Death of a Salesman

I caught the news of Jesse Helms' death on my way out the door on Friday, and the first thing I thought of was this Jon Carroll column from back in 2001, a couple weeks before 9/11 in fact. I read the requisite Times and Post obitcheries over the weekend, but as I had already assumed, Carroll's column still takes the better measure of the man, and the people who kept him in office.

The year was 1995. I was in my hotel room in Cairo watching CNN International, the only English-language television available.

....

I did not recognize the American guest at first. He was owlish and soft- spoken, with only a trace of a regional accent; he seemed to have a good grasp of certain complicated issues, including the budding war between India and Pakistan and the then-strained relations between Egypt and Syria.

His views were moderate; he offered more analysis than bombast. It took me a few minutes to realize that I was looking at Jesse Helms.

During the late '90s, I had CNN International on my satellite system. I was always struck by the clear difference between it and its doofier American cousin. And that was when the American CNN had a recognizable level of integrity.

Now, of course, CNN is very much the MTV of the news game. The erstwhile Music Television now no longer shows hardly any actual music at all anymore, just a parade of indistinguishable "reality" shows with interchangable emcees doing things that are scaracely worth filming in the first place. Similarly, CNN and its drooling stepchild, Headline News, grant ample blocks of time to fluffing celebrities, braying morons such as Glenn Beck and Nancy Grace, and tedious repetition of the most inane items imaginable. MSNBC is no better; whatever good-lib scrip it manages to print by airing Olbermann's daily pronunciamentos are offset by interminable prison docs and To Catch a Predator perv-a-thons, the sort of shit even Geraldo Rivera doesn't have time for anymore.

And none of the putatively objective encomia for the would-be statesman from Mayberry will offer any depth to Helms' political character beyond perhaps his twilight friendship with Bono. As Carroll points out, there are bits of information packaged for domestic consumption, and there are other bits from the same people repackaged for the rest of the world. So what Americans mostly knew of Jesse Helms was the drawling buffoon from Deliverance country, a divisive totem meant to rally yahoos and rile liberals who could never quite actually do anything about him.

The new gang in Washington, the ones who swept in 1994 and the ones who swept in with little George Bush in 2000, do not seem to be curious about anything. They are Values guys. People with Values are not curious, because their minds are made up. What's to be curious about?

They are not curious about the rest of the world, because the rest of the world lacks Values. The United States should serve as a moral beacon and, like a beacon, be utterly immobile, a distant point of light. Who cares about politics, art, culture, ideas, the smell of a foreign city, the sound of boats on an alien river? We do Values.

George Bush never thought it important to go anywhere. ....He arranged his trip to Mexico so he did not have to spend a night on Mexican soil. On his Europe trip -- I have a vision of the leader of the free world doing sit-ups in his hotel room, while his older advisers met with actual foreigners.

Americans are famously provincial. Americans are famously indifferent to their own ignorance. The new breed of Values pols panders to that, believes in that. Jesse Helms at least knew where Kashmir was and why it was important.

And yet Helms knew exactly who and what he was working, who and what had sent him there. It's a cliché that southerners are one of the few remaining groups that are still okay to stereotype in this country. But that's because they continue to play to those stereotypes, deliberately, proudly, defiantly. I don't mean the usual over-the-top Boss Hogg/Junior Samples cousin-fuckin' caricatures; I mean the real crackers, the ones who seriously try to debate the merits of honoring confederate banners and military leaders, the ones who still think racist jokes are funny, the ones who plaster weird, creepy bumper stickers on their jacked-up 4x4's, maybe keep a noose in their office to amuse visitors, the ones wallowing in their ignorance like it was grade-A pig shit. Either Helms knew better and played to that contemptible element anyway, or he was one of them from the get-go.

Probably a bit of both; most things in life are. But Helms is not some totem of absolution, carrying away the sins of his constituents with his own death. They voted him in, again and again, and hopefully what's left of that mossback legacy continues to die off with him. Helms wasn't a good guy, but you can't say he didn't give his people what they wanted. They own it as much as he does. It would have been something if just once Helms had felt it was as important to challenge his drooling demographic with the more sophisticated analysis that he had available, than to constantly play to easy type.