Jimmy Carter's "Malaise Speech" did not include the
word "malaise."
What
Carter did say was to the point.
"Too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and
consumption. Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what
one owns," Carter told the nation. He said "fragmentation and
self-interest" prevented Americans from tackling the energy crisis.
Who,
for example, is Mitt Romney?
Of
course we all know what Etch-a-Sketch owns.
Willard
is a very successful man.
Obama,
on the other hand, "hates success."
Trappist
monk, Father Thomas
Merton was once asked to write a chapter for a book entitled "Secrets
of Success." He replied: "If it so happened that I had once
written a best-seller, this was a pure accident, due to inattention and naïveté, and I would take very good care
never to do the same again. If I had a message for my contemporaries, I
said, it was surely this: Be anything you like, be madmen, drunks, and
bastards of every shape and form, but at all costs avoid one thing:
success."
The entire text of Carter's speech is at http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/primary-resources/carter-crisis/
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