Unspeakably awful choice. What's next? An inspiring speech from Fidel Castro? Ridiculous. Lets not pretend this fool is directly responsible for countless failures as a president that's still poisoning this country to this day. Just an absolute abomination when he was in office. Love it how liberal Hollywood loves to retell history in their rose tinted glasses to try to brainwash the American viewing audiences.
shareNo. I believe he was an excellent President. It was the President after him, Ronald Reagan, that screwed everything up.
shareNo I believe Jimmy Carter was much worse than Reagan. Carter was the one who screwed everything up.
shareScrewed what up? Tired of right wing tools like you claiming that every Democratic president ruined this or that. Pick up a history book and actually read it instead of reciting tired-a** bull**** right-wing talking points. And the recession of the '80s started under Reagan, a republican (I'm just old enough to remember that, so I know.) And every Republican president wasn't Mr. Perfect either, so let's get real about that---they made mistakes too. Also Carter was the president at the time the film in set in,duh. Of course they were going to show him in it.
shareAlso Carter was the president at the time the film in set in,duh. Of course they were going to show him in it.
If my answers frighten you then you should cease asking scary questions.share
Look at the numbers (not only) while he was president but his policies after his presidency. Record unemployment, inflation and toxic policies that destroyed this nation. His housing act was the fuse that lit the housing crash of the 2000s. Facts are facts. And liberals TOOLS like you are denying the long term disastrous effects of your policies that have been a cancer to this nation for a century. Deny it all you want but all the long term policies you put in place don't go away and only spread like a poison across this once great nation.
The fact is Democrats have controlled Washington for the most part of the last half of the 20th century. AT BEST you have to admit they have been really poor at fighting against Republicans. At worst you have to conclude they are mostly responsible for destroying this country.
Idiotic. You realize Presidents can't necessarily control or affect unemployment in the manners people think. That being said if you are going to go there then you better recognize that job growth has BY FAR been stronger under Democrat Presidents over the last 40 or so years than Republican ones. That's a fact. Carter, like Clinton and then Obama, inherited a country in terrible decline thanks to the same failed Republican policies put in by their predecessors. And each time they were left to clean up the mess. Only difference is that Carter didn't get two terms to finish the job.
Meanwhile I am confident in my view that the most disastrous actions taken by Presidents that affected America over the last 40 years happened under Republican watch or were initiated under Republican watch. Unnecessary wars. Blatant lies that got us into conflicts that were unnecessary. Roll back of Wall Street regulations and in fact giving Wall Street more freedom. Lying the nation into war. Harming and defunding Federal that agencies that lead to horrific responses to disasters such as Katrina. Not being serious about environmental concerns. Stacking the Supreme Court with terrible justices ACTUAL legitimate political scandals. Recessions. Overall lost of respect by citizens of our nations' allies. Installation of overkill authoritarian structures like Homeland Security. Selling arms illegally to our supposed enemies and then lying to Congress and the nation about it. Exposing our nation and our armed forces to terrorist attacks both at home and abroad (so many terrorist attacks and bombings on our people internationally took place under Reagan and of course let us not forget 9/11). The initiation of taking our privacy rights away in favor of more surveillance (Obama gets the heat for this too often but it was under GW that all of these rollbacks and new procedures were put into place). Increase involvement in the Mideast. Reducing taxes for the rich. Gutting FCC laws that required true fair and balance political viewpoints on all mediums. Using intelligence agencies to distort information rather all the while ignoring their dire warnings about imminent threats. I could go on and on. Republicans always bring about disastrous policies that don't bother to consider the long view and their ranks are stuffed increasing with religious fundamentalists who won't acknowledge science, math or even common sense. But the blind sheep that keeps voting for them buy into the idea time and time again that America can only become "great" again under their so-called leadership. You are one of those sheep. The fact that you started a thread about the use of Jimmy Carter in the trailer only proves how insecure you are in the first place. And the pathetic thing is you will be stuck in your sad, misguided and proudly ignorant mindset for the rest of your life. Good day.
Gee I wonder why the Democrats completely lost Washington. Hmmm wow golly you mean calling everyone who doesn't walk lock step in your ideology an idiot or moronic or a bigot or a Nazi or didn't work for you? Shocking.
shareNotice how Creekin111 didn't address any of your points? It's hard to argue against facts/reality.
shareThis entire thread should be flagged. This is a movie site - not a political forum.
The topic under discussion is a movie called 20th Century Women.
@creekin11 This is a movie site. Got it? Not a soapbox for you to belch personal opinions, rabble rouse and pick fights. Go over to Fox News or Drudge Report to disgorge your feculent delusions of the world.
Actually, there was a recession in 1973 that went into 1975 during Nixon & Ford's administrations. The slow economic growth in the aftermath spilled into the Carter administration, which along with the gas shortage (a culmination of Nixon's era fight with OPEC and the oil crisis) were enough to make Carter look bad.
Reagan was a very good communicator and sold the point that Carter was responsible for all of the problems, when those problems existed prior and between his own limitations and that of the circumstances, Carter couldn't overcome them. However, Carter held the same contempt for the kinds of freedoms, open expression and widening democracy of the time, which is documented in papers written by several of his administration members. He also played a part in American neoliberalism by supporting the Shah of Iran.
www.teriekwilliams.com
All Presidents of the neoliberal era are bad with each one worsening certain things. Carter's failings were a mix of his own inabilities as a political leader and being President at the wrong time. A large of part of what helps a successful Presidency falls on circumstance and what they allow. For instance, FDR struggled as President during the Great Depression and many of his advisers feared he'd be hated more than Herbert Hoover.
However, Pearl Harbor arrived just in time for him to launch American involvement in World War II leading to factory work, and eventually the Marshall Plan that ended the Depression, and made the U.S. a world power and empire. Had he been elected in 1925, FDR likely would've been a minor footnote in history. Carter was unable to handle the circumstances of the time because of his own limits and the limits of his circumstances. However, he didn't specifically create all of the situations he had to deal with even if he did screw up fixing existing problems, some of which Reagan improved upon and others which Reagan made far worse.
www.teriekwilliams.com
Meanwhile, the GOP voting bloc always conveniently forgets what happened between 2001 and 2008.
What's missing in movies is same as in society: a good sense of work ethic and living up to ideals.
The poisons that divide this country began at the beginning:
- The agricultural South vs. the industrial North
- Federalism vs. Anti-Federalism
- Slavery
Many of Carter's problems trace back to the 1950s and span into the 1970s:
- The era of neoliberalism (U.S.-backed dictatorships throughout the world)
- Nixon's fight with OPEC.
- The 1973 Oil Crisis
- The Fall of the Bretton Woods system.
- American support for the Shah.
- The aftermath of the Yom Kippur War.
- Watergate and the resulting permanent public distrust of government.
- The Nixon resignation & Ford's pardon leading to an era of increasing partisanship.
- The Recession of 1973 to 1975.
These problems culminated in problems for Carter, which he poorly handled due to personal and circumstantial limitations:
- The Gas Shortage
- The Iranian Revolution
- The Iran Hostage Crisis
- The low economic growth (following the aftermath of Nixon/Ford's recession).
For further clarification, Castro is seen as a hero by some for these exact reasons:
- The U.S. supported Batista, a dictator.
- Castro overthrew the dictator and kept the U.S. in a stalemate for 50+ years.
- Castro is seen as an inspirational figure of resistance to U.S. imperialism.
Many ignore Castro's tyranny because he stood against the U.S. who those same people saw tyrannize their own countries. They wish they had someone like Castro to stand against the U.S. in their countries at the time. In modern Latin America, many leaders don't side with us unconditionally anymore and America's increasing alienation from Latin America who admonished the U.S.'s embargo on Cuba (which causes the stark poverty in Cuba) was the true reason for Obama opening up Cuba.
P.S.: I don't endorse Castro. I'm quite suspicious of his relationship with the U.S. as well.
Carter's speech was about modesty, which many at the time argued would hurt him (a sentiment echoed by the man in the trailer correctly predicts Carter's loss on the basis of the speech) as he was telling Americans who always expect better for themselves to tighten their bellies. Admittedly, liberals often don't understand certain bedrock principles of the American populace. For instance, liberals don't understand that guns are a symbol of liberty in America given that one of the things that kicked off the American Revolution was Britain's desire on disarming the American settlers. Anyway, Reagan argued for the American exceptionalism myth and the idea that there's no limit leading to the 1980s, an era of unparalleled greed & excess.
But regardless of Carter or Reagan's politics, Carter's speech or the bit in the trailer was about a moral principle that is not bad at all. However, in the culture we live in today, once a value, principle, idea or object is politicized, it becomes a tribal cultural war in which people can actually argue that modesty is a bad thing. It's actually quite sad and why the poison in this country is likely to destroy it from the inside.
www.teriekwilliams.com
Agreed with you re: how when things like modesty, kindness, and compassion are politicized, they can be made out to be bad things. Such a shame.
Agreed with everything Carter said in the trailer. My only gripe with the trailer is that, all those guys in the room, and they all didn't like the speech. And one of the few women in the room was the one who said she loved it. Didn't sit well with me because of the implication that women appreciate things like kindness, modesty, and compassion more than us guys. Not true (only speaking for myself, of course). Kindness, compassion, and empathy are the 1st qualities I look for in making a connection (friendship, etc) with another person. Especially since they seem to be in such rare supply these days. Just wish others appreciated that stuff more in me, since they seem to be among the few things I'm actually good at :-/ lol But people are so cynical these days, so I suppose no one would believe me ::sigh:: How else to explain the lack of PMs? But I'd be pissed if God gave me those gifts all for nothing. At least animals appreciate me :-)
But yeah, I guess I just wasn't too comfortable once again relating to the female over all those males, since that seems to be the story of my life, relating more to females than males. Not saying I have a problem with it, just makes me feel kinda weird as a middle aged straight white guy lol Even if I am a socialist, empath, and feminist. Wish there were more guys out there in Trump's America I could relate to (and vice versa) and not feel like such a freak. And not feel so judged and/or ignored on here (please PM me anyone who agrees or at least understands what I'm saying. Usually don't check replies here because too many jerks around here and I refuse to give them the satisfaction of messing with my head). Oh well. We are who we are.
Really want to see this movie. Big fan of his other films Beginners and Thumbsucker. Especially Thumbsucker (hence my profile pic) :-)
I'll leave you all with another Carter quote:
"The measure of a society is found in how they treat their weakest and most helpless citizens"
Wish people here would heed that message. Since all too often, I've noticed a disturbing trend here and on the net as a whole where people are looking down on others for being "weak". Creepy "alpha" behavior. Which is kinda the same thing the Nazis did, so it never fails to creep me out. To me weakness is just part of being human. So you'd think it wouldn't kill people to have a heart and basic empathy, but people have always confused me, so... ::shrug:: Just saying how I feel. Hope all that made sense. Peace.
"I like you 'cuz you're real. You don't pretend you've got it all figured out like everyone else."
People, especially men, disliked Carter's speech because during this period they had been impacted by a lagging economy and a gas shortage forcing them to "tighten their bellies." By the 1980s, kindness and compassion went from ideas to policy constructs of political correctness. Being male or even "alpha male" was viewed as being deficient while an almost Marxist anti-Americanism permeated the left for 30 years. This trend produced a left-wing that with condescension dictated to society that it had to be polite to a protected class of eternal victims or it was a threat to be silenced and marginalized. The extreme manifestation of that is found in modern feminism, transgender activism and the cultural war of identity politics as waged by the left.
By 2016, Western society began rejecting this. Why? Because politeness, multiculturalism, diversity and political correctness went from ideas to dictated, mandatory political constructs implemented by a bourgeois sensibility that's not interested in being questioned. The societal response to the intolerance toward critical views of these political constructs is not polite because people are sick of being dictated to for the same reasons people rejected Carter's dictation of "tightening bellies." Yes, these are good values on the face of things, but they've gone beyond that to being mandatory politicized policies that with an almost dogmatic quality produce infantile outrage among those who feel the state should enforce these ideas without question.
Now a group of anti-establishment politicians have tapped into a sentiment of anger and backlash to this with a form manipulation they've won power on the basis of. In America, these demagogues will erode socialism and remove compassion from their consideration of immigration, civil rights and foreign policy. They're likely to send Europe into a collapse with a powerless, impotent left-wing bickering internally. In that collapse, the real Nazis will arise just as they did in the 1930s under similar circumstances. All in all, the society we are beginning to live in will not have its concern with the weakest, which is a message that people must become stronger. Socialism and the left-wing will not protect them because they will be too weak to mount a defense. The people who care about compassion and liberty are the only defense. Every generation must fight for these ideas. Millennials are entering their generation's greatest struggle and its more likely than not that its our children who will reap the benefits of victory far more than we will.
That's not the point. The point of the film is to show American society in 1979 through the lens of a group of characters in Santa Barbara, not to glorify Jimmy Carter.
shareThe movie is set in 1979.. Jimmy Carter was president then... it doesnt retell history or even have anything to do with Carter other than showing one speech of his on the tv.. has nothing to do with the rest of the film.
shareCarter was not a good president; he was handled a mess and wasn't prepared to fix it. But nothing he did had any lasting effect.
The President whose policies have ended up ruining America was Ronald Reagan, and that's hardly subject to rational debate. He was already suffering from Alzheimer's (he would routinely say something in public, then sincerely deny he had said it, then when confronted with the evidence, sincerely deny that he had ever denied it), and bought into two radical ideas promulgated by the ultra-wealthy, which proved to be disastrous.
1. Supply-side economics. Slash taxes on the wealthiest dramatically, and everyone benefits! No, actually, it's very clear that only the wealthiest benefit; everyone else suffers. Income inequality, which had not been a significant problem, began to skyrocket, and has done so under every subsequent Republican president, while it has risen much less or not at all under Democrats.
Historically, the economy has been at its healthiest, and the nation most prosperous, in proportion to how much we tax the wealthiest, not how little. Nor is it remotely unfair to tax the wealthy extra; doing so has to be part of any functional capitalist system. Once you cross a certain line of wealth, you stop paying interest and instead start making money without doing any work. You can buy things that poorer people have to rent from you, you can loan money at interest, and you can invest in corporations and hence make money just because you already have it. It's a beautiful engine for building the economy as a whole, but it's also an engine for moving money from the poor to the rich. You then need a system of taxation to redistribute that wealth so that everyone benefits.
Reagan broke this system. It now serves only the unfettered, sociopathic greed of the very wealthiest Americans. That's all our recent economic history in a nutshell. That's most of what's wrong with America in a nutshell.
2. "Government is the problem." Supposedly fueled by libertarian philosophy, the whole less-government, less-regulation movement is best translated as "Let's get rid of all those pesky rules and laws that prevent corporations from profiting by harming society." The whole idea that we should get rid of government instead of improving government makes no sense; it's led to clearly harmful policies like the defunding of basic scientific research (not patentable, and hence no profits for any corpration).
Deregulation led directly to the 2008 economic collapse. The rhetoric laid the grounds for a lot of today's cynicism and negative political discourse. It made the Tea Party possible, and the Tea Party is largely responsible for our having the least effective and least popular Congress in history.
And if there's any doubt that the "libertarian" motivation was B.S., at the same Regan spent huge amounts of money to jail recreational drug users after arbitrarily declaring it to be the nation's biggest problem. Note that Nixon had invented the "War on Drugs" as a conscious attempt to deprive his hated opponents of their votes: hippies who smoked dope and inner-city blacks who did cocaine.
Finally, it was Reagan, with his fictional "welfare queen" stories, who most boldly put forth the absurd idea that the reason the struggling middle class had too small a piece of the pie was that the even poorer people had too much of it. Folks like yourself have continued to believe this (often because of its thinly disguised racism) while consistently voting against your economic self-interest. And hence the system remains broken.
There's more (like his complete inaction in AIDS), but I'll stop there.
Prepare your minds for a new scale of physical, scientific values, gentlemen.share
Love him or hate him, Jimmy Carter was the last President to have the cojones to call Americans out on their selfish, consumer-oriented BS. Much like Eisenhower's speech about the potential evils of the military-industrial complex--which 57 years later is our largest entitlement program--Carter had the view and honesty to see the direction in which we were headed.
And here we are with a reality-TV show President handpicking countries and religions that he'll accept into our country. If you can't see the line between there are here, you haven't been paying attention...
Time to turn off the Fox News.
Carter was one of our best presidents ever.