Hitch's Turn

Brilliantly scabrous Christopher Hitchens on Jess's Welcome trip to hell. In his first paragraph he echoes the first thoughts I had upon learning of this piece-of-shit's passing:

It seemed somehow profane that Sen. Jesse Helms should have managed to depart this life on the 232nd anniversary of the declaration of American independence. To die on the Fourth of July, one can perhaps be forgiven for feeling, is or ought to be a privilege reserved for men of the stamp of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, both of whom expired on that day in 1826, 50 years after the promulgation of the declaration. One doesn't want the occasion sullied by the obsequies for a senile racist buffoon.

... I make no apology for calling him a provincial redneck, because that, to be fair to him once more, was how he thought of himself and even described himself. It was a scandal that a man with so little knowledge of the outside world should have had such a stranglehold on American foreign policy for so long. He once introduced Benazir Bhutto as the prime minister of India. All right, that could have happened to anybody. But what about the hearings on North Korea in which he made repeated references to "Kim Jong the Second"? In order to prevent any repetition of this idiotic gaffe, Helms' staff propped up a piece of card on which was clearly written the pronunciation "Kim Jong ILL." The senator from North Carolina duly made the adjustment, referring thenceforth to the North Korean despot as "Kim Jong the Third."

I remember watching him at a hearing in the early 1980s, on the confirmation of Richard Burt as ambassador to Germany, and marveling that such a venomous hick could be in a position to block a treaty or to stall a nomination. To the delicacy of foreign relations, he brought all the sophistication of a crusader against "modern art." (On this issue, the New York Times obituarist felt more confident, I noticed, allowing himself a mild smirk at Helms' admitted failure to "figure out" the Alexander Calder mobile that was installed in the lobby of the Senate's newly opened Hart Building. Philistinism is an offense, even if it is not as rank as racism.) Had it not been for Helms, it is unlikely that the United States would have become so fatally embroiled with the scabrous contras of Nicaragua. And probably nobody but Helms could have surveyed the situation in El Salvador in the 1980s and concluded that the problem with that small and tortured country was that its government was already too socialist.