Let the Dead’s Own Words Speak Ill of Them

“[Senator Jesse] Helms regularly clashed with Bill Clinton, and once said the president “better have a bodyguard” if he visited North Carolina. He later said the comment was meant in jest.” (Wall Street Journal 7/5/08)

Sentor Jesse Helms“Your tax dollars are being used to pay for grade school classes that teach our children that CANNIBALISM, WIFE-SWAPPING, and the MURDER of infants and the elderly are acceptable behavior.”

— Senator Jesse Helms campaign mailer

“Both presidential candidates this year are calling for an end to what they say are politics of division and vitriol that have intensified in Washington over the past quarter-century.
“In a sense, they are repudiating a style embodied as much as anybody by former Sen. Jesse Helms, who died Friday at age 86.” (Wall Street Journal 7/5/08)

Wow.  In a single package.  A nasty-speaking opponent of civil rights for minorities of all types and a template for late 20th-Century vicious personalized divisive politics. 

It’s hard to find the inherent worth and dignity in some people.

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2 Responses to Let the Dead’s Own Words Speak Ill of Them

  1. sfmini says:

    Copied from my reply to another post.

    As a tiny tot, living near Raleigh North Carolina our only available TV station was WRAL-5, which then had a split network affiliation between CBS and ABC, I think. At any rate after the 6 o’clock news this horrid man would give a few minutes of a piece of mind. It was Jesse Helms and this was at least before 1965. I didn’t much care for him so I would go turn the TV down. At 4 or 5 I didn’t like the man. How did he get away with spewing that crap on the air? Easy, he owned the TV station.

    My father had one thing to say about him. He served his constituency well. I think that’s an insult to both of them.

  2. robinedgar says:

    The inherent Worth and Dignity of the Dead. . .

    Obviously what people say and do reflects on their actual worth and dignity, regardless of how much “inherent” worth and dignity they may have. Considering just how much lack of respect for some people’s worth and dignity many U*Us display, one has to wonder how much real worth the “First Principle” of U*Uism actually has in practice. That being said, I don’t believe that the dead deserve any additional respect simply because they are dead. The respect that the dead are entitled to, at least in terms of what people have to say about them after their death, should be the respect, or lack thereof. . . that they earned through their words and actions while they were alive. To paraphrase Ovid’s words, “If you want to be respected, be respectable.”

    When I learned that U*U COP aka Peter Kohl had passed away I did think long and hard about how much well earned criticism to posthumously subject him to on The Emerson Avenger blog but in the end decided that there was no compelling reason to spare this self-described “Citizens’ Police Officer” from legitimate criticism that he had earned while he was alive. Here’s my U*Ulogy for Peter Kohl –

    http://emersonavenger.blogspot.com/2008/03/rip-uu-cop-aka-peter-kohl-montreal.html

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