New York Diary

Jimmy's from Georgia

I went to see Jimmy Carter speak last night. In many ways, he was a compelling and interesting man, full of a desire to do good in the world and pleased to be using his post-Presidential time realizing that desire. Much of the event I was at was a question-and-answer session, and that, too, was interesting, with discussion running the gamut from the role of the UN and the appropriateness of the Iraq war to people's moral obligations in everyday life to this country's changing political landscape.

With all of this as food for thought, it might be a bit surprising that the thing I have been chewing on is the fact of Carter's amazing identification with Georgia. Carter, so a friend tells me (I haven't looked it up), is 82. And he is firmly, staunchly, happily from Georgia. He lived there, he built his Presidential library there, he returned after his time in the White House, he talks with an old Georgia twang and he made a point of centering the Carter Center in Atlanta. This is Carter's home. He doesn't want to live anywhere else, and when he was in Washington, by his own admission he missed his home.

People of my generation just aren't like that. We are citizens of the world, or at least of America, far more than we are of this or that state. There is a kind of cosmpolitanism that has taken hold across this country.

That's not to say that we forget where we come from, or that New Yorkers and Bostonites aren't in some ways fiercely loyal to their cities, but that those identifications are no longer as geographical as you might think. A friend of mine here in New York thinks of himself as a Chicagoan, to be sure, but it isn't anything geographical or even practical that he misses. He has explained to me that he will probably never live there again, in fact; his preferred jobs are in New York, while his idealized retirement is in Europe. Clinton may have grown up in a small house in Little Rock, and he may have put his Presidential library there, and he may even have been governor of Arkansas, but he's a New Yorker now.

Or, no, scratch that. He's not really a New Yorker. He's a citizen of the world, in a way that Jimmy Carter simply is not and could not be. Clinton could be at home in New York or Arkansas, London or Tokyo or Seattle or Toronto. Jimmy Carter could spend time in each of these places, could live there, but he'd never make them his home.

I don't know what to make of this. It's just a reflection...

posted by Skay @ 8:08 PM