On Jesse Helms: A Life Spent Throwing Garbage from the Windows

In which The Gay Recluse contemplates the urge to shit on the world.

In our apartment building, trash collection is not exactly arduous: all you have to do is put it out by the elevators between the hours of six and nine, morning or evening.

For some, however, this is too much to ask, so they just throw it out the window!

We try to imagine what kind of thought process this entails, and how little respect it displays for those like our long-suffering super Leo and his wife Maggie who inevitably have to clean it up.

We are struck by the uncivilized quality of such actions, knowing that if everyone did this, the city -- by which we mean society at large, which requires a certain empathy that rises above the written law -- would quickly grind to a halt.

This of course is why we also hated Jesse Helms, who said this about gays/AIDS: "It's their deliberate, disgusting, revolting conduct that is responsible for the disease."

And this: "I've been portrayed as a caveman by some. That's not true. I'm a conservative progressive, and that means I think all men are equal, be they slants, beaners, or niggers."

The reason he loved teenagers should be obvious: it's the age we typically associate with destruction and antipathy (and romanticize and excuse it as such); as a society, we seem to feel that it's important to taste the uncivilized to understand its opposite, which makes a certain amount of sense, if you think about it.

So yeah, we break shit and party and scream and then -- or most of us -- grow up and learn to resist such urges, if not for own sake then for others on whom we have no right to inflict our misery.

But Jesse Helms was a teenager his entire life. Which is probably why he appeared so grotesque, like a real monster!

The joy we felt learning about his death, of course, barely lasted a second; it was a more a function of our past, when we did not yet understand that Jesse Helms was merely a symbol of something angry and insolent -- and uncivilized -- that lives in all of us, wanting desperately to tear down what has taken so long to build.

Evil Jesse Helms quotes from JoeMyGod. Mr. Helms welcomed teenagers. Even when lobbyists could not get in to see him, high school students could. His office once calculated that he had met with 170,000 teenagers in his 30 years in the Senate. --The New York Times

Comments

[Mike Licht]

The late senator deserves a fitting memorial. See http://notionscapital.wordpress.com/2008/07/05/jesse-helms/

[The AB Remainders: La Dolce Vita Presso La Baia Di Tartarughe The Curious Affairs Of Atherton Bartelby]

[...] of concisely chronicling, in text and in images, the death of the North Carolina Senator, in “On Jesse Helms: A Life Spent Throwing Garbage From The Windows,” in which he also laments another nasty habit that always used to enrage me when I lived in [...]

[Tim]

Somebody said to me the other day that a pay toilet should be errected over the grave of the late senator Helms. "This way the national debt can be paid off in a matter of months."

Somebody else said: "I wish I believed in Hell just for the satisfaction of seeing Jesse Helms sent there."

As for the atrium in your building serving as a giant communal trashcan, I would advise you to: "Par favor, no cages por las ventanas. Hay otras cosas que puede hacer sobre el problema." (Please, don't shit out the windows. There are other things you can do about the problem.)