The United States saw an 18.1% increase in homelessness this year. AP

We want our politicians to be transparent, yet we want them to be powerful as well, and power, even in the best of circumstances, means the management of information, and telling the truth is not managing the information. Nathan Heller in The New Yorker.

Last year, the hottest on record, was not a good year for the world, so saying Happy anything seems slightly daft and delusional. The news seems so bleak; I get in the car, turn on the radio to some random NPR news program, and almost immediately get unsettled. Even the good news, “Assad flies to Russia, Syria taken over by repentant Islamic terrorists.” is not Oh, boy! That’s great! good news. The almost everyday anchors of the news cycle are Russia’s brutal attacks on the Ukrainian people and infrastructure and Israel slowly turning into a quasi-Nazi state with Palestinians as the victims. ( Growing up in a family that idealized the fledgling Israel state, acknowledging that reality is difficult and makes me very uncomfortable.)

Then there is soon-to-be President Trump, who is already dominating the National zeitgeist. I hope he does well; I really do. I disagree with a significant percentage of what he says he wants to do, and I hope those plans don’t actually work out, but Trump also says he will keep us out of any new wars. I hope he delivers on that. I just hope he doesn’t fuck up our beautiful, even if flawed, country.

To change the subject, President Jimmy Carter died a couple of days ago. I will miss him. I think the country will miss him, too. I think Carter’s death comes at a good time, at 100, for him and at this troubled National time when we so need his virtues. His honesty and, as importantly to me, at least, his ability to see the world as it is rather than as we want it to be are two needed qualities that are in short supply today.

I first heard of Jimmy Carter and got to know him, so to speak, in my car while in a light snowstorm in the middle of northern Nevada. I turned on the radio, hoping to get a local station with a weather report, and what I got was what I thought was a random Southerner talking about US foreign policy. Surprisingly, the speaker, who had been schooled in the Navy’s nuclear submarine program by taking graduate work in nuclear physics and reactor technology at Union College, was knowledgeable, brilliant, and thoughtful.

That’s how I still think of President Carter: knowledgeable, brilliant, and thoughtful. Although they are not attributes, along with telling the truth, that are as useful as President as I would like. Early in his presidency, a decade before Al Gore, Carter accepted that the Climate crisis was real and acted on it. In June of 1979, he installed 32 solar water heating panels on the roof of the White House (Reagan had them removed in 1986; thinking, I guess, why have solar panels when all a President has to do is say, “It’s morning in America”?).

Being knowledgeable, brilliant, and thoughtful are also the qualities, along with Carter’s deep-seated decency, that contributed to President Carter losing his reelection bid. However, they were not the only reasons that former Georgia Governor Carter lost. He was an outsider in a world where being an insider is essential, and he was unlucky (a very underrated, even, if hard to define, asset).

Theodor White, a Presidential historian who interviewed Carter, wrote in America in Search of Itself that Carter’s chief of staff, Hamilton Jordan, spoke about the broad arch of Carter’s presidency while Carter was bogged down in trivialities and minutia. I think this translated into President Carter’s inability to react quickly to attacks, change, or world crises (quickly is the operative word here).

The United States Government itself is being bogged down in trivialities, and minutia is also part of why Vice-president Kamala Harris lost her election. There are several things that Biden did that infuriate me, and there are several that I thought were stupid or self-serving – at best – but, by and large, Biden had a much better-than-average four years, passing some very progressive programs that would help many of the people who voted against Harris. But, the government moves so slowly that most of the results haven’t come to fruition. It has been four years since President Trump tried to lead a failed self-coup, and Attorney General Merrick Garland was still “crossing all the ts and dotting all the is “and was on his way, methodically, to presenting a case. Of course, it’s now 2025; Trump will be President, and too late to go to court.

Speaking of 2025, I don’t want to make any predictions except that 2025 will be hotter than 2024 and President Trump will get richer (or rich, if you think he is not really rich now). I hope the Russian war on Ukraine will end in Ukraine’s favor (and it just might; Russia is not doing well financially or militarily, although Putin will probably have to go for that to happen).

Happy New Year!!!