Vicious, bigoted, nasty mean-spirited cunt dies
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/jul/04/usa

That's a brilliant obit.

That Theodore Bilbo it refers to sounds like a right charmer.

QUOTE:
The irony was that he was often seen as a relative moderate in his home state of North Carolina. His views sprang directly from his background as the son of the police chief in the small town of Monroe. Even before the Depression, life there was a constant struggle. It produced generations of deeply conservative poor whites, steeped in jingoistic patriotism and fundamentalist religion,

The first sentence provides a good argument for forced sterilisation in parts of N.C.

The last....isn't that more or less what Obama was saying?

Nice obit, and nice news - albiet 86 years too late.

I'd only take issue with this line, and it's one of those out-there lines that I wish the Guardian would run by me before they printed it: "The irony was that he was often seen as a relative moderate in his home state of North Carolina."

This line is simply false. North Carolina is anything but a bastion of right-wing extremism. There's a theory that the term "Tar Heels" came from the fact that NC was always slow to support the Confederacy, and in battle they were slow to the frontlines.

My first gf's mom grew up there, and she's say how her whole high school would go to see James Brown everytime he was in town. Dean Smith was the legendary basketball coach of UNC, and he was known as one of the great integrators of sport in the south. When he finally took the all-time win record from Adolf Rupp (notoriously racist coach of Kentucky,) it was seen as one of the last battles of the Civil Rights movement. Of the old confederacy, North Carolina is tied for the least amount of lynchings along with Virginia.

The only place he would probably be a moderate would be in Mississippi, where the KKK became the CCC (Council of Conservative Citizens,) Alabama, Texas, or Oklahoma.

This made my 4th of July, not least because he was one of my Deathpool picks.

I usually don't like to speak ill of the dead, but even as a kid, I knew he was an evil, evil bastard. When somebody told me he was openly a segregationist at the start of his career, and yet somehow had stayed in Congress into my lifetime, I realized for the first time how fucked our government was.

The only bad part is he won't be alive to see the first black man elected President. If only he could've waited until next February.

QUOTE:
I usually don't like to speak ill of the dead

I never understood that reluctance to speak ill of the dead.

Augosto Pinochet, Saddam Hussein, General Franco, Lavrenty Beria, Nero, Ghenghis Khan, Menachem Begin, Queen Victoria, Pope Alexander VI, Mao Ze Dong, Bomber Harris, Hernan Cortes, Ariel Sharon, Heinrich Himmler and Jesse Helms, hereby consider yourselves spoken ill of. You cunts.

Sharon isn't dead is he?

He is to me.

No, but he can't hear you speak ill of him.

QUOTE:
The only place he would probably be a moderate would be in Mississippi, where the KKK became the CCC (Council of Conservative Citizens,) Alabama, Texas, or Oklahoma.

Or at the National Review.

"Though there was dismay in North Carolina, his decision was greeted with relief by most of the country."

More "dismayed" extremist North Carolinians just broken up about Jesse Helms.

Jason is correct. Helms obviously had a lot of support in North Carolina - otherwise he wouldn't have been repeatedly reelcted - but there was also a lot of ambivalence about him and what he represents.

A friend of mine at college who was from Asheville (small city on the edge of the Smokie Mountains with a lot of hippies) had a sticker on his car stating "I am from North Carolina and I do not support Jesse Helms.") He was very proud to be from Appalachia (although he wasn't really a mountain man. His dad is a lawyer as he is now) and always liked to make fun of people from New Jersey and New York, but he went out of his way to show he was neither racist or stupid. There are a lot of people like him in North Carolina and throughout the south.

Charlotte in particular is a fairly cosmopolitan place where most people have come there from somewhere else to a job in its rapidly growing economy. For example, Charlotte is one of the few cities in America where housing prices have actually risen lately. It's a big banking hub and has a pretty decent culture scene for a city of its size. I spent a lot of time there when my brother lived there and it's very easy to see that many Charlotteans (as they are called) are a bit uneasy about the history of the South, while trying to preserve some of its better traditions like pork barbecue, NASCAR, friendliness, etc. It seems that they're a bit more willing to talk honestly about racial issues than, for example, Bostonians.

And of course, the universities and and the Research Triangle area is very cosmopolitan, although not immune to racial tension as the Duke lacrosse case demonstrated.

I have spent time in charlotte and it is certainly impressive.

There is a huge difference in the Carolinas BTW between north and south. north being closer to virginia in terms of not being that nuts and south a a lot more like alabama and georgia and more likely to elect lunatics like helms.

Overall, Virginia is moving to the left because the population growth is almost all in the northern DC suburbs. However, there are a lot of backward people and backward politicians in Virginia - especially that guy Rep. Jethro T. McRacist or whatever his name is who said that Keith Ellis' election by the good people of Minneapolis (Ellis is Muslim) showed why America needs to chase out immigrants (Ellis was born and raised in Detroit).

South Carolina is generally viewed as being the more economically troubled and generally backward of the two Carolinas and I guess that's been the case for a while. However, in Colonial times, South Carolina was probably the most "civilized" of the southern colonies. As I recall, Charleston was either the second or third biggest city in the original 13. Charlotte and Atlanta were, I believe, proverbial "wide spots in the road" at that time.

Times change.