Overcast and getting darker this early-evening Sunday here in California’s Central Valley, a foggy impending conclusion to a rather beautiful, sunshine-filled day, though, a bit on the chilly side.
In tolerable levels well beyond any required whine, however.

Posting off a rather nice feature I read this afternoon on Jimmy Carter, whose funeral is upcoming, and the huge, vast, humongous gap between the entire Republican party, from Reagan, 40 years go to the T-Rump right now, and James Earl Carter Jr. — a difference between nasty, cold darkness and warm, empathic light.
The piece by longtime journalist and author Ed Vulliamy at the Guardian is a memory flashback to when Vulliamy interviewed Carter in 1987 during the former president’s visit to the UK — a supposedly straightforward question-and-answer session became a ‘conversation,’ mainly because Carter presented himself as decent-acting: ‘Here was a man entirely free of airs and graces, let alone the narcissistic pomposity that defines power; a humility that was not contrived.‘

Go read the whole piece, there’s no paywall, so worth the few minutes. It’s a way-nostalgic, sweet look at a man/politician not found nowadays. Including this bit on our current real-time horror:

What timing, this sad news of his passing. No two holders of the office could be further apart from one another: the peanut farmer who won by preaching “compassion and decency and openness and honesty and brotherhood and love” (his words, not mine, from a campaign speech); and the convicted felon and sexual abuser soon to be inaugurated for preaching stupid but rabid hatred, and impunity of the bully.

One of the best snap descriptions of our current shit.

Decency’s funeral next week, or not, yet here we are once again…

(Illustration out front: “Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter,” by illustrator and caricaturist Tom Bachtell, and found here.)