Jimmy Carter and His Cockroaches
I've always had misgivings about Habitat for Humanity ever since I heard one-term disgrace Jimmy Carter was involved. Kathy Shaidle shows these misgivings weren't entirely unfounded in a column which is hilarious if you don't live in one of slumlord Carter's houses:
Now, in a development sure to embarrass Nobel Peace Prize laureate Carter and his widely admired charity, a recent investigation by the Times of London revealed that the Fairway Oaks housing development is “better known for cockroaches, mildew and mysterious skin rashes.”
April Charney is a lawyer representing many of the 85 homeowners in Fairway Oaks who are now suing Habitat for Humanity. The charity, she told the Times, failed to tell residents that their new homes were built on a reclaimed garbage dump.
Some residents blame their health problems on the Fairway Oaks location, and their crumbling homes on Habitat for Humanity’s philosophy of using volunteers as construction workers, rather than experienced, licensed professionals.
“The intentions are good,” Charney told the Times, “but when the politicians and big-shot stars have left we’re stuck with the consequences. This house looks pretty but inside it either stinks or sweats.”
This part was darkly funny to me also:
Habitat for Humanity’s problems seem to date back to 2005, when the organization’s founder, Millard Fuller, was dismissed by the board of directors following sexual harrassment accusations by former Habitat employees.
Fuller and a legion of supporters, including Jimmy Carter, denied the allegations and worked to overturn the decision. In a confidential letter to the board, after Carter warned that a “national scandal” could ensue if Fuller was relieved of his duties as cheif executive.
In the March 26, 1990, letter, Carter explained that in the Southern culture that he and Fuller shared, physical displays of affection were commonplace. He came to realize, however, that such gestures were not universally welcomed, citing his dedication of the John F. Kennedy Library in 1979, when former First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis had “visibly flinched” at his attempt to hug her.
I wish I was a fly on the wall for that Jackie-O moment.
And I wish I had been a cockroach in the motel at another instance of Jimmah's ("JIMMAH!" - South[ern Trailer] Park.) penchant for lusting outside his heart not wisely but too well.
ReplyDeleteThe Onassis Cringe triggered recall of an old Martin Peretz "Cambridge Diarist" column from a 1980s issue of The New Republic, the magazine Peretz acquired thanks in part to his having married into the Singer sewing machine - er, family. I recalled him sporting with the imagined response of gruff "Brattle Street dowagers" to the farmer President's penchant for full-mouth-to-mouth bussitations as his version of a fine howdy-a-do, but could not recall the specific grande dame whose brush with Plains-spoken double-cracker-barreled smack-talking had provoked her in turn to smack-balking, and Peretz to smack-blogging it avant la Internettre.
For which small miracle of ready retrieval among others, thank Google; I like this version even better, and the entire Los Angeles Times obit for Elizabeth, Britain's Queen Mother, from whence it came, is worth a full read:
"Had she been the grandmother down the street, as her humbler countrymen liked to think of her, her fondness for liquor and chocolates, for racetrack betting and horse breeding and for racy jokes would have gotten her labeled a bawdy old lady. People loved the tale of her calling down from an upper floor of her palace, wanting help from a doting household whose numbers included many homosexuals: 'Are there any old queens down there who’ll fetch a gin and tonic for an old queen up here?'
"A servant reported finding half-bitten chocolates in wastebaskets, where Elizabeth tossed them if the filling was not to her liking. On a tour of Manchester, a constable staring at her chewing something was startled when she opened her window and tossed him a caramel."
<>
"At her own private dinners, the widowed queen could cut loose, instituting 'anti-toasts' to those she disliked: a left-wing politician, Ugandan strongman Idi Amin and former President Carter, reportedly 'because he is the only man, since my dear husband died, to have had the effrontery to kiss me on the lips.'
"Swagged in pearls and shod in rubber boots, rather like a Christmas tree in a plastic bucket, she fished in freezing Scottish streams and cheered her thoroughbreds at the racetrack.
"If she wasn't up to going out, she could follow the racing results at home, on the only race-ticker in a private residence in London.
"As her age crept toward 100, her relatives, friends and courtiers began dying around her. When a lady-in-waiting pleaded that she felt too old for the job, Elizabeth demanded of her, 'What about me?'"
Now that's what I call "undue charity."
ReplyDeleteAdam Andeve's comment is best read with Hendrix's "Foxy Lady" playing in the background.
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