Jesse Helms and Joe Hill

[smkyle1]

By Tom Hall –

I dreamed I saw Joe Hill, last night,
Alive as you and me.
Says I “But Joe you’re ten years dead.”
“I never died says he.”

This old song popped into my head while I was reading a rightwing blogger’s paean to Jesse Helms. The blogger praised Helms as a “heroic warrior for conservative values.”

Bullshit.

Jesse Helms was the son of a rural police chief who kept people in line in the post-Civil War South, making sure that plantation culture stayed intact, though the name had been changed to “sharecropping,” and making sure that the textile mills had cheap labor by exploiting racial divisions while suppressing workers’ rights. Jesse displayed his ‘heroism’ during World War II by using daddy’s political influence to get a job as a navy recruiter. This kept him safe on the home front while “white men” and “colored boys” he recruited went off to fight and die.

While Jesse’s warrior heroism spanned the length and breadth of his recruiting desk, his ‘values’ redefined conservatism....

http://www.laprogressive.com/2008/07/11/jesse-and-john/