex-presidents, Mr. Jimmy blazes on. Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan, both men who sandwiched him in office, are dead; George senior teeters; Bill Clinton tremors when tired and, at 71, has begun to fade before our eyes. (Meanwhile, Bill and Hillary have pocketed over $150 million from speeches.) George W. has retreated to a more low-profile, patrician life of painting and occasional aid trips to Africa, while Obama is just beginning a post-presidency that some have projected could be worth roughly $250 million in personal gain and includes the recent announcement of a multi-year production deal with Netflix.
With Carter now in his fourth decade as ex-president, his actual presidency feels more like a footnote, an aberration in the life of a holy man. The public servant in him, the impulse that led him to the presidency in the first place, has thrived in the aftermath of his former Beltway imprisonment. While he rejects pay-to-play speechmaking and appearances, his net worth—reportedly $7 million to $8 million—has come from the 30-plus books he's written, many of them spiritual in nature. His activism and advocacy across the globe—in particular his success in eradicating Guinea worm in Africa and Asia, from 3.5 million estimated cases in 1986 to 30 last year—led to the 2002 Nobel Peace Prize. (...)
If one were to judge by the sustained Sunday crowds, Maranatha Baptist Church has turned into an unlikely American pilgrimage site. Perhaps we're afflicted by a deeper national need, or lack, the kind that inspires searchers to travel hundreds, sometimes thousands, of miles and begin lining up in the dark, but it raises a bunch of personal and collective questions. After all, soul-searching is a by-product of having temporarily lost one's soul.
On one of my Sunday visits, last November, I arrived around 4:30 A.M. and was handed a scrap of paper with the number 15 scrawled on it, meaning I was 15th in line. The man doing the handing out was named George, dressed in blue slacks and a checked shirt with a red ball cap on his head. He said that some Sundays, if you're not there four or five hours ahead of time, you don't get in. The Sunday after Mr. Jimmy announced he had cancer, in August 2015, 1,800 people came to Plains, beginning to queue on Saturday night. (The highway patrol shut down the road out front; Mr. Jimmy did two lessons, one in a nearby auditorium, and still they turned people away.)
Today, George had arrived at his usual time, around 4 A.M., to find a young man—twitchy, half-awake, and chilled—in a suit, no tie, white shirt, standing out there on the front porch of the church in the dark, here to see Mr. Jimmy before it's too late. Everything at that hour seemed special in Plains to someone coming from the North, as I had. George's honeyed drawl, for one. And the silence was special, in the hour when the Muscogee ghosts give up night on the southern coastal plain, and everything is deep and still. George had his eye on the special sky now, scanning the canopy of stars.
“Last week we saw it three times,” he said. “We won't see it again for about ten days.”
He was talking about the International Space Station, which you could track with an app on your phone. On his phone, too, George showed some pictures of yesterday's fishing trip with Mr. Jimmy. No artifice, no braggadocio: just another fishing trip with Mr. Jimmy—who you can almost forget is ex-president of the United States down here—to add to the others. (...)
Our America, as summed up recently by The New York Times, is a place where “life expectancy has declined, suicide rates have risen, the opioid crisis has worsened, inequality has grown, and confidence in government has fallen.” But our democracy has survived ragged, if not broken, times before. In 1971 the Times asked in a headline, IS AMERICA FALLING APART? Then put a fine point on it: “America is a prewar country, psychologically unprepared for one thing to go wrong,” wrote Anthony Burgess. “Now everything [seems] to be going wrong. Hence the neurosis, despair, the Kafka feeling that the whole marvelous fabric of American life is coming apart at the seams.”
If we were fully unraveling in 1971, what was 1974, then? What were 1776 and 1862? We were coming apart at the seams in 1929 and 1942, 1963 and 2001. It's possible we've been coming apart since our inception. Perhaps it's a shortcoming of our American imagination, or national narcolepsy—and part of our volcanic creation story, too—to believe that this moment, right now, may be the worst moment ever, over and over and over again. If we forget other dysfunctional presidents, from John Quincy Adams and John Tyler to LBJ and Nixon, we might believe that this president is the most irrational, unstable, and narcissistic of all. The potential split atom of our democracy forever threatens to be our annihilation.
But it doesn't mitigate these times to say there have been times like them before. It only begs the question: To whom might we appeal, or where might we find not just a voice of reason but one to remind us that—despite division and gun violence, deep-seated issues of race and class—the experiment is still worthy and vital?
Perhaps this is why people come to Plains. Because to gaze upon Jimmy Carter, to look upon a face marked by time—the charismatic handsomeness of his 50s has softened, hollowed, and transformed into the weatherworn visage of his 90s—is to see someone shorn of ambition, trying to tell a truth, or his truth. Somewhere inside the man we knew as president, there's always been Mr. Jimmy, the seeker, who over time grew in concentration, no longer caring for our approval but, in a weird way, for the state of our national soul. If he was once criticized as a politician for being egomaniacal or sanctimonious, it's easier, with his presidency in the deep past, to accept Jimmy Carter as a human being whose heart might have always been in the right place. In church, teaching from the Bible, Mr. Jimmy becomes to his followers the purest distillation, then, of some post-presidency ideal, some secular saint. On the hallway bulletin board are pinned pictures of community events, the Carters beaming with locals. The butterfly garden out back was built by Rosalynn. And at these Sunday-school meetings, her husband steadies our twitchiness in singsong tones, with a personal psalm of history, Bible study, current events, and autobiography.
“There's no way to separate completely the responsibilities of public service and also some basic moral and ethical principles on which we base the finest aspects of our life,” Mr. Jimmy says, “and we cure the problems in our society.” He likes to quote a favorite theologian, Reinhold Niebuhr, who said, “The sad duty of politics is to establish justice in a sinful world.” Carter says, for better or worse, he tried. In the Oval Office every morning before beginning his day's work, he would stand before the huge globe situated by the Resolute desk and touch his finger on Moscow, trying to put himself in Brezhnev's shoes. He would think: How can I not provoke him today?
“We never shot a bullet, we never dropped a bomb, we never launched a missile,” says Mr. Jimmy of his time in office. It's a fact he's proud of, especially given that since World War II, America's been at war with about 20 countries. China, on the other hand, hasn't been in a major war since 1979. “What they have done is to use their enormous resources to benefit their own people,” he says. “China has 14,000 miles of fast-speed rail.”
Look at the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, he tells us one Sunday morning: “Thirty little, tiny paragraphs that you can read over in five minutes.… A lot of them are not being honored by our country in particular.… That's why we have wars today. All of those 30 paragraphs guarantee that women and men should have equal pay and equal opportunity for advancement and equal rights.… We have a long way to go.”
If we as a nation suffer from thin-skinned righteousness, or ideological arrogance, he says he himself has suffered the sins of pride, thinking himself superior at times—to women, to those of different background. He's not proud of this in the least, but he has the courage to admit it.
“Who decided whether you'd be kind or filled with hatred?” he asks on another morning. “Who decided whether you would forgive other people or not? Who decided whether you'd be honest and tell the truth or not? Who decided whether you would be generous or not? Who decided whether you'd be filled with love or not?”
Then he answers his own questions: “Every one of us,” says Mr. Jimmy, “has our own free decision to answer the question This is the kind of person I'm going to be. It's not a decision that your parents can make for you, or your wife can make for you, or your husband or your friends. Everybody in here has the right to decide This is the kind of person I'm going to be. And if you haven't been the kind of person that you are proud of so far, you're free from now on the rest of your life to correct your mistakes.”
by Michael Paterniti, GQ | Read more:
The church is the bull's-eye of his stomping grounds—the verdant flatland upon which Plains sits, where he hunts and fishes. He receives vegetables from the farm where he grew up, a few miles outside town, which is now on the National Register of Historic Places. He visits every so often, and there's the old bedroom that belonged to Mr. Jimmy, with a model wooden ship and weathered copy of War and Peace, and there's the dining-room table at which the Carter family—two girls and two boys—sat to eat, or sat to read and eat, as Mr. Jimmy's mother, Lillian, insisted that her children always be reading. And there's the scrubby red-dirt tennis court built by Mr. Jimmy's daddy, Earl, a Sunday-school teacher himself, who employed a wicked slice to always beat his son.About 40 Sundays a year, Mr. Jimmy materializes from thin air, flickering before us at Maranatha to lead Bible study, to say, No, the world's not going to end. Not just yet. Though he's elfin with age, you'd still instantly recognize him as our 39th president: with those same hooded ice-blue eyes, the same rectangular head, the same famous 1,000-watt smile. But when he teaches like this, he transforms from whatever your vision of Jimmy Carter is into someone different, some kind of 93-year-old Yoda-like knower, who in his tenth decade on earth still possesses that rarest of airy commodities: hope.
Hope is something that Mr. Jimmy thinks about a lot—and faith, too, from which hope rises in the first place. It's something that you're born with, faith, but also something you must re-apply every day, like a gel or cream. He says first you have faith in your mama, when you're suckling at her breast. And then you have faith in your people: the tight-knit circle of kin and neighbors in your town. Then—your country. He says what might be most important, though, is faith in a creator of some sort. Mr. Jimmy says you can fill in the blank: Muhammad, Buddha, Jesus…Gaia, Martians, T'Challa, king of Wakanda…
In front of the congregation—in spring and summer, autumn and winter—he perambulates the green carpet like old people sometimes do, as if on the deck of a ship on a rolling sea. He wears a turquoise bolo, somewhere between groovy and huh? His face is still elastic, the zygomatic muscles reflexively drawing his mouth into that smile, but his voice sometimes turns phlegmy without notice—and he starts coughing. His mind is a churning thing of wonder. His recall is sharp, his barbs of humor unexpected.
“So you didn't put 'em to sleep, right?” he says to the pastor, Brandon Patterson, on one April morning when he steps up to the lectern, flashing a mischievous grin. He turns to the overflow crowd. “You like our pastor okay?” Murmurings of assent. “Well, he just passed his 24th birthday and he got married and he got a dahwg.” Mr. Jimmy hangs on the word, and bends it, to laughter. “He and I used to argue about who loved their wife more, but now he's divided his love between a dahwg and his wife, so I think I'm ahead of him!”
Among ex-presidents, Mr. Jimmy blazes on. Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan, both men who sandwiched him in office, are dead; George senior teeters; Bill Clinton tremors when tired and, at 71, has begun to fade before our eyes. (Meanwhile, Bill and Hillary have pocketed over $150 million from speeches.) George W. has retreated to a more low-profile, patrician life of painting and occasional aid trips to Africa, while Obama is just beginning a post-presidency that some have projected could be worth roughly $250 million in personal gain and includes the recent announcement of a multi-year production deal with Netflix.
With Carter now in his fourth decade as ex-president, his actual presidency feels more like a footnote, an aberration in the life of a holy man. The public servant in him, the impulse that led him to the presidency in the first place, has thrived in the aftermath of his former Beltway imprisonment. While he rejects pay-to-play speechmaking and appearances, his net worth—reportedly $7 million to $8 million—has come from the 30-plus books he's written, many of them spiritual in nature. His activism and advocacy across the globe—in particular his success in eradicating Guinea worm in Africa and Asia, from 3.5 million estimated cases in 1986 to 30 last year—led to the 2002 Nobel Peace Prize. (...)
If one were to judge by the sustained Sunday crowds, Maranatha Baptist Church has turned into an unlikely American pilgrimage site. Perhaps we're afflicted by a deeper national need, or lack, the kind that inspires searchers to travel hundreds, sometimes thousands, of miles and begin lining up in the dark, but it raises a bunch of personal and collective questions. After all, soul-searching is a by-product of having temporarily lost one's soul.
On one of my Sunday visits, last November, I arrived around 4:30 A.M. and was handed a scrap of paper with the number 15 scrawled on it, meaning I was 15th in line. The man doing the handing out was named George, dressed in blue slacks and a checked shirt with a red ball cap on his head. He said that some Sundays, if you're not there four or five hours ahead of time, you don't get in. The Sunday after Mr. Jimmy announced he had cancer, in August 2015, 1,800 people came to Plains, beginning to queue on Saturday night. (The highway patrol shut down the road out front; Mr. Jimmy did two lessons, one in a nearby auditorium, and still they turned people away.)
Today, George had arrived at his usual time, around 4 A.M., to find a young man—twitchy, half-awake, and chilled—in a suit, no tie, white shirt, standing out there on the front porch of the church in the dark, here to see Mr. Jimmy before it's too late. Everything at that hour seemed special in Plains to someone coming from the North, as I had. George's honeyed drawl, for one. And the silence was special, in the hour when the Muscogee ghosts give up night on the southern coastal plain, and everything is deep and still. George had his eye on the special sky now, scanning the canopy of stars.
“Last week we saw it three times,” he said. “We won't see it again for about ten days.”
He was talking about the International Space Station, which you could track with an app on your phone. On his phone, too, George showed some pictures of yesterday's fishing trip with Mr. Jimmy. No artifice, no braggadocio: just another fishing trip with Mr. Jimmy—who you can almost forget is ex-president of the United States down here—to add to the others. (...)
Our America, as summed up recently by The New York Times, is a place where “life expectancy has declined, suicide rates have risen, the opioid crisis has worsened, inequality has grown, and confidence in government has fallen.” But our democracy has survived ragged, if not broken, times before. In 1971 the Times asked in a headline, IS AMERICA FALLING APART? Then put a fine point on it: “America is a prewar country, psychologically unprepared for one thing to go wrong,” wrote Anthony Burgess. “Now everything [seems] to be going wrong. Hence the neurosis, despair, the Kafka feeling that the whole marvelous fabric of American life is coming apart at the seams.”
If we were fully unraveling in 1971, what was 1974, then? What were 1776 and 1862? We were coming apart at the seams in 1929 and 1942, 1963 and 2001. It's possible we've been coming apart since our inception. Perhaps it's a shortcoming of our American imagination, or national narcolepsy—and part of our volcanic creation story, too—to believe that this moment, right now, may be the worst moment ever, over and over and over again. If we forget other dysfunctional presidents, from John Quincy Adams and John Tyler to LBJ and Nixon, we might believe that this president is the most irrational, unstable, and narcissistic of all. The potential split atom of our democracy forever threatens to be our annihilation.
But it doesn't mitigate these times to say there have been times like them before. It only begs the question: To whom might we appeal, or where might we find not just a voice of reason but one to remind us that—despite division and gun violence, deep-seated issues of race and class—the experiment is still worthy and vital?
Perhaps this is why people come to Plains. Because to gaze upon Jimmy Carter, to look upon a face marked by time—the charismatic handsomeness of his 50s has softened, hollowed, and transformed into the weatherworn visage of his 90s—is to see someone shorn of ambition, trying to tell a truth, or his truth. Somewhere inside the man we knew as president, there's always been Mr. Jimmy, the seeker, who over time grew in concentration, no longer caring for our approval but, in a weird way, for the state of our national soul. If he was once criticized as a politician for being egomaniacal or sanctimonious, it's easier, with his presidency in the deep past, to accept Jimmy Carter as a human being whose heart might have always been in the right place. In church, teaching from the Bible, Mr. Jimmy becomes to his followers the purest distillation, then, of some post-presidency ideal, some secular saint. On the hallway bulletin board are pinned pictures of community events, the Carters beaming with locals. The butterfly garden out back was built by Rosalynn. And at these Sunday-school meetings, her husband steadies our twitchiness in singsong tones, with a personal psalm of history, Bible study, current events, and autobiography.
“There's no way to separate completely the responsibilities of public service and also some basic moral and ethical principles on which we base the finest aspects of our life,” Mr. Jimmy says, “and we cure the problems in our society.” He likes to quote a favorite theologian, Reinhold Niebuhr, who said, “The sad duty of politics is to establish justice in a sinful world.” Carter says, for better or worse, he tried. In the Oval Office every morning before beginning his day's work, he would stand before the huge globe situated by the Resolute desk and touch his finger on Moscow, trying to put himself in Brezhnev's shoes. He would think: How can I not provoke him today?
“We never shot a bullet, we never dropped a bomb, we never launched a missile,” says Mr. Jimmy of his time in office. It's a fact he's proud of, especially given that since World War II, America's been at war with about 20 countries. China, on the other hand, hasn't been in a major war since 1979. “What they have done is to use their enormous resources to benefit their own people,” he says. “China has 14,000 miles of fast-speed rail.”
Look at the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, he tells us one Sunday morning: “Thirty little, tiny paragraphs that you can read over in five minutes.… A lot of them are not being honored by our country in particular.… That's why we have wars today. All of those 30 paragraphs guarantee that women and men should have equal pay and equal opportunity for advancement and equal rights.… We have a long way to go.”
If we as a nation suffer from thin-skinned righteousness, or ideological arrogance, he says he himself has suffered the sins of pride, thinking himself superior at times—to women, to those of different background. He's not proud of this in the least, but he has the courage to admit it.
“Who decided whether you'd be kind or filled with hatred?” he asks on another morning. “Who decided whether you would forgive other people or not? Who decided whether you'd be honest and tell the truth or not? Who decided whether you would be generous or not? Who decided whether you'd be filled with love or not?”
Then he answers his own questions: “Every one of us,” says Mr. Jimmy, “has our own free decision to answer the question This is the kind of person I'm going to be. It's not a decision that your parents can make for you, or your wife can make for you, or your husband or your friends. Everybody in here has the right to decide This is the kind of person I'm going to be. And if you haven't been the kind of person that you are proud of so far, you're free from now on the rest of your life to correct your mistakes.”
by Michael Paterniti, GQ | Read more:
Image: Matt Martin
[ed. A decent man in an indecent profession.]
