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.
Chalk River Nuclear Reactor
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.
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