I’m a Cana­di­an. You know, from that coun­try just to the north of the U.S. which Don­ald Trump has been loud­ly threat­en­ing and snig­ger­ing at. The U.S. has had a lot of Pres­i­dents in my life­time, all of whom Cana­di­ans have had to deal with. It has been a bumpy ride. One of them, Jim­my Carter, died today, at the age of 100. Most Cana­di­ans have formed a good opin­ion of Carter.

But when I trav­elled in the U.S. in the 1980s, I was shocked by the way peo­ple talked con­temp­tu­ous­ly about Jim­my Carter. Oh, how they sneered at him! I couldn’t under­stand it. Back in 1952, an exper­i­men­tal nuclear reac­tor in Cana­da suf­fered a dan­ger­ous melt­down. This was very ear­ly in the devel­op­ment of nuclear pow­er, and it was in fact the first pub­licly known nuclear acci­dent. Cana­da asked for help from the small num­ber of experts in the field to deal with it. Young Jim­my Carter was then a U.S. Navy lieu­tenant who was work­ing on a nuclear sub­ma­rine project in Sch­enec­tady, N.Y., not too far away. Carter took a team up to Chalk Riv­er, Ontario to help the men shut­ting down the reac­tor. This was an incred­i­bly dan­ger­ous job that required him and oth­ers to be low­ered into the reac­tor room on a rope and turn bolts while being bom­bard­ed with dead­ly radi­a­tion —- a task that had to be per­formed in less than 90 sec­onds for each turn. Carter was warned that he might nev­er have chil­dren from the expo­sure. But he was a brave young man.

It aston­ished me that there was so much hos­til­i­ty toward a Pres­i­dent who had unflinch­ing­ly cham­pi­oned human rights and democ­ra­cy — but who was dri­ven out of office by oil prices which he had no con­trol over, and a hostage cri­sis that Ronald Rea­gan had secret­ly paid off the Ira­ni­ans to keep going until he could get into office. The trea­so­nous Rea­gan deal was well-known to any­one who cared to know. Final­ly, the rea­son dawned on me. Carter was gen­uine­ly a coura­geous man, and there’s noth­ing Amer­i­cans hate more than courage. They pre­fer infan­tile macho pos­tur­ing. Carter was an intel­li­gent man with an under­stand­ing of sci­ence. Amer­i­cans REALLY hate that. Carter was prin­ci­pled and hon­est. Amer­i­cans avoid such peo­ple like the plague. Carter was com­mit­ted to human rights. That’s anoth­er no-no for Amer­i­cans. Carter had real-world mil­i­tary expe­ri­ence and under­stood the mil­i­tary. Amer­i­cans much pre­fer frauds like Rea­gan, who fought WW2 from the Hol­ly­wood Can­teen, or, in our time, Pres­i­dent Bone­spurs. Carter was a sin­cere Chris­t­ian, attempt­ing through­out his life to fol­low the best teach­ings of Jesus. That’s some­thing Amer­i­cans also despise — they pre­fer a reli­gion of greed, cru­el­ty and pet­ty spite. Carter was the gen­uine arti­cle, a real man —- and Amer­i­cans hate that more than any­thing on Earth. They will time and again pre­fer a pho­ny, a fraud, a weasel, or a con-artist.

This was my harsh assess­ment at the time, and I’m afraid that the decades that fol­lowed more than con­firmed my opinion.