On Thu, Aug 23, 2001 at 04:47:41PM -0400, Max Sawicky wrote:
> This is either a gag or some of the most subtle
> satire I have ever read.
>
> where did it run?
>
> mbs
>
>
>
> Farewell to a Great Jacksonian
>
> By Walter Russell Mead.
> As rumors spread through Georgetown, Cambridge and Manhattan that
> North Carolina Sen. Jesse Helms had decided not to run for
> re-election to the seat he had held since 1973, the merriment among
> the chattering classes could scarcely be contained. Anti-gay rights,
> anti-abortion, anti-world government, pro-Bible and pro-tobacco,
> Jesse Helms is the antitype of political correctness. His enemies
> have never been able to beat him at the polls; now that the senator
> is yielding the floor to Father Time, liberal Democrats -- and not a
> few pro-business Republicans -- rejoice at the imminent departure of
> an eloquent, resourceful, inveterate foe. The jubilation is both
> premature and misguided.... It is misguided because for all his
> staunch conservatism and angry rhetoric, Mr. Helms is one of a
> handful of Southern statesmen who ensured the triumph of the civil
> rights revolution.... [O]nce the civil rights legislation of the
> 1960s was enacted, Mr. Helms -- along with some of his erstwhile
> segregationist colleagues like South Carolina Sen. Strom Thurmond --
> did something very revolutionary for Southern white populists. He
> accepted the laws and obeyed them. This is not how Southern
> politicians responded in the 1870s and 1880s. Populists like South
> Carolina's "Pitchfork" Ben Tillman did not just fulminate against
> civil rights laws. They led movements of armed, organized resistance,
> intimidating black voters at the polls, defending racial lynchings
> and, in Tillman's case, being directly and openly involved in the
> murder of black political leaders. Even as the passions of the civil
> rights movement were at their height, Messrs. Helms and Thurmond
> (whose father was Ben Tillman's attorney) shunned violence.... Even
> their opposition to affirmative action is based on their claim that
> these principles violate what ought to be a color-blind stance on the
> part of the government. That is something no white Southern
> politician, and especially one representing Mr. Helms' core
> supporters of farmers and small-town whites, would have ever said
> before Jesse Helms came along. It is something they all say now. Mr.
> Helms could have followed the Tillman path and led the white South
> into violent resistance; he also could have failed to carry his
> supporters with him into grudging acceptance of the new racial order.
> He disciplined and tamed the segregationist South even as he
> represented it to a hostile nation. We are all better off because he
> managed this difficult high- wire act.
-- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929
Tel. 530-898-5321 E-Mail michael at ecst.csuchico.edu