The obituary page of the Spy

Bigot, bully, hater, and
friend to war criminals, 
Jesse Helms dies at 86

By U. Netanya Tokef
Spy Obituary Writer

We told you: he looked like what we was

One thing you could say about Senator Jesse Helms, who died last week at 86: what you saw was what you got. In his forty years in public life, he walked, talked, and acted like a dick. And he looked like one, too. His bald, pink round head poked up through a foreskin of wattles, jowls and wrinkled gray suits. In his later years, he had difficulty staying erect for more than five minutes, usually collapsing limply into a nearby chair. 

He was a man of firm principles and low ideals, which he championed throughout his long but not illustrious career. He first poked the public eye with incendiary attacks on the civil rights laws of the 1960's and Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., whom ol' Jesse accused of propounding "action-oriented Marxism ... not compatible with the concepts of this country."

The cracker Tarheels of North Carolina, today a state with entirely undeserved pretensions to civilization and enlightenment, were impressed enough by this demagogic drivel to send Jesse off to the U.S. Senate for 30 years, where he played a vital role in sabotaging legislation designed to advance the interests of the poor and the downtrodden.

Of course, such callousness would not effectually distinguish Jesse Helms from scores of other Republican politicians of his or any other day.  It was Jesse's unique ability to express hatred and prejudice, combined with a skulking ability to throw sand into the gears of government in the service of those "ideals," that made him such a threat to small-r republican government.

His apologists and brain-dead reporters claimed that he was known for being "courtly," by which they meant he did not yell and scream when spewing forth his appeals to, and apologies for, race hatred.  Of course, in the old days cherished by Jesse Helms, Trent Lott, and other distinguished Republicans, the massa never had to raise his voice because he had the guns, the whips and the dogs. Backed by Senate Republicans, reactionary money, and the approval of the ignorant rednecks of his home state, Jesse, too, never needed to raise his voice.

In later years, having exhausted the political gold of appeals to racism, he turned his attention to gays.  In his mind, persons with a sexual preference different from his (or at least the one he pantomimed) were an abomination for whom a cruel plague was nothing but a just reward.

Mourners flock to make sure Jesse Helms is really dead

Although he was best known for his mush-mouthed hate-ridden assaults on blacks, gays, women, and anyone else not as narrow-minded and hide-bound as himself, Helms actually did most of his damage in the field of foreign policy, where he used his gavel as Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, with the acquiescence of his spine-free Republican colleagues, to subvert the conduct of U.S. foreign affairs in great part by harassing and browbeating the powerless professionals who sought to execute it.

Through the years, he bullied the State Department and other agencies into accepting his equally reactionary and incompetent henchman as colleagues. Those clowns would in turn traduce the policies of whatever administration was in power to advance their favorite causes, notably blood-drenched "anti-Communist" extremists from Nicaragua to Angola, and the isolationist reactionary utopia as articulated by one of his knuckle-draggers while clothed as an American diplomat: "Get the U.S. out of the UN and get the UN out of the U.S."  If such efforts placed the U.S. in violation of its obligations under that musty piece of paper, the UN Charter, so much the better.

Fortunately, for ol' Jesse, he hung around long enough to see some of his cherished policies, such as fomenting and supporting the brutal contra guerrilla war against the democratically-elected government of Nicaragua and undercutting the UN and any other multilateral forum not reflexively servile to right-wing Republicans, adopted by ideological soulmates in White House.  

Sadly, for him and even more so for the nation, he did not live, or at least retain consciousness, long enough to see his former cabal of violence-prone extremists, now doing business as the Bush Administration, send the entire Middle East up in flames in furtherance of their wet dream of an America so strong and so overbearing that no one would do to this country what was done to them every day in junior high school.

Of course, even a man as loathsome and evil as Jesse Helms had some redemptive moments. Just before he slipped into senescence, he treated the nation to the rousing spectacle of the public gibbeting of drunken gasbag Bill Weld, whom Ted Kennedy tried to ship to the U.S. Embassy in Mexico so that Ted's nephew could become Governor of Massachusetts before paralyzing another woman in his car.

The insufferably patronizing Weld, who had incurred Helms's wrath by investigating some of his more crooked staffers, was slowly roasted on Jesse's North Carolina barbecue spit until nicely charred. Bill Weld never got to enjoy Happy Hour in Mexico. We'll drink to that.

Although Helms died in well-deserved obscurity, his legacy of crude appeals to racism and homophobia, harnessing the machinery of government in the service of rich, powerful white men, and a one-size-fits-all foreign policy advocating an America that shoots first, tortures second, and buries the bodies later is alive and well today.  

It's called the Republican Party.

Research for this obituary was provided by the The New York Times, the Raleigh News & Observer, and Salon. The joke comparing a Republican politician to a limp male organ was stolen from the late great Richard Pryor, who had been referring (correctly) to Ronald Reagan.