For all his political posturing, however, Helms repeatedly showed himself inept at the tedious business of shepherding legislation through Congress.The Senate's tradition of choosing committee chairmen by seniority eventually brought him to head the agriculture committee (1981-87). It should have been an enviable chance to promote North Carolina's farming and tobacco interests, which employ half its people. Yet the state, ranked eleventh by population, had one of the nation's highest poverty rates and lowest levels of federal funding.
Helms contributed his share to this misery with his ownership of rented houses in poor black districts of Raleigh. Some tenants reported that his properties had been without adequate heating for 30 years. The city's building inspectors repeatedly issued summonses against Helms to remedy a wide range of dilapidations, from rotting floors to leaking pipes.
There's a jolly piece by Andy McSmith in today's Independent. Entitled Dancing on their graves and triggered by Tina Turner's unsurprisingly cool response to her ex-husband's demise, it casts an eye over some of the more memorably sour, if not downright cruel, reactions to other people's deaths. As someone who's never been at all afraid to say good riddance at the news of some despicable shit shuffling off his or her mortal coil, I thoroughly enjoyed the article and am looking forward to being able to celebrate the sound of, say, Margaret Thatcher or Eggs Benedict's bucket being resoundingly kicked.«Le relazioni omosessuali sono contro natura e sono nocive al Bene della società… L'omosessualità è una deviazione. Se uno non lo cura è un vizio... (translation: Homosexual relationships are against nature and damage society. Homosexuality is a deviation. If it isn't treated it becomes a vice).
A charity dinner was held in 1995 near Manchester to raise funds for the police. One entertainer invited was Bernard Manning (then 65, pictured left), one of the standup comedians who do the rounds of working men's clubs in Northern England and notorious for his anti-ethnic jokes.
The dinner was attended by some 300 policemen - all white except for one black officer. Targeting this single Blackman, Bernard launched into a string of racist jibes. His audience (yes, the police audience) all whooped with delight and cheered him on. Here's a sample of the jibes reported in News of the World (April 1995):
"Where is he? How are you, baby? Having a night out with nice people? Isn't this better than swinging from the trees? - You're black, I'm white. Do you think colour makes a difference? You bet your bollocks it does!"
"They actually think they're English because they are born here. That means if a dog's born in a stable, it is horse."
"They used to be happy people in the cotton fields, singing their bollocks off day and night. A fella used to go around with a whip... 'Oh, massa, give us another crack of dat whip. I love dat whip'..."
"A Liverpool docker went to South Africa for a job. The boss tells him: 'It's people like you we want here. Here's a test. There's a revolver, go out and shoot 6 niggers and a rabbit.' The docker asks: 'Why do I have to shoot the rabbit?' He got the job.
It was an Austrian journalist who alerted me to Waldheim, a reporter whose father had fought in the Wehrmacht, who had survived the evacuation of north Africa ("I do hope I didn't kill him," the "Enigma" cryptologist said to me when I told her of his attempt to escape by air - his plane got through the Allied net). "Look for the letter W," the Austrian journalist said, the letter W after each debriefing, each Allied commando captured by the Gestapo, each prisoner to be extinguished by "nacht und nebel" - by night and fog.
No, Waldheim didn't order their deaths. He didn't even interview the captured British commandoes, or so he said, but merely "collated" their reports. His junior officers did the interviewing (let us not contemplate what that meant). Then the British prisoners disappeared into night and fog.
