JESSE HELMS, THE U.N. & ALIENS

Thursday, December 5, 1996
Source: The Toronto Star

  HELMS IN THICK WITH SPACE ALIENS
by Joey Slinger

A WHILE BACK I described Jesse Helms, the chair man of the United States'
Senate foreign relations committee, as "a dingbat." I realize now that it
was a dreadfully inconsiderate thing to do.

        At the time I meant little more than Archie Bunker meant when he
used to say to his wife, "Edith, you're a dingbat." But if it is
insensitive to say ' Why don't you hop on over here?" to a person who has
only one leg, imagine how you'd feel if you called someone a dingbat and
later it turned out they had a serious psychiatric disorder, such as being
woo-woo.

        We've realized for some time that Jesse Helms was odd, at least we
in Canada have ever since he got a law passed for bidding Canadians to have
truck and/or trade with Cuba. Perhaps it was because we have trouble seeing
a starving island with a broken-down leadership posing the greatest threat
to human liberty since the Goths sa-shayed through the gates of Rome
without bothering to knock.

        Maybe all those cheap cocolocos on the beach at Varadero clouded
our judgment. Or may be we thought that, as threats go, Fidel is nickel
dime compared to a chairman of the U.S. Senate foreign relations committee
who is woo-woo.

        But, as I say, we didn't completely realize this at the time. We
didn't realize it until Helms disclosed his tragic symptoms in Foreign
Affairs. If you're not familiar with it, Foreign Affairs is to other
magazines what St. James' Cathedral is to the plastic Jesus on the
dashboard of your car.

        It carries weight. It also carried an article by Helms titled
"Saving the U.N." He proposed to save it by employing an old U.S. strategy
for saving things, one not quite perfected in Vietnam: blowing it to
smithereens and bulldozing the rubble into the East River.

        Fair enough. Everybody is entitled to their opinion, and Foreign
Affairs boasts "a broad hospitality to divergent ideas." Helms, however,
wobbled beyond standard divergence when he wrote that the United Nations'
Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space "counts among its crowning
achievements the passage of a resolution calling upon sovereign nations to
report all contacts with extraterrestrial beings directly to the
secretary-general."

        Because it turns out that the U.N. committee doesn't count this
among its crowning achievements. Or among its not so-crowning achievements.
Or among any achievements. It has never passed any resolution of the kind.
By writing not only that it had, but that it was prouder than spit that it
had, Helms showed he was suffering from what clinicians refer to, in hushed
tones, as "booga divergence."

        As such, he deserves to be pitied rather than reviled by Canada's
socialist entrepreneurs (abetted by their howling lackeys in the media and
Parliament) whose only interest is stripping wealth from the enterprises
public-spirited Americans established to assist Cuban economic development,
enterprises that were criminally expropriated by the Castro regime, except
for the ones like the whorehouses and casinos that were shut down.

        Although it does explain why the United States is determined to get
rid of the secretary general. Up till now, we thought they didn't like
Boutros Boutros-Ghali because they suspected he was some kind of foreigner.

        But if they believe that all the other sovereign nations have been
piling up lists of the contacts they've had with extraterrestrial beings
and transmitting them directly to the secretary general, as required under
the terms of the resolution, and if Boutros-Ghali hasn't happened to
mention this to the U.S., if he's been stonewalling the Senate foreign
relations committee when it comes to space aliens, they would be cheesed
off. I mean, wouldn't you be?

        Old Jesse can probably hear the secretary-general trying to weasel
out of it, claiming that he has nothing to report-that not so much as a
single yurt dweller or llama milker has passed along news of being wakened
in the night by a glowing blob asking to be taken to their leader- and that
perhaps no contact has been made. Helms would take this as more proof of
the bureaucratic foulups at the U.N. that threaten to hamper things like
America's freedom to sell tobacco from his home state, North Carolina, to
millions of Asian children and keep Cuban tobacco farmers frozen out. You
don't have to tell Jesse Helms about contact with extraterrestrial beings.
Contact, hell. He uses them for researchers. May be even for ghost-writers.

Slinger's column appears Thursday and Saturday.


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