The Final Frontier?

Claudia Rosett writes:

Just when you thought the United Nations could not possibly become any more inane, out comes a story in London’s Sunday Times that the UN is about to appoint a special envoy for alien life forms. The idea, apparently, is that if aliens contact or land on earth, demanding “Take me to your leader,” the UN will have a designated official ready to step in as chief mouthpiece for the human race.

My first guess is that this close encounter of a UN kind would end swiftly, and not well. Imagine, for a moment, that you are an alien arriving on earth, curious about the ways of homo sapiens — and your first real sitdown is with a member of the UN bureaucracy. Either you’d speed back into space, howling: “The horror! The horror!” Or, if you’re an alien of strong stomach and advanced weaponry, you’d listen just long enough to conclude that earthlings have arrived at some endpoint of blithering and irredeemable decay, and zap them wholesale off the planet. Either way, there’s really no need for a UN-alien interface. The question we ought to be asking is how many U.S. taxdollars the UN plans to lavish on this new arrangement...

I have the perfect Earthling for the job.