Time & Perspective Quote by Jesse Helms

Helms turns a throwaway travel anecdote into a sales pitch for appetite, and that little pivot is the point. Two cigarettes at once is a cartoon image of excess, a visual gag that reads instantly as both funny and faintly grotesque. By calling the smokers "customers we need", he compresses immigration, foreignness, and consumption into a single consumerist fantasy: outsiders as ideal economic inputs, valuable not for citizenship or shared civic life but for how fast they burn through product.

The line’s intent is double-edged. On the surface, it flatters a kind of hard-nosed capitalism: the market loves heavy users. Underneath, it’s a wink at stereotype. Vietnamese people are not introduced as neighbors or allies, but as a colorful, instrumental other. Helms doesn’t say they were talking politics, building businesses, or navigating war’s aftermath; he spotlights a bodily habit. It’s a subtle downgrade from personhood to purchasing power.

Context matters because Helms, a North Carolina conservative known for culture-war politics and hawkish Cold War instincts, wasn’t exactly a poster child for multicultural openness. That’s what makes the joke do work: it lets him sound worldly and pragmatic while keeping emotional distance. The humor functions as camouflage, turning an economic argument into a quip and laundering the transactional view of people through a punchline. It’s not just pro-commerce; it’s pro-commerce as a substitute for empathy.