Tonight Jesse Helms Dines in Hell But Not (I Think) in the All-White Section

Jesse Helms is dead. That is *swell*. Breathing the same air he breathed always filled me with disgust.

Raised as a fundamentalist Protestant, I was one of those walking contradictions that sometimes spring from that peculiarly American soil. I was told that humanity was evil -- which I accepted as a proposition even though everyone I knew was kind of nice -- but as a good American boy I was filled with the notions of progress and the march toward earthly perfection.

Perfection is too strong. I believed in meliorism. I thought things inexorably inched forward. Then, about the time I was finishing up my degree at Duke while teaching at North Carolina State, my wife and I saw on the television the pustulant racist fish-faced Jesse Helms doing editorials for a Raleigh TV in which he was railing at (I still remember this phrase) BLACK WOMAN JUDGES.

And much else. But that is the phrase my wife and I recall. He was loathsome, and ignorance was the only prism through which he could have been seen as anything else.

You know the rest of the story. And so as I lost my Christian faith, I simultaneously had to accept that Christianity was pretty much right on about our collective heart of darkness, and I saw that progress was impermanent and anything but inevitable.

The truth is some scary shit, my friend.