DATELINE–South California

On the opening night of the Republican National Convention, vice-presidential nominee Jack Kemp issued the “ich bin ein” one-liner of the 1996 political season.

The former Buffalo Bill was speaking to the PBS-MS-NBC anchor at South California’s San Diego Convention Center, a commercial bulwark entrenched a mere 25 miles north of the Borders Bookstore separating the U.S. from Mexico.

Kemp, who has in the past criticized Republican attacks on immigrants, has reconsidered these “stands” in the light of his new position as the “Number Two” man on the ticket. PBS-MS-NBC anchor Tom Brokaw queried the candidate about the plank in the Republican party platform that would deny all but dire emergency services to “illegal aliens.”

Kemp angrily replied, “I would never call any human being an alien.”

Staff grammatologists at South to the Future have posited several plausible translations of Kemp’s ambiguously phrased claim. According to experts, the sentence can be parsed in a manner which would suggest a sentiment roughly equivalent to the following: “Immigrants are not aliens, they are human beings.”

However, another plausibly correct translation of Kemp’s words is the shocking revelation: “I’ve seen aliens. I was kidnapped by aliens. Tom, these immigrants are no aliens.”

But yet another equally valid reading of Kemp’s statement, in accordance with grammar’s commutative property, is quite a different message altogether: “Immigrants are aliens, and, therefore, I do not consider them to be human beings.”

Shocking yet true. What could this mean?

Where the experts do agree, is that the structural schemata and voice wave analysis conclusively prove that in Kemp’s moral universe, “alien” and “human” are mutually exclusive categories.

Gauging by his blanket endorsement of the Republican party’s 1996 platform, including the call to create a permanent stateless caste of “legal” aliens in this country, we can only infer that Jack Kemp does in fact believe that millions of extra-terrestrial life forms are living within the walls of Reagan’s shining gated city-on-a-hill, the modern American Jerico.

And if Kemp’s vision is true, we can predict that under a Dole/Kemp administration, July 4th celebrations will no longer be marked by a friendly game of horse shoes and a patriotic flag raising. Nein, meine Lieblings. A republican Independence Day will soon be commemorated by shoving a lighted firecracker up the ass of the off-the-books domestic help or playing pin-the-bombing on the neighborhood bodega owner.

But lest you worry about the injured alien, do not fear. For both Kemp and Dole will agree that an exploding suppository constitutes a “clear need for emergency intervention.”

Even when it’s E.T.’s ass on the stake.