For Black history month ...

Go along on this pilgrimage by U.S. Muslim leaders in 2018 through the sites of Alabama's civil rights struggle and martyrdoms.

In the short film, Nihad Awad of the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) preaches to a local group:

Muslims of Alabama ... you are surrounded by legacies of oppression. What went wrong then could go wrong again. What's the difference? We were not there hundreds of years ago; we are here today.

Indeed.

Tips for volunteering in the presidential primaries

A friend recently asked me for advice on how to get on board as a volunteer with the primary campaign of one of our aspiring Democratic presidents. After all, I work on campaigns and have experience with volunteers, so I should have ideas.

And I do have some tips, though these come with a caveat: I've never actually worked in a presidential primary campaign. (I'll explain that at the end of this post.) I'm neutral about the current field.

Let's say you want to volunteer for the candidate of your choice. It's likely to be harder than it seems it should be. Aren't campaigns all about engaging masses of people? Well, sometimes.

• You want to do more than contribute money. Unfortunately, your labor may not be what the campaign wants from you. The most urgent need, for nearly all candidates all the time, is more cash.

• Maybe you could help in a small way by raising money. We'll assume you don't have big bucks. But you could get some friends together, maybe show a campaign video, and raise a little something. The campaign might be grateful for the resulting check. But don't count on much support in the way of materials to give away or a staff speaker, if the anticipated haul is less than perhaps $5 or $10K. And whatever you do, make sure to comply with campaign finance disclosure laws -- otherwise your small money can be more trouble than assistance.

• Primary campaigns from within are about throwing up temporary, usually flimsy, campaign infrastructure on the fly. Staff who opened a new office a week ago aren't likely to have developed work programs to plug supportive volunteers into, even if they wish they did. Finding the right desk chairs may seem a higher priority.

• Campaigns at the launch stage usually assume they want to collect names and contact information from potential volunteers. But they are often have little capacity to sort and contact the potential people power they harvest. You can't assume that signing a volunteer form, or returning an email petition, or messaging through Twitter will evoke any response. Keep trying these approaches and you may hit the moment when your name comes up.

• To successfully volunteer, it helps to find someone you know or can reach out to who is closer to the campaign than you are. Your contact might be someone in local Democratic politics or a member of an organization like a professional association or union that your candidate is close to/courting.

• Eventually institutional players will follow their own internal processes and get involved. The smoothest way to find your way into a campaign is as a member of an endorsing union or Democratic club. But that avenue won't be available until these groups conduct their own internal processes. If you are a member of something that endorses, you can help your candidate win that endorsement.

• Understand that what campaigns may most want from volunteers is visible crowds in the right places. Being there when your person is speaking or takes part in a broader Democratic cattle call for aspirants is a form of volunteer support. The campaign should be recruiting you to these events, but keep your eyes out too. Staff are imperfect. Learn all you can about who your candidate is trying to bring over to support and get yourself to likely occasions, perhaps wearing campaign gear. You'll likely meet sympathetic people.

• Campaigns that are taking off figure out how to use volunteers eventually. Don't give up. If your candidate is thriving, you'll find a place before the big primary election. Learn about when your state primary happens, who can vote when, and how the primary results allocate Democratic convention delegates. You'll be an expert among your friends and increase your chances of bringing them out for your person.

I'm sure that readers will have additional suggestions; please drop them in comments.

...For FWIW: I've never worked in a presidential primary and will be neutral for a long time in this Democratic primary. Eventually I will vote for someone ... and I'll support whatever Democrat emerges. Tolerance for lesser evils is a necessary part of electoral politics.

My attitude to all candidates is instrumental rather than enthusiastic. Before throwing down with any candidate, I ask myself where does this individual fit in the never completed project of making the country more fair, more generous, simply a better place for us and the world. I can support and work for very flawed candidates if, in a particular place and moment, their election will advance that project. I don't have to love the individual; I just have to think they'd help or avert hurt.

In the presidential sweepstakes, a calculating attitude is certainly appropriate. Nobody at that level is going to look perfect. These champions are not yet the standard bearers. They appeal by signifying potential directions and values for the country. Because I bring pretty well articulated values to the political fray and because I have a healthy sense of what a difficult job it is to flesh out any of what I hope for in our politics, I don't tend to fall in love at the primary stage -- or ever. Let's get what we can from these people and keep holding their feet to the fire.

Friday cat blogging

Morty has been a little under the weather lately, so he's been hiding under his play structure. Happily he seems to be healing, returning to his regular annoying self.

Contemplating the shapes of the world

We have hung a new shower curtain. The top 4/5s of it is a quite detailed map of the boundaries and cities of the contemporary world. Looking at it daily is improving my grasp of national geographies. At the bottom are outlines of seven continents without interior markings. I find myself staring long and hard at this blob:

Yes, that's Asia. But what is "Asia" anyway? It almost looks to consist of everywhere Europeans either don't include in "Europe" or perhaps didn't "discover" when they left "Europe." What else does Kamchatka have to do with Ceylon?

The ancestors of those Europeans who invented these continental naming conventions would likely have centered their map around the Mediterranean Sea and might well have included modern Turkey, Palestine, and perhaps even Egypt and Libya in their sense of the land masses that mattered and were all one known civilization.

On the other hand, would they really have thought the Nordic lands and the wild expanses of Russia, even the portion west of the Ural Mountains, were part of the same whole? I doubt it.

Will we always think of "continents" as we do today? Perhaps some day people will categorize land masses yet some other way. It is interesting to contemplate the arbitrariness of conventional divisions.

Because migrants are human

She could have said a lot of things about Trump's Wall. She could have said it would be ineffective, expensive, disastrous for border communities and landowners. But she called it "an immorality."

via ytCropperIt's probably accurate to assume that the reason that ungrammatical label sprang to her mind goes back to Nancy Pelosi's good Roman Catholic education in Baltimore.

Cardinal Joseph W. Tobin, archbishop of Newark, lays out Catholic teaching on migration in an oped. It's actually rather simple:

Is the border wall ethical? President Trump has suggested the wall is moral and those who oppose it immoral. His critics claim the opposite.

To answer this, we have to consider its effect on humans. What harm could a border wall cause to immigrants and refugees, all of whom are equal to us in the eyes of God?

... You must also look at the intent of someone who wants to construct a wall in order to determine its morality. In this case, it is clear that Mr. Trump wants to deny entry to anyone crossing the southern border, even those who have a right to cross and seek protection and are no threat to us. ...

... The way in which Mr. Trump has argued for a wall also is instructive. In trying to secure funding, he has cast all immigrants as criminals and threats to national security by spreading misleading and inaccurate information about them. His justification for the wall is based upon lies and smears against the vast majority of immigrants who are law-abiding and moral, but whom he paints as less than human. ...

... Immigration reform that is humane and honors our nation’s values must finally be enacted, and the root causes of global migration addressed. ...

Migrants are sister and brother human beings. To act otherwise is an "immorality."

On beyond the RESIST moment

As I walk around middling neighborhoods in San Francisco, the bumper stickers are still prominent; many, many, of us responded to the shock of seeing Donald Trump elevated to the White House by engaging, protesting, and eventually electing a Democratic House of Representatives. Locally, we can enjoy the spectacle of our Congresscritter putting President Blunderbuss in his place.

But after two years, though we still need to protest and impede Trump's racist authoritarianism, we can't allow ourselves to become exhausted spectators to a faraway Washington drama. People are being hurt and terrible policy choices are being locked in by a GOP coterie of con-men masquerading as a cabinet. We need to be envisioning what we do want from government more than what we don't want.

And it turns out, such re-envisioning is just what majorities of us have been doing with results that surprise the cautious establishments of both political parties.

For starters, we don't want Donald Trump in 2020. According to a Washington Post/ABC news poll:

A 56 percent majority of all Americans say they would “definitely not vote for him” should Trump become the Republican nominee, while 14 percent say they would consider voting for him and 28 percent would definitely vote for him. Majorities of independents (59 percent), women (64 percent) and suburbanites (56 percent) rule out supporting Trump for a second term.

Even with our absurdly unrepresentative Electoral College, you can't elect a president with those numbers.

But even more to the point, somehow the stresses of the last two years have moved public opinion in some clear new directions:

A strong majority of Americans support sharply raising taxes on the wealthy. A plurality disapproves of the large corporate tax cut passed by the Republican Congress in 2017. A whopping 70 percent of the country — and even 52 percent of Republicans — support Medicare for all. More than half of the country wants to see abortion remain legally available (with that number dropping below a majority only late in pregnancy.) Fifty-seven percent of Americans (and 69 percent of military veterans) would support removing all troops from Afghanistan after 17 years of stalemate.

Damon Linker, The Week

And there's plenty more: no amount of presidential bluster moved more than 60 percent of us to think it worth shutting down the government for a Wall. Trump's Wall, Trump's push to Make America White Again, simply doesn't cut it for most of us.

And Linker missed a couple of vital items. We don't know quite what we mean yet, but bipartisan support for something called a "Green New Deal" hit 81 percent in December.

And for all the saber rattling from Washington, the powers-that-be act as if they know that getting directly militarily engaged in Venezuela would be wildly unpopular. (Sure hope I'm right on that one, but I think that's the lesson they've taken from nearly two decades of lingering wars of choice.)

And so -- we've moved on from the simplicity and unity of the RESIST moment. There is a tremendous amount of work to be done to flesh out where we want to go; inevitably different people will work on different parts of this. And that work will generate different priorities

But the catalogue of items laid out above are no longer fringe ideas -- I would expect that all the aspiring Dem presidents will at least give them lip service.

Resistance gave us that. Now we have to fumble through all available means, including the political thickets, to make our newly clarified majority wishes into realities.

Incongruity noted

When this disconcerting item turned up in the news, I wondered whether the evangelicals who are trying to inject their faith into public schools would be emphasizing the bit of Luke's Gospel we heard read yesterday. Jesus kicked off his ministry to the world by quoting an ancient prophet of his people:

"The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
because he has anointed me
to bring good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives
 and recovery of sight to the blind,

to let the oppressed go free,
to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor."

Somehow I doubt this was what the folks behind several state bills had in mind. But I could be wrong.

Rant: can we practice solidarity without bullshit?

Neighbors and friends gathered on Friday night in the 'hood to protest U.S. intervention in Venezuela. Goodness knows, there's plenty to protest. The Trump administration has appointed Elliott Abrams, a tired old miscreant who was deep in Ronald Reagan's Iran-Contra law breaking, to superintend its policy. Nobody should rest easy when a nationalist U.S. regime starts threatening to intervene in favor of "democracy" or "human rights" in a country south of the border. The record is long and brutal; see for example Before Venezuela, US had long involvement in Latin America.

But just because the U.S. is up to its old imperial tricks doesn't mean that leftists, anti-interventionists, and peace loving folks should blind themselves to realities on the ground in Venezuela. The testimony of the smarter investigative media and too many Venezuelans is loud and summed up well by Joshua Alvarez :

Nicolas Maduro’s reign of power in Venezuela is illegitimate. Not only was his latest election to the presidency stolen, he’s presiding over a failed state that is harming its own citizens and causing South America’s own gigantic refugee crisis.

Maduro claimed to have "won" the presidency in an election in May 2018 with

68 percent of the vote despite having an approval rating of just 21 percent.

I could see Trump emulating that one.

Deceased president Hugo Chavez legitimately won the support of many of of the poorest Venezuelans by sharing some the country's oil wealth with inmates of Caracas' slums. The U.S. and our oil companies hated him, but he was a smart left populist who knew how to play on nation pride. He may not have built a sustainable economy and polity, but a good-size section of the people believed he was trying against subversion from a bourgeoisie abetted by the Yankees. The opposition was split by its own rivalries and never convinced Venezuelans that it was out for the nation instead of the U.S. and its own class interests. Maduro, Chavez' designated successor, has been unable to either pick up his mantle or run the country effectively. Venezuelans are getting out if they can.

So what does all this mean for leftists in San Francisco? Friday's little rally should have been at the very least a defensible moral statement against U.S. imperial actions.

Instead, the speakers I heard (briefly) were simply idiotic. We can't allow ourselves to be trapped in a tired template that defaults to "the enemy of my enemy is my friend." We wouldn't support ordinary Venezuelans by supporting Trump administration "diplomacy"; that's easy. But Maduro's rule is not something that decent progressives can applaud either. (And certainly we get nothing by using a rally against intervention in Venezuela to rail against the faults of the Obama administration or Democrats in general. Focus, folks!)

The collective efforts of Latin American countries, which are already bearing the brunt of the refugee crisis, offer the best hope for a less violent, more popular resolution for a people who've lived dashed hopes and gross impoverishment. There may be no good outcome in sight, but sure as ever it won't come because North Americans make fools of themselves about other peoples' struggles.

Mission branch public library is getting a remodel

City librarians and architects explained the project to 30 or so interested but anxious neighbors and users on Saturday afternoon. (H/t to Mission Local for alerting me to this meeting.)

Hey -- didn't they just do this to the branch? That's how it felt to many in attendance. We were reminded that those last big changes happened way back in 1997, consisting of a very necessary earthquake upgrade.

The building is a Carnegie Library, fruit of early 20th century philanthropic uplift, which means it is historic, elegant, and impractical as hell for a modern facility. It is also well loved and well used, including housing half of the San Francisco Public Library's entire Spanish-language children's collection.

This time around we'll be getting a restored central staircase, returning to something closer to the building's original floor plan while converting much of the interior into what is called a "community living room." Let's hope this works out as well in practice as in aspiration; the librarians sure try to accommodate all-comers, so it might.

A couple of the architects' improvements fell under what they labeled environmental "resiliency" -- that is building for anticipated climate change. This city will be warmer, so the entire place will be air conditioned, serving as a neighborhood "cooling center." It will also be constructed as a possible "Smoke Refuge," somewhere to retreat to when California's big wildfires befoul our air as they did last November.

All this will require shutting down for 1.5 to 2 years starting in summer 2020. There will be some kind of library access somewhere as yet undetermined. Let's hope it is close by; the library helps the Mission feel the very special neighborhood it is.

Saturday scenery: dogs of the Haight-Ashbury

The human's best friend is prominent among the street people along the neighborhood's sidewalks.

They fit right in among the tourist traps, part of the scenery.

They are curious about passersby, but have learned to keep their distance.

Big yawn here.

I assume these substantial mutts protect their people. And their humans look as if they need some protection. The allure of the Haights' streets passed me by even in the neighborhood's heyday; it's continued attraction leaves me cold. Whatever is going on in that space is opaque to a mere wandering pedestrian.

All encountered while Walking San Francisco.

The new incarnation of Senator Moonbeam

Young Brown.

That headline requires a little explication. In 1982, two-term California Governor Jerry Brown ran for the U.S. Senate seat vacated by Republican S.I. Hayakawa. Jerry had been a mixed bag as Governor, but he seemed a wonderful choice for the Senate, a visionary with big ideas well-suited to an office in which day to day administrative competence was not very important. That's funny to remember now that we've seen two more terms from Guv Jerry in which administrative competence was a cornerstone of his tenure. Anyway, lot of Californians looked forward to seeing the still youthful Brown blow the minds of the old fogies in DC; but alas, more Californians wanted Pete Wilson instead ... and that eventually led to terrible times for the state GOP.

Now that Jerry has finished two more largely successful terms in Sacramento, at age 80, he's back to a visionary role. He's been named "executive chairman" of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, sounding the alarm about climate change and nuclear catastrophe. At the Bulletin's annual shindig announcing the position of their alarming doomsday clock which currently sits at 2 minutes to midnight, Brown laid out our peril:

“The blindness and stupidity of the politicians and their consultants is truly shocking in the face of nuclear catastrophe,” Brown said. “We know that thousands of these weapons on high alert could be launched by mistake…. We are almost like travelers on the Titanic, seeing the iceberg up ahead but enjoying the elegant dining and the music.”

“The danger and probability is mounting that there will be some kind of nuclear incident that will kill millions, if not initiating exchanges that will kill billions,” he declared.

... And Brown had a message for the media too, which he says too often focuses on petty Washington drama and the political horse race over the increasing dangers of nuclear annihilation and environmental collapse.

“You love Trump’s tweets,” he said. “You love the leads and to get the clicks. But the final click could be a nuclear accident or mistake.”

The power of a good idea whose time has come

Still neutral on the Dem presidential hopefuls -- I need a shorthand nickname for this gaggle. Any suggestions?

But if Elizabeth Warren can spread the idea that it is the responsibility of government to ensure that the country's wealth is better distributed, she'll have served us well. She wants to tax, moderately, not just "earnings" but the stored horde of accumulated wealth that gives the One Percent their permanent sway among us.

Note that this is not just a throwaway line political line from Warren: she's assembled the economic experts to design a tax that would do the job. Read all about it here.

It's been a long, strange, trip

It gives one pause to have this turn up in the mail. 1969 was a long time ago and a great deal has happened since.

Just perhaps, the country and its people are finally moving beyond the backwash of those turbulent times. We were so hopeful -- and some people were so angry. Sometimes the hopeful and the angry were the same people.

These days majorities of us seem to want more racial justice, more gender justice, and a government that serves all the people, weakest first. That's what many of us wanted back then. And we scared the bejesus out of the powerful. Much repression and grinding suppression ensued, as well as uneven gains for human freedom that felt sporadic and always tenuous.

Supposing we fight off outright fascism and keep the planet habitable, might we find our way to a less contested commonwealth? Now there's a nice old-fashioned word and concept? I like it. Nothing to do but keep on keepin' on.

Hints of what is to come

I am not ready.

I understand why Dems who want to be president have begun coming out of the woodwork. They do have to test out their shows on the road right now. They have to establish who they are and why they want to be the Big Dog. For what it is worth (nothing), I am completely neutral among candidates at this stage -- excluding only Tulsi Gabbard who seems a putrid opportunist.

But I see hints of good developments. The Trump shit show seems to be driving Dem politicians away from their worst habit: trying to be all things to all people by obscuring the issues that divide us.

Two tidbits that flew by today:

• The Washington Post's David Weigel concluded from South Carolina where Cory Booker and Bernie Sanders made themselves visible for MLK Day:

  A party that used to triangulate around the demands of black leaders in the South now sees a strong, activated black vote as the most obvious part of a winning coalition.

  If you want to keep up on the 2020 campaign, read Weigel; he's the most interesting, diligent, wide ranging political reporter out there.

• Meanwhile that wise, warmed-over Clintonite, Simon Rosenberg used an extended interview with Leon Krauze on Trumpcast to urge aspiring Democratic presidents to "lean in" on immigration. By this he seemed to mean to explain to the U.S. population that immigration is good for the country, essential to all of our well-being including that of the immigrants, and that a policy both humane and widely beneficial is possible. These may seem obvious pronouncements until you consider the source: Rosenberg and his ilk of Washington policy purveyors have spent decades urging Dems to muddy their stances on immigration, to try to be all things to all people -- while grassroots groups raged at their timidity. No more. Thanks Donald.

It will be vital in 2020 for us all to unite around whoever ends up securing the Democratic nomination -- but there are already strong hints that our necessary Big Tent may feel far more healthy, less odiferous, to progressives than has been true for awhile.

Blog on temporary hold ...

Here's the view out the window in the lovely space in Vermont where we're staying for an undetermined time to assist a friend. It's cold (0F) but beautiful.

I may post occasionally, but on an undetermined schedule.

Attentive medicine

Dr. Victoria Sweet's publisher describes God’s Hotel: A Doctor, a Hospital, and a Pilgrimage to the Heart of Medicine as an account of the practice of "attentive medicine." I like that. I had been meaning to read this book ever since I'd heard of it.

Dr. Sweet's story of working and learning at San Francisco's Laguna Honda Hospital wanders through her study of (and experiments with practicing) the medieval abbess Hildegard of Bingen's medical prescriptions; a pilgrimage on foot along several sections of the Camino de Santiago in France and Spain; and always returns to the lessons in healing that her patients and community at the city's repository for its sick poor taught her over twenty years of service. I cannot recommend it too highly.

Here's a sample of the sort of wisdom Dr. Sweet offers. Summoned to the bedside of a disturbed patient, she found herself diagnosing the woman's malady without all the paraphernalia of modern scientific care. Of course she brought to the encounter her decades of medical experience. But, she reflected,

I had done so little for her ... I hadn't looked into her eyes, held her hand, or reviewed all her records. I'd done nothing at all. Except sit. But how effective that had been! ... Somehow just be sitting with her, I'd understood what was wrong.

... after Ms. Gilroy, I took the time to 'just sit' in this way with all my patients. Especially if they took a turn for the worse, or if a nurse or family was worried that something wasn't quite right. ... Not for long -- five or ten minutes. Sometimes the patient would want to chat, and we would chat, and sometimes I would study the patient's face, bedclothes, and bureau. But mostly I would just sit. And something, somehow, would happen. It would become clear what, if anything was wrong with the patient and what, if anything, I could do about it.

The book turned out to be a perfect companion for a visit to a friend whose life situation seemed to require an intervention of some sort -- just what sort I wasn't sure. (Hence the recent blog interruption.) It turned out that intervention largely meant conversation, some apparently quiet time, and hopeful silence in place. Whether anything concrete has been accomplished, only more time will reveal. ...A nice feature of this book that might escape notice is a set a chapter notes which offer suggestions for accessible reading on medical history and other topics. It would not be hard to make a course out of these suggestions -- and probably some teacher has done so....Despite having lived in San Francisco over forty years, I only visited the old, unimproved, Laguna Honda once -- on an incomprehensible mission that I am sure Dr. Sweet would appreciate. When I was part of the Martin de Porres Catholic Worker community, someone (I forget who if I ever knew) gave us a truckload of unopened, very heavy, boxes of ceramic tile. There wasn't anything wrong with the tiles -- but we had no need for ceramic tiles. Unless you wanted it, it had no value. The stuff hung around, too big for doorstops, taking up space we didn't have. Finally someone figured out she had a friend who worked at Laguna Honda -- perhaps a gardener or janitor. This individual wanted the tile -- for what purpose I never found out. So we drove the stuff up the hill, at night, covertly, and unloaded behind the building. And that was that. Perhaps the tile came in handy to some part of the Laguna Honda community somehow? It was that sort of place, as Dr. Sweet testifies.

Friday cat blogging

Jack is a mighty hunter, bringing home the disemboweled remnants of flying squirrels. But he's also not above taking advantage of a little human-provided stove heat.

Probably not this day

The good folks of the volunteer fire department never got around to giving their signage a seasonal upgrade. But fortunately there is a volunteer fire department.

These young people are supporting the Los Angeles teacher strike

Californians for Justice organizes high school age youth to envision and fight for racial justice in their lives. The young people have campaigned for several years for what they call "relationship centered schools." They are demanding that the schools ensure they encounter adults they can relate to. When such adults are lacking, students disengage. When they meet teachers and others who care about them, who do not cling to unequal expectations of them based on race or zip code, they can thrive.

And so CFJ youth are huge supporters of the UTLA strike. The teachers and the kids are on the same track: if the powers-that-be don't find the money to pay teachers better and to provide needed resources, they fear they'll lose the adults who can serve as their anchors:

Without the support of public officials and the additional investment of resources, teachers–especially those working in low-income schools with predominantly Black and Brown student populations–are being forced to leave their schools and communities behind to find living wages. We’ve already seen this in Bay Area communities like Oakland, where the district is struggling to retain teachers–and teachers of color in particular–due to the housing crisis and the increased cost of living.

This pattern of teacher turnover is detrimental to students and communities of color and makes it hard to build Relationship Centered Schools where all students, staff, and administrators feel safe, supported, and capable of thriving.

CFJ Student Leader Jiawen Wang who is a student at Oakland High expressed this concern recently: “When teachers come and go we lose the strong connections students need to feel safe and comfortable at school. We can struggle and fall behind in our classes. We can become overwhelmed and not know who to turn to for assistance. We can check out and go through an entire day without talking in class or connecting with an adult.”

Los Angeles and the entire state of California can do better by the young people who are the future.

"My faith is the key to my optimism."

When former President George H.W. Bush died in November, the glaring contrast between him and the current White House occupant made for fulsome eulogies from all sides. After all, whatever he was, he was an adult, not a toddler; courageous in war, not a whining coward; and competent, not an self-indulgent bumbler. I couldn't much praise him -- his pardons sweeping the Iran-Contra crimes under a legal rug disqualified him from my admiration. But others differed and many chose to speak well of the dead.

It all reminded me that we do have a living former president who has proved himself over decades to be a genuinely decent human being. Jimmy Carter (in office 1976-80) was perhaps not the wisest of presidents. By unnecessarily inviting the deposed Shah (dictatorial monarch) of Iran into the country for medical treatment, he set in train events which have put the US in conflict with Iranian nationalism to this day. As a US politician, he didn't understand the importance of unions to the Democratic coalition, contributing mightily his Republican successors' successful assault on labor.

He wasn't a great president.

But he has been a fine example of how a former president can make himself (still no herselves!) a socially useful force for good. The media always focuses on the warm fuzzy stuff, like building houses in poor communities with Habitat for Humanity and teaching Bible classes at his humble Georgia Baptist church. But Carter has traveled the world encouraging free elections and civil peace, while speaking unpopular truths when he has felt he must. For example, he was excoriated for labeling Israel's treatment of its Palestinian subjects an analogue of South Africa's white supremacist "apartheid."

So GHW Bush's obsequies reminded me that I wanted to read Jimmy Carter's latest and probably last of 32 books, issued last year in his 93rd year. Faith: a journey for all strikes me as likely akin to the Bible study talks he has been delivering for decades, yet designed to provide the contours of the life story he'd like told at his own funeral. I read it in an audio version which he reads himself, clearly and sweetly; I would highly recommend this to anyone curious about Carter.

We know he's a Christian, a forthright follower of Jesus, but not therefore a closed minded fundamentalist, a type he abhors. He makes it clear that his faith set his path.

I believe ... that Christians are called to plunge into the life of the world, and to inject the moral and ethical values of our faith into the processes of governing. At the same time, there must be an absolute prohibition against granting any control by government over our religious freedoms.

... To me, God is the essence of all that is good, and my faith in God induces a pleasant feeling of responsibility to act accordingly.

In a time when the religious right has overrun white evangelical Protestantism, it's hard to recall how simply conventional these views once were in those quarters. In 1978, while serving as president, he sought to convey the breadth of the calling he believes should define his co-religionists while speaking to a Baptist audience:

What are the goals of a person or a denomination or a country? They are all remarkably the same: a desire for peace; a need for humility, for examining one's faults and turning away from them; a commitment to human rights in the broadest sense of the words, based on a moral society concerned with the alleviation of suffering because of deprivation or hatred or hunger or physical affliction; and a willingness, even an eagerness, to share one's ideals, one's faith with others; to translate love in a person to justice.

No wonder the political world thought/thinks him a crazy idealist. Yet his faith enables him to call out the precariousness of human society with a forthrightness practicing politicians know they must avoid.

It is sobering to realize that the average human intelligence's probably not changed appreciably during the last ten thousand years. In fact, the total capacity of brains of Neanderthals has been found to be greater than that of modern humans. We also know that the process of learning has greatly accelerated during recent times with our improved ability to share information rapidly.

For the first time, we have become aware that our own existence is threatened by things such as nuclear weapons and global warming. These recognized threats are, perhaps, an ongoing test of our human intelligence, our freedom, and our ability to shape our own destiny. The human challenge now is to survive by having sustained faith in each other and in the highest common moral principles that we have spasmodically evolved, and through mutual understanding and peaceful cooperation in addressing the discerned challenges to our common existence.

Carter declares himself calm inside and ready for death, knowing death must come soon. His faith tells him that "the love of God will prevail" in the creation that God has made.

When Carter dies, I doubt he'll receive the sort of effusive send-off that we've just seen for Bush the Elder. Though Carter undoubtedly lacks for nothing, he didn't use his post-presidency to make himself wealthy or even to try to continue to exercise power, conventionally understood. His faith may seem incomprehensible to folks who are not Christian or even not his kind of Christian. But he sure seems to have gotten something admirable out the moral and ethical structure within which he has rooted his life.