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maga misses ole jesse and strom
Individual Most Historically Influential ON North Carolina?
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donbosco
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My ‘take’ on Helms.
Growing up my Deddy insisted that we watch the news on WRAL because it came out of the capital city of Raleigh, a reasonable distinction before the days of 24-7 news coverage, and would have the latest regarding the state of the State. That was Channel 5 - a number that in my youth was negatively associated with the clear villainy of Jesse Helms - a connection thankfully tempered in recent years by heroes that wore that number like Marcus Paige and Armando Bacot!
As a child I remember very clearly noting that the left-side of Helm's mouth configured into a sneer each time he pronounced the letter 'R.' Long before I even tried to understand what his horrid message was I had come to dislike the man. Once I gathered the gist of his communication that dislike ballooned. In retrospect I can see that a lot of things began to inch off the rails as this cretin’s influence rose.
That he and his dirty tricks were acceptable was the tip-off that so much worse might be in the cards. Today the likes of Marjorie Taylor Greene, Jim Jordan, and Lauren Boebert represent the “Worst Ángels of our Nature” and manage to effortlessly out-Helms ‘Dear Jesse’ daily. Of course I believe that senator Helms’ life’s work is a huge negative on the planet and humanity and that his hands are deeply stained with the blood of 100s of thousands of Central Americans but as bad as he was I can’t get past the sense that the modern trumpist GOP is beyond even his famous malevolence. Still, were he around today I have no doubt that, not to be outdone, he’d adjust properly.
Helms attacked my Alma Mater with vigor and frankly he was a measure that we were on the right track. From our #DeepChatham den in the 1960s and ‘70s to hear the nightly foreshadowing on Channel 5 of today’s all too familiar trumpist juvenile name-calling in Helmsian phrases like “UNC: The University of Negroes and Communists” or “Not Chapel Hill - but Commie Hill” simply endeared the Southern Part of Heaven to me. After all, it was Coach Smith’s teamwork, passing, and winning style of play, communal to its core, that had gotten me on The Front Porch and with every Point to The Passer for an easy basket I knew more and more where the Better Ángels were based.
That the larger UNC System can still serve as a target for Senator No’s modern disciples and admirers is a comfort but that the same set now hold most of the reins of power is deeply disturbing. The consistent attacks on the 17 campuses and the humanities in particular has been Gerrymandered into an upper hand over a decade old now and much damage has been done. Imagine that crooked sneer on the face of Helms as he looks up from his eternal resting place and mutters Re-Education. In the trenches and classrooms the battle continues.
Growing up my Deddy insisted that we watch the news on WRAL because it came out of the capital city of Raleigh, a reasonable distinction before the days of 24-7 news coverage, and would have the latest regarding the state of the State. That was Channel 5 - a number that in my youth was negatively associated with the clear villainy of Jesse Helms - a connection thankfully tempered in recent years by heroes that wore that number like Marcus Paige and Armando Bacot!
As a child I remember very clearly noting that the left-side of Helm's mouth configured into a sneer each time he pronounced the letter 'R.' Long before I even tried to understand what his horrid message was I had come to dislike the man. Once I gathered the gist of his communication that dislike ballooned. In retrospect I can see that a lot of things began to inch off the rails as this cretin’s influence rose.
That he and his dirty tricks were acceptable was the tip-off that so much worse might be in the cards. Today the likes of Marjorie Taylor Greene, Jim Jordan, and Lauren Boebert represent the “Worst Ángels of our Nature” and manage to effortlessly out-Helms ‘Dear Jesse’ daily. Of course I believe that senator Helms’ life’s work is a huge negative on the planet and humanity and that his hands are deeply stained with the blood of 100s of thousands of Central Americans but as bad as he was I can’t get past the sense that the modern trumpist GOP is beyond even his famous malevolence. Still, were he around today I have no doubt that, not to be outdone, he’d adjust properly.
Helms attacked my Alma Mater with vigor and frankly he was a measure that we were on the right track. From our #DeepChatham den in the 1960s and ‘70s to hear the nightly foreshadowing on Channel 5 of today’s all too familiar trumpist juvenile name-calling in Helmsian phrases like “UNC: The University of Negroes and Communists” or “Not Chapel Hill - but Commie Hill” simply endeared the Southern Part of Heaven to me. After all, it was Coach Smith’s teamwork, passing, and winning style of play, communal to its core, that had gotten me on The Front Porch and with every Point to The Passer for an easy basket I knew more and more where the Better Ángels were based.
That the larger UNC System can still serve as a target for Senator No’s modern disciples and admirers is a comfort but that the same set now hold most of the reins of power is deeply disturbing. The consistent attacks on the 17 campuses and the humanities in particular has been Gerrymandered into an upper hand over a decade old now and much damage has been done. Imagine that crooked sneer on the face of Helms as he looks up from his eternal resting place and mutters Re-Education. In the trenches and classrooms the battle continues.
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In re Jesse Helms: The stories I heard about Jesse's father, "Big Jesse" tend to make "Little Jesse" look like a calm, rational, contemplative man. Apparently "Big Jesse" who was Chief of Police, is reputed to have believed that when black person was caight red-handed in a crime, then it was a waste of time and money to go through the rigamarole of a trial and incarceration. And further, "Big Jesse" further believed his use of summary punishment had a calming effect on the rest of the black male population that benefitted both them and the comminity at large. The old "it's for their own good" rationale that was so popular in the South in the first half of the 20th Century.
donbosco
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"Timothy Tyson frames his prize-winning first book with two images. In 1936 an eleven-year old African-American boy in Monroe, North Carolina, witnessed a white police officer, Jesse Helms, Sr., physically assault a black woman and then drag her, dress up over her head, along the pavement to the local jail. White bystanders laughed. African American men hung their heads and hurried away. Sixty years later Robert F. Williams, that black boy who became an advocate of "armed self-reliance," was laid to rest, his body carefully dressed in a gray suit given him by Mao Zedong, his coffin adorned with a red, black, and green pan-African flag, and his eulogy given by Rosa Parks, the embodiment of non-violent resistance."
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As a follow-up to your recommendation of "Albion's Seed," GOOD GRIEF that is one brick of a book. I will try to digest it a bit more thoroughly than I did "Moby Dick" and "Portrait of a Lady" in a long ago American Literature (Eng 41) class taught by Kimball King, where each of the above was gulped down in a week amidst a torrent of other reading. As I best I can remember, "Moby Dick" was a novel of process, similar to books such as "Hotel" and "Airport," but about the whaling industry. "Portrait of a Lady" was a Guilded Age travel guide to Italy, serving the same niche as one of Rick Steves episodes on PBS does today.
ETA: So far the passage that would have received the greatest howls of laughter and assertions of its truth from my Scotch-Irish ancestors of my youth is the following characterization of their ancestors who had been expelled from both Lowland Scotland and Northern Ireland as a, "double-distilled selection of some of the most disorderly inhabitants of a deeply disordered land." And I feel certain they would have supplemented that with an assertion of "triple-distilled" to account for their ejection from Pennsylvania to the South via the Great Wagon Road.
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donbosco
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My folks are triple-distilled on my Deddy's side and at least double-distilled (Palantine refugees) on my Momma's.
But the book is divided up in some pretty digestible segments for the most part so you don't have to do longish reads. Keep it in the bathroom.