Jimmah Carter — 93 years old, tanned, rested, bags packed, new passport in hand and ready
to head to Pyongyang. By the way, Rosalin thinks the Russians stole the election from Hillary,
while Jimmah does not. (Image courtesy of Dustin Chambers of the NYT)

Endless third-rate presidential political campaigning, growing need for better access to medical care, insane price inflation of our southernmost home after just three short years of occupancy, and fatigued after so many low-rent island rendezvouses with hurricanes during the previous fifteen years led to us deciding to cut and run north to live in the South along the wetlands of the Coastal Empire with its eastside gangs, while enjoying tales of NORKs, Russians, and assorted hackers with the assistance of bottles of Makers Mark 46.

My life on Key West: ninety miles north of Havana and fifteen hundred years on never ending happy hour blues music trails . . . farewell to my wine and liquor nights on Duval Street; or, Key West, I hardly knew ye . . . I was just a bit character in a rude and witless tale of the disappearing American Dream, with notes, nightmares and other partial memories from Washington DC, Honolulu, Monterey, South Bend and Albany, Georgia . . . and 35 years inside the security state as a veteran of three wars — one cold and long, one hot and short, one hot and endless — with liberty and justice for all, world without end (all others pay cash), unless or until crazy people get atomic tipped ICBMs.

Some folks will tell you that as we age, we sometimes get spooked like horses because oldsters become naturally more nervous and jittery about their aches and pains, but that’s not right. Horses come to that way naturally because their eyeballs make things appear larger. With us humans, we finally stop listening to our internal BS and get in tune with the fading echoes around us of truth, decay and dissolution.

This news flash doesn’t come over the radio, TV or internet, followed by a song about “faster bikes, smoother roads, older whiskey and more money . . . ” but then a real update did come on my car radio in early ’16 about how bad the coming summer hurricane season was going to be, because our official government computer models that were wrong the past eleven years told us so. Again.

We were living in very strange times in ’16, and they were likely to get a lot stranger before we bottomed out. Which could have happened a lot sooner than even NYT thinks today 18 months later or too late as the case may be . . . because ’17 is, after all, another election year, well some of us think it’s just one continuous election year when the NYT’s and WAPO’s favored candidates don’t win, and more than a few folks I talk to or hear from seem to feel we are in for strangeness, weird badness of one shape or form. More than a few people say we are already deep in the midst of it.

Which recently seems to be truer by the day. The evidence points both ways, depending on the day’s tweets and media’s over and under reactions . . . But from my perch in the Hostess City out on the eastern edge of the Coastal Empire of Georgia, the storm barometer mercury seems to be falling, sometimes fast and sometimes slow. So without a real bad storm hitting us, maybe it no longer matters. I’ve given up paying attention to the shrill voicings of filthy news about this or that person’s falling numbers in the latest Gallup/WSJ/FACEBOOK insta poll. Who cares what today’s trending digital gaffiti crapola indicates about who will be our next president. Or, who is fouling the national airwaves for the next day/week/month’s news cycles. Paying attention to that will drive us all straight into opiod abuse with its poisonous gibberish.

Well, we up and left Florida last year and headed for Savannah in early August. Not more than two months after we unloaded our stuff, we were whacked by Hurricane Matthew and then election night 2016. The next year Hurricane Irma overran our old digs in Key West and then clipped us up here. So much for seeking safety on the mainland 666 miles north of that coral island speck by interstate.

Last weekend, on a local radio station, I heard that a fellow Georgian, 93 year old Jimmah Carter, was waxing kindly to a NYT’s writer about our current president to see if Carter might be of some assistance in dealing with the NORKs.

The last time he did so almot a quarter of a century ago, I seemed to recall that Carter showed up in NORKland not just uninvited but unathorized by the current US administraton to negotiate a deal about nukes with the rocket man’s grand dad. Four years after that good deal, the NORKs reneged.

I wonder if that was why the local radio station news reader sounded angry and agitated . . . the radio’s reception got a bit scratchy but I heard phrases like “mongrel dog . . . bloodthirsty psychotics . . . (rocket man’s) haircut looked like his granddad’s . . . ”

The voice on the radio then paused for a long moment, then dipped a few octaves and went on to announce a commercial break. I lost interest.

For Christ’s sake! If I could handle working under the erstwhile Manchurian Candidate president 40 years ago, I’m sure I could deal with this kind of news, should Jimmah catch the next flight to Pyongyang.

I probably should stock up on stomach pills and booze. It would be extremely difficult to concentrate on the cheap realities of Carter’s Peace Train ’17 under dry and unmedicated conditions. The idea of following even the early stages of such a cynical, self serving and increasingly retrograde campaign would or should plunge anyone into a condition bordering on terminal despair. Perhaps Carter is played out as a peanut farmer, house renovator to the poor and down trodden, and has been unsuccessful in securing work as a professional alligator poacher in the swamps of Southwest Georgia.

So for the moment I will try to suspend both the despair and final judgment. Both will be massively justified in the next few months, I think — and until then I can fall back on the firmly-held (but rarely quoted) conviction of the late Adlai Stevenson, who once tied all of this country’s political craziness together in one small and perfect capsule when he said ” . . . in a democracy, people usually get the kind of government they deserve.”

Here’s to Peace Train ’17. Dilly dilly.

Copyright © 2017 From My Isle Seat
www.vicsocotra.com