When our notorious Sen. Jesse Helms announced his retirement on Aug. 22, I, and much of the nation and world, let out a slow sigh of relief. And as I inhaled, the only words that could appropriately express the sentiment I felt were ironically from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.: “Free at last, free at last. Thank God Almighty, I’m free at last.”

My profound relief and gratitude were then followed by an immense sense of jubilation and glee. I kicked up my heels, prancing around my living room rug doing an impromptu impersonation of the Munchkins’ “Ding dong, the witch is dead ... get out of bed ... the witch is dead. The wicked witch is dead!” I was ecstatic.

Not that I wish the senator dead (though he once remarked that he’d like to see Castro leave Cuba “vertical or horizontal,” and that Clinton would need a bodyguard when he visited North Carolina). I only want to see the senator out of office, in a nice, pleasant retirement home where he can talk about the good old days of segregation and gay bashing till the cows come home. Let him think what he wants; just keep him out of office.

As a senator, Jesse Helms has been a tremendous embarrassment to the United States, vehemently fighting against women’s rights in the United Nations, and visiting only one other country, Mexico, in his five years as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relation Committee. Repeatedly, Helms displayed his lack of compassion and knowledge of other countries by opposing aid to what he dubbed “foreign rat holes.”

Furthermore, Helms served as a hideous skeleton in the closest for North Carolinians who wanted to move beyond the state’s former image of Old South racism, ignorance, and hatred. For a state hosting one of the finest collegiate academic programs in the country and whose mid-state Research Triangle Park attracts many of the nation’s foremost scientists, Helms is an anachronism, a dinosaur relic hanging onto some disillusioned dream about the white man’s burden.

When you mention North Carolina politics to someone from outside of the state, you don’t hear about Gov. Easley; the name that comes up is Jesse’s - and it’s usually mentioned with a cool mixture of disdain and snide sarcasm.

I usually feel the need when someone connects Helms to my home state to say, quickly, “Well, I didn’t vote for him.” Indeed, I did not. In fact, I voted against him. I even used to joke that I moved to North Carolina for the sole reason that I wanted to vote against him. But alas, it didn’t work. He won and he won again. “Who the heck,” I pondered, “would vote for such a person?!”

The African-Americans of our state surely didn’t. Helms has been a clear opponent of affirmative action across the United States. He also fought against the country adopting a national holiday honoring Dr. Martin Luther King, supported apartheid in South Africa, and whistled “Dixie” next to African-American Sen. Carol Moseley-Braun. In 1992, Helms’ campaign and the North Carolina Congressional Club settled a Justice Department charge that his campaign sent pre-election postcards wrongly threatening 125,000 black voters with incarceration if they voted.

The gays, lesbians and AIDS activists of our state did not vote for Jesse either. Helms lobbied long and hard in Congress against federal funding of AIDS research and assistance programs as well as anti-discrimination laws regarding sexual orientation. He made his stance on the “unnatural” and “perverted” practices of gay men and women clear, and upheld the radical Christian perspective that AIDS was sent by God to punish sinners.

The women of our state wouldn’t have voted for Helms, who preserved the 1950s notion of a woman’s best place being behind a man. He argued against the rights of women in the world and consistently voted to deny women the right to make choices regarding abortion.

The artists of our state couldn’t have even considered voting for Helms, who was the leader of the fight against the National Endowment for the Arts’ funding of projects he considered unworthy and inflammatory.

So who would have voted for Helms? Obviously, someone did. In fact, many North Carolinians did, or he wouldn’t be sitting in the United States Senate.

I believe that Helms’ support comes from others like him - some old white men - who continue to hold on to an antiquated notion of a glorious South in which the divisions of money, race, gender and class were clearly drawn and in which the repercussions of defying those divisions were, like Jesse, unsympathetic and cruel. Unsure of holding onto their power as other citizens vie for equal, not special, rights, these men and those they control voted for the man who would struggle to give them what they believe is their God-given right - superiority.

In the days that followed Helms’ announcement, a number of liberal commentators asserted that the political left was losing its best punching bag - that Jesse, in being so ridiculously offensive, unknowingly brought more supporters to the liberal cause. Though I can see their point and relish the thought of a liberal president, Senate and House, I cannot bear the thought of another term with Jesse representing our state and our nation. Helms has long belonged in the darker regions of our nation’s imperfect past.

Farewell Jesse. Goodbye. And good riddance.

(Esther Godfrey is in a doctorate program at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. She lives in Swain County and can be contacted at egodfrey@utk.edu)

 

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