Review of Jimmy Carter: Man from Plains (2007) by Chads. — 02 May 2008

Former president Jimmy Carter was still in office when Carl Reiner's "The Jerk" played in first-run theaters. Navin R. Jackson(Steve Martin) hailed from the south(Mississippi), and was a white boy raised by a black family, just like former president Carter, a Georgia boy, who although not adopted like Cat Juggler, was looked after by an African-American woman named Rachel, a sharecropper, during his formative years in Plains.

When the ex-president visits Darfur, he wears the traditional Sudanese clothing, and dances, badly, to the Sudanese beat, albeit not so in a condescending fashion, because this Nobel Peace Prize-winning octogenarian feels a genuine ease around black people.

But Carter has the rhythm of ex-Laker Mark Madsen(best ESPN highlight, ever!), as does Navin, when he claps in time to the songs of his adopted family. Jimmy Carter is not a jerk. "Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid" is not a racist book.

Read it. Or more to the point, buy it. This documentary is more about commerce than art. There's no way of getting around it, "Jimmy Carter: Man From the Plains" does play like an informercial for his hardcover bestseller about Israel's totalitarian-like occupation of Palestinian homelands.

But the film also speak volumes of the pervading anti-intellectualism that's dumbing down our culture, in which people will make vicious attacks on a person's character without any substantiation to back up their opening salvos and thrown gauntlets.