THE JESSE HELMS LOVE CONNECTION

[defrog]

I have been resisting temptation to post anything on the death of Jesse Helms – partly because anything I could possibly say about him has been blogged already, and partly because I try not to speak ill of the freshly deceased, no matter how much it might be justified by the facts. And it’s virtually impossible to write anything positive about someone like Helms – unless you buy into his politics, maybe.

I never did. Indeed, Helms stood for pretty much everything I opposed. Helms stood for just about everything stupid, greedy and ugly in the human condition. I often considered his political success to be a sign that America was doomed to be mired in atavistic Jesus-fueled xenophobia. Some might argue that you have to respect Helms at least for standing by his convictions and being unafraid to say what he thought. Yes. Well, so did Hitler.

But no matter. As a semi-professional blogger, it is my responsibility to bring balance to the Force. And so I will now attempt the impossible by posting a positive Jesse Helms obit. Because he did actually accomplish one good thing in his dirty life and times.

Which was this:

At the start of 1997, one of the bigger international news stories was the coming handover of Hong Kong to China. And, because China was run by Gawdamn Commies, there was much hand-wringing and fist-shaking by US conservatives about the fate of HK. Helms – who was head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and who adamently referred to China as “Red China” in the same way that conservatives today make a point of saying Barack HUSSEIN! Obama’s full name – naturally took the pessimist stance that HK would be overrun by tanks and replace Beijing as the well-funded new capital of Red China.

At this time, I was in Hong Kong and living in sin with my girlfriend and her mom. Katie and I were a firm Couple by this time, having been together for a couple of years, but neither of us were in a big hurry to talk marriage, as we didn’t believe you needed a govt stamp to be in a committed relationship.

And one night in February as we watched the news, a story came up that Helms was deeply concerned that one of the results of the coming Commie Takeover would be a deluge of Hong Kong women marrying American expats to get a green card so they could flee to the states. Which was bad for America, apparently. So, the story went, Helms had proposed a law that said any Hong Kong woman who married an American after April 1, 1997 would not get an automatic domestic visa, and would be treated like any other Red Chinese natonal trying to get into the US (i.e. with derision, suspicion and deportation).

Katie and I looked at the calendar, then at each other, and said, “Well, that doesn’t give us much time.”

We were married on March 27th. Our reasoning was that, whatever we thought of marriage as an institution, we were both sure we wanted to stay together, and that if I ever had to move back to the states, I wanted her to come with me. (Katie was also influenced by the fact that even with a BNO passport, it took her four tries to get a US student visa in the early 90s.)

Naturally, the legislation never passed. It never came up for a vote, actually. I’m not sure Helms ever even wrote it up – it was just another case of him mouthing off about the Yellow Peril and how nonwhite foreign women want to marry Americans just so they can get in the country and then get divorced and either steal American jobs or live on welfare or whatever the fuck it was that Jesse was so alarmed about.

But the fact remains: Jesse Helms’ waterheaded racist xenophobia is the reason I have been happily maried for the past 11+ years.

Cheers, Jesse.

Love is strange,

This is dF

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without him in it*