◆The Barbaric Yawp Project

Pick Up the Hammer I was a peanut farmer from Plains, Georgia. I was president for a single term, and for a long time the history books called that term a failure. I want to talk to you about failure. And about telling the truth. I ran for president the year after a president resigned in disgrace for lying to the country. So I made one promise above all the others. I told the American people: I will never lie to you. People found it almost quaint — a strange thing to feel you had to promise. It is a stranger thing now, when the lie has become the whole of the performance. In the summer of 1979 I went on television and told the country a true thing it did not want to hear. I said we were suffering a crisis of confidence that no amount of money could cure — that a people who had come to worship consumption and self-indulgence were starving in a place groceries cannot reach, because owning things and buying things does not fill the hole where meaning is supposed to live. They hated it. The next year they chose a man who told them it was morning in America — that they could have everything and give up nothing, and that the emptiness I had described was merely my weakness, not their condition. I do not entirely blame them. Flattery is sweeter than truth, and it wins the first election every time. But hear me: the politician who only ever tells you that you are great is not your friend. He has simply discovered what you want to hear, and decided to sell it back to you. I did some things in that one term. I gave back a canal that was never ours to keep. I made the way a country treated its own people part of how we chose to deal with that country. I sat two old enemies down at a table in the Maryland woods and would not let them leave until they made a peace that has held for nearly fifty years. I put solar panels on the roof of the White House. The man who replaced me took them down. They are always, eventually, taking the panels down. And then I lost. Badly. Here is the part I most need you to hear. Losing the most powerful office on earth turned out to be the beginning of the most useful work of my life. I picked up a hammer and built houses with my own hands, for people I would never meet, into my nineties. I helped take a disease that tortured three and a half million people and drive it almost to zero. I went to small countries to watch over their elections so no strongman could quietly steal them. I did this for forty years with no power at all — because the power was never the point. The office was never the point. I lived out my life in the same small house, in the town where I was born. I taught Sunday school until I could no longer stand. I was married to one woman for seventy-seven years. I tell you this not to be admired, but because you are being sold a different gospel now — that a man is measured by the gold on his buildings, the size of his grievances, and the number of times he wins. That is a lie. It was always a lie. The measure of a life is what you build when there is nothing in it for you. So tell the truth, even when it costs you the election. Do not trust the man who only tells you that you are great. And pick up the hammer.