Was just waiting for the right obit…. Our church came through:
Friends when it comes to hating all the same folks God does, no one — outside this room — came close to the Late, Great Jesse Helms, a fine senator from one of those Carolinas. We are here today tocelebrate the life of a real Christian hero. When Jesus takes a servant of His home on the 4th of July, a holiday more important to the Lord than His own birthday, it means that person was very special to Heaven. God is telling us that Senator Helms is His idea of a True American™.
Much like George W. Bush, Jesse Helms was a politician from the inspirational George Wallace School of Trash-Talking the Powerless. In Alabama, back in the ‘60s and ‘70s, Wallace learned the nuances of winning elections by serving his constituents’ so-called “bigotry” rather than their interests. It’s easy to get the rich white vote! You just give us and the corporations we own all the subsidies and tax breaks, while making the law free of pesky environmental and sissy safety regulations. Of course, someone has to pay for all of this, and that’s the poor white folks (you know, the people who supervise our even-poorer help). Since these folks are getting squeezed harder than a 400-pound Negress flying in the middle seat in coach, George Wallace came up with a nifty gimmick to trick these gullible fools into electing someone who will do absolutely nothing for them when he gets into office! The secret? You get their vote by creating an enemy they will loathe. Then, promise to go after that enemy. For Wallace, the enemy was everyone’s favorite: colored folks. Friends, he used the “n” word more often than many of us in this room, andblocked the entrance to the University of Alabama to prevent some colored kids from contaminating the school’s shower facilities until he was removed by the activist National Guard. This got him almost all the poor white vote, and with the lowest property taxes in America, the rich white vote was a cinch.
For our President Dubya, the enemy has been, at different times, (1) Osama Hussein (or is that Saddam bin Laden? Toe-mae-toe, toe-mah-toe), which later morphed into the not so easy to identify (and, therefore, not so easy to blame for not catching) “Al Qaeda,” sort of a catchall for anything scary with facial hair and (2) Adam and Steve, a mythological pair of prancing homos that camped it up as they gentrified Eden. Forgive what I understand may be coarse vernacular, friends, but as my hell-bound Jewish securities lawyer is fond of saying, the financially vulnerable will tolerate getting “screwed” so long as the government prevents the same from occurring between two penised persons. Alas, one George didn’t keep those Negroids out of Tuscaloosa forever, and the other George never found Osama, but just the promise to try was enough to get the rednecks and white trash crowd to vote for them.
No one understood all of this better than Jesse Helms. Jesse got his start in 1950 working for Senate candidate Willis Smith, a man who recognized the importance of races knowing their place. Jesse helped Smith win the Senate by doctoring a photograph of his opponent’s wife so that it appeared she was dancing with a black man, and we all know where that leads! Jesse was elected to the Senate, himself, in 1972 on his relentless platform of attacking Negroes. But Jesse wasn’t unfairly singling out coloreds for his disgust and derision. Among the group of people for whom he expressed abject hatred, he generously included gays, liberals, socialists and anyone non-American.
As such, Jesse was a man after our own hearts. He opposed any increase in the minimum wage (which would just make poor people even more uppity), opposed any spending on the so-called “arts” (which is just another word for “smut”), opposed compensation of Japanese-Americans who were imprisoned during World War II (which was their own fault for being born Japanese in the first place), opposed naming a holiday after Communist, Martin Luther King, Jr., opposed all laws protecting gays and lesbians from violence (based on God’s edict in the Book of Leviticus) and fully supported apartheid in South Africa. He even opposed the Civil Rights Act, insisting that North Carolina be exempted from any law against discrimination. Congress overwhelmingly voted him down on this effort, further establishing his present status as a Christian martyr.
Jesse didn’t mince words. He was once accused of being a caveman. He angrily responded: “I’m a conservative progressive, and that means I think all men are equal, whether they be slants, beaners or niggers.” After graciously complimenting the overly pigmented by noting that they “have a natural instinct for rhythm and for singing and dancing,” Jesse warned the coloreds: “The Negro cannot count forever on the kind of restraint that’s thus far left him free to clog the streets, disrupt traffic, and otherwise interfere with men’s rights.” Jesse, ever the scientist, completely dispelled the notion that AIDS can be transmitted by intravenous drug use or heterosexual acts when he observed: “If homosexuals would stop what they’re doing, there wouldn’t be any more AIDS.”
As we all know, the acorn doesn’t fall far from the tree. Once, Jesse’s dad, a policeman, stopped some uppity black wench from protesting some so-called injustice. When she continued her silly rants, he smashed her with his huge fists, then dragged her off to jail, with her dress pulled up over her head, as the caveman used to do with his sexual prey. She screamed in pain as the concrete tore away her skin, but he continued his trek, unabated. Jesse continued that tradition of putting folks in their place with his time in the Senate. Perhaps his greatest legacy of all is the fact that his hatred never escaped him. He hated those who weren’t white, upper-income, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant heterosexuals up until the day he died. He never “repented,” in fear that some of Jesus’ carelessly phrased New Testament proclamations might trump the Old Testament words upon which the senator had based his entire life. Friends, Jesse Helms passed away on Independence Day, with a soul as clean as a 1950’s drinking fountain.
Out Of My Mind 