Death of a Clown X 2

The entire staff at Just Another Blog (From L. A.)™ is immeasurably saddened by the death Thursday of Larry Harmon, a longtime – what? Not that Larry? Really? You're sure? No relation at all? Whew, that's a relief. Fuck it, then. Another Bozo© dead. Whatever. Oh, one note of interest. He was defrocked by his fellow clowns.

In 2004, Harmon and Bozo were in the news when the International Clown Hall of Fame in Milwaukee announced it was revoking its Lifetime of Laughter Award given to Harmon in 1990 as Bozo's creator, and posthumously inducted Pinto Colvig as the first Bozo. Kathryn O'Dell, the hall's executive director, told the Associated Press that the hall had been duped into believing that Harmon created Bozo and did not discover the truth until Buck Wolf, an ABCNews.com columnist and entertainment producer, reported that Harmon was wrongly laying claim to the character. Harmon told AP he was saddened that the hall had removed his plaque and denied having misrepresented Bozo's history.

There's a typical show bidness story. (Except the part where the guy got caught & something bad happened to him.) In other dead clown news, Jesse Helms, the racist Republican former senator from North Carolina croaked on the Fourth of July. We can only assume that the Spirit of America awoke for a moment or two from its stupor & struck him dead.

No cause of death was given, but his family said in 2006 that he had been diagnosed with vascular dementia.

We wonder if he was diagnosed in 2006, or that his family decided to announce it then. Because from here it appeared he'd been a demented old fuck most of his life.

"Jesse Helms was a kind, decent and humble man and a passionate defender of what he called 'the Miracle of America.' So it is fitting that this great patriot left us on the Fourth of July," President Bush said in a statement Friday.

How fucking revolting. Shame on Bush, that's as repugnant as anything he's ever said.

"He was a loud and clear voice for muscular, principled conservatism," said Whit Ayres, a pollster for many Southern candidates. "He was ideologically consistent, and he didn't bend with the wind."

We've never understood this "Oh, he stands by his principles, you have to respect him, blah blah blah" attitude. The same can certainly be said about Hitler & Stalin. They stuck by their principles to the bitter end. Isn't the slightest consideration of the "principles" involved called for? So often those who are lionized this way have the least principled, most repugnant principles.

And he was the only senator to vote against making the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday a national holiday. His lone dissent came only after he conducted a 16-day filibuster against the King holiday, during which Helms took to the Senate floor to decry the assassinated King, a pacifist and civil rights leader, for his "action-oriented Marxism."

Now really. What kind of "principle" is that? There's quite a litany of his most egregious stands & "principled" statements in the L. A. Times obit. The N. Y. Times (The Liberal Bible™) has some insight into his 19th century mind:

Mr. Helms saw himself as a simple man — he even used the word “redneck” to describe himself — who protected simple American values from the onslaught of permissiveness, foreign influence and moral relativism. For 30 years, he cut a familiar figure on the Senate floor, typically wearing horn-rimmed glasses, black wing-tip shoes and, on the lapels of his gray suits, American flag and Free Masonry pins.

(Why never to wear an American flag lapel pin. Not to mention Masonry. )

Mr. Helms liked his art uncomplicated. “The self-proclaimed, self-anointed art experts would scoff and say, ‘Oooh, terrible,’ but I like beautiful things, not modern art,” he told The New York Times in 1989, during a pitched battle over federal subsidies for the arts. “I can’t even figure out that sculpture in the Hart Building.” He was referring to an Alexander Calder mobile.

Thomas Kinkade, perhaps? His politics were are sophisticated as his aesthetics.

“Look carefully into the faces of the people participating,” he said in a 1968 editorial against anti-Vietnam war protests. “What you will see, for the most part, are dirty, unshaven, often crude young men and stringy-haired awkward young women who cannot attract attention any other way.”

He will not be missed by any one w/ a shred of decency; we do regret his not having left the national scene much earlier.