Jesse Helms Dead at 86
It’s a long time since Jesse Helms was at the frontline of politics, retiring back in 2003, an unreconciled paleo-conservative amongst the neo-liberal vanguard. After all this time, MC Hawking has got his wish (circa 2001). Jesse Helms has died.
Helms famously refused to support funding for AIDS research in the 1980s because he believed that there wasn’t a single case of AIDS in the US that couldn’t be traced back to an act of sodomy. Sodomy in his language especially including anal sex between two men, even if consensual, which his God forbid.
Helms wasn’t particularly respectful of the boundary between church and state, calling for returns to the moral and spiritual foundations that he thought made (Christian) America. Those spiritual foundations being particularly sectarian and non-negotiable as far as Helms was concerned.
While criticising the USSR for labour camps, Helms was a supporter of right-wing El Salvador that provided the US with cheap coffee, harvested under harsh labour conditions. He also supported the contras in Nicaragua, who while professing support for democracy, were stacked with hard-liners of old and engaged profusely in acts of terrorism.
Helms loud support for democracy was nothing if not a thin veneer over the visage of a to-the-core fascist.
While recognising the “top blokes after death” phenomena, I’m not prone to saying ill of the dead. Still, it is hard with Jesse Helms not to. He lived his life as a very bad person. The best I can say about Helms, goes threefold.
Firstly, he did some charity work with Bono. Secondly, he gave consideration to the silenced voices of the victims of 9/11 (even if he assumed them to naturally be supportive of his own political views). Thirdly, he’s dead.
Not a cause for celebration, his death nor his small list of redeeming acts. He was already out of the game for a few years when he died, so his death alleviates nothing if not his own suffering from ill health (which I never wished upon him at any rate).
His passing is callow. Let’s hope that his passing doesn’t through nostalgia, embolden some of the worst in America.
~ Bruce
I’m not prone to saying ill of the dead.
Christopher Hitchens has cornered the market on that, I’m afraid.
(I’m referring to his Falwell obit on FOX News.)
I had that particular case in mind, although it has to be said that while Hitchens didn’t pull any punches, he wasn’t in an orgasmic state of glee.
Take Saddam Hussein’s death for example. I have no problems with people giving him unfavourable obits, but what does bother me about his death (aside from the matter of his execution) is that people in the west, who Saddam did nothing to, celebrated his death with a certain amount of glee and triumphalism.
A not insubstantial part of the political right gained pleasure at his execution.
On the other side of things, I think one should limit themselves to being at worst, tongue-in-cheek about the deaths of people like Kerry Packer. Packer had many, many flaws but he was no Falwell, nor a Helms and certainly not a Hussein.
http://www.slate.com/id/2194921/
Speaking of Christopher Hitchens…
Christopher Hitchens: 100-proof boo-ya!
I have dibs on that one for quote of the week, by the way.