JIMMY AND AMY ON TOUR

Let’s start over. Nobody ever really leaves Jimmy Carter, or, rather, he never really leaves us. He never just quilts or fly-fishes or goes to boring conferences, as a good ex-president should. No, heading his rump State Department, Plains Division, is a full-time endeavor, and even when not cornpromising American positions in geopolitical quagmires, sniping at sitting presidents in times of crisis, or conferring respectfully with terrorists, butchers, and other bad men, he always lurks on the periphery.

Even in off-Nobel season, having just lost out to those third-tier no-nukes P ugwashers, he stays primed, happening by D.C. to collect his National Caring Aw ard, bestowed by the Caring Institute, and attending (online) Hiroshima’s “Futu re of Hope” conference (which didn’t sound too hopeful at all, according to the Asahi Evening News headline: “Panelists split on whether mankind will survive”). Also, to keep in touch with his public, he stopped by Borders Books the other day for a signing.

Carter and daughter Amy have produced The Little Baby Snoogle-Fleejer, a work for kids. More precious than the he-said/she-said ditherings of $ IEverything To Gain (co-authored with wife Rosalynn) and as tin-eared and Tartuffan as his recent poetic offering, Always a Reckoning (which actually contains the titles “A Committee of Scholars Describe the Future Without Me” and “Why We Get Cheaper Tires From Liberia”), Snoogle-Fleejer is not, as it sounds, a cross between German engineering and phlegm. “It’s kind of a beautiful sounding name,” Carter explains. “And the little sea monster is ugly and fearsome but timid and kind and lonely.” The story centers around a gimpy outcast who befriends the monster, who in turn finds lost treasure, enabling the crippled boy to pay for an operation for his terminally ill mother — the usual bale of Carter mirth.

The former president said he used to tell his kids the story at bedtime. Amy did the illustrations, which Carter has said “startled” him at first, “but I have grown to love them.” For those who don’t have the luxury of such an adjustment period, her rainbowfolkish renderings are from the school known as Peter-Max-teaches-remedial-Egyptian-fingerpainting-to- aging-student-activists.

That didn’t stop an adoring public from lining up 700 deep on this December afternoon, with five and six books per person, four hours prior to signing time. To them it was a chance to square up to the greatest president of the late 70s for the two to three seconds it took him to sign his name without looking at the purchaser. For me, it was a chance to ask Amy why she named her cat “Yasser.”

She looked gawky and petrified and said, “I don’t want to talk about that.” Nor did the Secret Service steakheads, with their thick-necked menace sheathed in crisp Kuppenheimer navy, who brushed me back until after the signing.

“Isn’t he a nice man?” one father said to bawling tow-headed twins. “He’s a model ex-president,” said another admirer. “It’s adorable,” said someone else of the book. “I like to get famous people to sign baseballs,” explained a guy who’d just gotten Amy Carter to sign his baseball.

“That man is a national treasure,” said former Defense secretary Robert McNamara, no stranger himself to public adulation, passing through on his way to the sound recordings. After the idolaters finished, I posed a question to the treasure himself.

“Who currently is your favorite dictator, strongman, or agent of genocide, and can peace be made with him?”

“Favorite dictator?” he answered. “Let me think for a minute. Well, I don’t know who the leader is now of North Korea, but I got along well with Kim I1 Sung when he agreed to stop the development of his nuclear weapons, and I presume his son is still continuing that.” (The son is Kim Jong I1, whom Carter recently begged to attend the “96 Olympics in Atlanta.)

When Amy’s turn came around again, I asked her whether she would still describe her political philosophy as “feminist socialist.” She said, “Ummm . . . sure!”

“If capitalism’s so bad, why are you on a book tour?”

“I think that when asked my political opinions,” she said, “and they are reflected in part by both theory-you know I’m obviously extremely pro-choice, for gay rights, and would love to vote for a president less conservative than Clinton.” I pressed on.

“Of all the times you’ve been arrested [she was arrested four times before being bounced out of Brown for rampant activism], where’s your favorite holdilng pen?”

“It was definitely the best to get arrested with Abbie,” said Amy, referring to fabled 60s yippie Abbie Hoffman, with whom she protested on-campus CIA recruitment, engaged in numerous acts of CD (their term for civil disobedience) , and denied they were an item, though the late Hoffman was obviously under her spell when he said Amy had “a shot at being the first woman president.”

These weren’t the only questions. There were those of 21-year-old Chantal, who came up behind me and a cameraman, munching a complimentary bookstore sugar cookie. “Who’s that?” she queried, looking straight into Carter’s face.

“It’s Jimmy Carter,” said the cameraman.

“Who’s he?” she followed with no sign of embarrassment.

“He was the president,” the cameraman explained.

Chantal, still confused: “Of Border’s Books?”

by Matt Labash