Jesse Helms: GOOD RIDDANCE (UPDATED)

I know it's not exactly kosher to speak ill of the dead, but if there are two people in the world I could reserve it for, one is Hitler and the other is Jesse Helms.

This post over at Firedoglake probably best explains why I detest that racist, homophobic bigot who stubbornly stood for principles that belong in the 15th century.

He served for far too long in the Senate, and it almost shames me to say that I lived in North Carolina while he was serving as its Senator.

If there's any justice in the afterlife, then Helms is certainly not in a very happy place right now.

UPDATE:

The G Spot is a fairly new blog, but it has a hell of a lot more on how the British papers gave Jesse Helms's a fitting obituary that spoke naught but the truth and left out the maudlin sentiment American papers seem obsessed with giving every public official and celebrity post mortem.

It reminds me of Orson Scott Card's Speaker for the Dead -- the protagonist of the preceding book (Ender's Game), Andrew Wiggin, has left his xenocidal ways behind and now travels the galaxy and "speaks" people's deaths. In doing so, he does not go out of his way to speak excessively well of the deceased; instead, in keeping with the tradition of speaking deaths, which he founded at the end of Ender's Game, Andrew Wiggin speaks nothing but the truth of a person's life. In Speaker for the Dead, the one death he speaks (at least as far as I remember -- I haven't read the book in a year) is of a man that many feared and thus hated for his strength, which shapes the man into who he is.

I really wish I could summarize it, but it's rather difficult to summarize without writing a few pages myself (this translates into BUY THE BOOK and READ IT FOR YOURSELF).

Still, we must remember that the truth of our actions will live on beyond us, and there's very little point in trying to hide it behind polite encomiums and eulogies.


Posted by pdmccaul [Op-Ed] ( July 06, 2008 04:28 PM ) Permalink | Comments[1]