In what has to be one of the crowning ironies of the early 21st century, Jesse Helms, an ultraconservative who fought everything the Constitution stood for and tried desperately to turn America into a Xtian monarchy, died yesterday. On the 4th of July.
On second thought, maybe it was in a way fitting. He was, after all, a peculiarly American crackpot, the kind we've had to suffer all through our history. An unabashed racist and puritanical bigot who wanted to see America turned from a democracy into a Xtian monarchy and did his level best to lay the groundwork for it, Helms was the kind of Southerner who thought the American Dream ended when Lincoln freed the slaves and was never comfortable with the institution of the income tax or the fact that women could vote. He was several of our secret shames brought to horrifying life, a man who detested foreigners, blacks, the poor, in fact anyone who wasn't white and from south of the Mason-Dixon.
In the end he was famous not for what he did, because he didn't accomplish very much in his 30-yr Senate career, but for what he wouldn't allow to happen.
Helms's opposition to social change and what he viewed as legislative overreaching led to his nickname of "Senator No," a title he came to relish. He blocked nominations for federal office, withheld funding for the United Nations, opposed gun control and threatened to cancel federal support for arts groups and school busing. A staunch opponent of communism, he sought to isolate Cuban leader Fidel Castro and refused to relent on strict U.S. trade embargoes of Cuba.
In 1977, Helms angrily denounced a treaty advanced by President Jimmy Carter to turn over the Panama Canal to Panama. From 1979 to 1986, over the objections of Republican leaders, Helms used parliamentary ploys to scuttle the SALT II arms limitation treaty, which he said made unwarranted concessions to the Soviet Union.
In the 90's he became Chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, a man who didn't know the difference between India and Pakistan and bragged that he didn't care. He was ill-informed but as opinionated as if he weren't. The only thing everybody agrees he was good at - and the reason the Right loved him - was fund-raising.
David A. Keene, chairman of the American Conservative Union, said recently that Mr. Helms’s contribution to the conservative movement was “incredibly important.”
For one thing, Mr. Keene said, Mr. Helms was alert to technological change, especially the importance of direct mail, and readily signed fund-raising letters that helped conservative organizations get started.
Yes sir. Direct mail. Now there's an accomplishment the Right can be proud of.
Jesse Helms was a disgrace as a man and a Senator but that hasn't stopped the usual gushing.
"Today we lost a senator whose stature in Congress had few equals," said Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Senate Republican leader, who lavished praise on the former senator as he defended Mr. Helms against those who remember him as a resolute polarizer on racial and other rights issues. "Senator Helms certainly was no bigot," McConnell said.
How McConnell reaches that conclusion in the face of miles of contrary evidence is a mystery but he's a conservative and reality doesn't mean much to him. The cherry on the sundae though belongs, as always, to the inimitable George W.
"Jesse Helms was a kind, decent and humble man and a passionate defender of what he called 'the Miracle of America.' So it is fitting that this great patriot left us on the Fourth of July," President Bush said in a statement Friday.
Jesse Helms didn't have a clue what America was about or he wouldn't have done half the things he did. Jesse Jackson (no relation) put it succinctly if mildly.
"At the height of his power," the Rev. Jesse Jackson said yesterday, "he fought for the values of the old confederacy. He resisted the new South. He resisted the opportunity to fight for a more perfect union."
Actually, you could say with equal accuracy that Helms was a man of the old Holy Roman Empire who fought for the values of Biblical government presided over by an all-powerful monarch. A man who resisted the Industrial Revolution and the opportunity to fight for US entrance into the 1870's. Except for its use in making money, he was a technological, political, and religious Luddite who never got over the (*horrors!*) freeing of the slaves, the loss of an English king as our ruler, or the spinning jenny.
He was a living anachronism, a throwback to everything we hoped we'd left behind, and he helped mold modern conservatism into a group with the same lingering disgust with the Constitution he had, the same longing for earlier times when peasants had to doff their caps to their betters (conservatives always picture themselves as the elite in whatever time they live). He was a direct precursor of George W Bush, and much of the responsibility for what's happened in the last 7 years belongs to him.
He won't be missed.
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