Jimmy Carter, Rock and Roll President, Revisited
Reviewed by Larry Gleeson
Another year has gone by, as another year has arrived offering promise and hope. As the late great Jimmy Carter has recently passed (December 29, 2024), I felt it apropos to revisit the 2020 AFI DOCS closing night film, Jimmy Carter, Rock and Roll President with hope and optimism for the coming year.
Jimmy Carter, Rock & Roll President featured testimonial interviews, poetry readings, and archival performances from musical legends Bob Dylan, Nile Rodgers, Roseanne Cash, Chuck Leavell, Willie Nelson, Johnny Cash, Dizzy Gillespie, Sarah Vaughn, Ray Charles, Mihaela Jackson, Tom T. Hall, Jimmy Buffet, Bono, Loretta Lynn, Dolly Parton, Trisha Yearwood, Garth Brooks, Charlie Daniels, and Gregg Allman and the Allman Brothers Band. Moreover, Ambassadors to the United Nations, Madeline Albright and Andrew Young, as well as Special Assistants to the President, Jim Free and Tom Beard, shared their respect and admiration for President Carter with direct interviews. Chip Carter, son and Presidential driver, added verisimilitude to the film’s revelatory narrative.
Jimmy Carter, Rock & Roll President, directed by Mary Wharton, provided an artistic view into the influence of music on Jimmy Carter’s upbringing and
Class Dreaming
Paper by Thomas Borias.
United States, 2024; in a country supposedly founded on principles of equality and freedom, the richest 1% of households hold 30.9% of the country’s wealth, while the poorest 50% hold only 2.5%. Beyond this mathematical incoherence, it demonstrates that the United States is a country deeply rooted in a class hierarchy, where the rich occupy the top, and have access to privileges, while the poor struggle to survive with the resources left by the wealthy. Throughout history, cinema has explored this problem, and films critiquing classism are frequent. James Cameron’s Titanic (Cameron 1997), one of the highest-grossing films of all time, discusses class struggles in 1900s America. Parasite (Bong 2019), a Korean film directed by Bong Joon-Ho, which became the first non-English-language film to win the Academy Awards for best picture, focuses on class division in modern South Korea. Finally, The Hunger Games (Ross 2012), set in dystopian America, opens the debate on the future of class oppression. Thus, through the study of three films set in three different eras – Titanic (the past), Parasite (the present), and The Hunger Games (the future) – this paper
