nataliedee.com
Monday, October 27, 2008
Saturday, October 11, 2008
Islam Is The Light
I work at Target. Why? Because I have rent to pay.
This Saturday, the day in which our sales are the highest, my supervisor put me to work in the toy department. This shift involves dealing with eight hours of screaming, ill-behaved children while digging through the stockroom for this year's Hot New Toy for their four-year-old sons and daughters.
And I think I found one I could fall in love with.
The "Little Mommy Real Loving Baby Cuddle and Coo," from Fisher Price, has been annoying me for the past three months. Half of a department store aisle is reserved for stocking five boxes of these animatronic dolls, that detect customer movement and simultaneaously drone to the same recorded baby-cooing audio. The effect of this chorus of robot-infants is nothing short of terrifying when experienced without due warning.
Everytime I work in the toy department, I expect their batteries to have died by now, but they never have.
Their sound is so insidious that customers are now hearing terrorist propaganda in those voices. Get this, Fox News reported on Oct. 9th that Target stores in Pennsylvania and Oklahoma received complaints from outraged customers who had heard the phrase, "Islam is the light," in the doll's audio track.
But here's the damnedest thing about it: Those customers are right.
Every time someone sees Jesus in a pizza crust, hears Satan in a warped Beatles record and God from eating bread mold, I treat the phenomena like an exercise in distraction, and worse, a flimsy premise for escaping horrifying realities that have actually been explained, but are disbelieved nonetheless.
Two customers, one with a video camera, brought this to the attention of my boss, my coworker and myself and, like the natural skeptic that I am, I resisted validating them until I prompted the toy myself, after they had been taken them off our shelves and moved to the Receiving Department.
It was a weird feeling when I heard the startlingly coherent utterance in my own ears, some vaguely navigated emotion: total clarity within monumental improbability. Like going to Vegas, with one bill, and hitting the jackpot on the first slot machine you saw.
All I could say to myself, then, was: "Well, is Islam the light?"
Even two broken clocks, one with a video camera, are right twice a day. Fine. Okay. So what? Did I feel threatened by this realization? No. Did I feel its propaganda had infected my thinking in one way or the other? No. Did I comfortably go on with the rest of my life? Of course, because everybody, including myself, has more to be worried about than the topics of discussion among talking-fucking-dolls.
I consider this story to be really be about the most elaborate inside prank within the Mattel Corporation.
One that doesn't validate the prophesying of quacks and kooks unless you also validate the idea that creating a terrorist requires little more than to insert four words into a toy.
One that gives understanding of and clarity to our real fears by creating fake ones.
One that might be aimed at making the public actually look stupider for being right than they would for being wrong.
One that makes for inspired blogging at the very least.
If there is a good kind of terrorism, this would be it.
This Saturday, the day in which our sales are the highest, my supervisor put me to work in the toy department. This shift involves dealing with eight hours of screaming, ill-behaved children while digging through the stockroom for this year's Hot New Toy for their four-year-old sons and daughters.
And I think I found one I could fall in love with.
The "Little Mommy Real Loving Baby Cuddle and Coo," from Fisher Price, has been annoying me for the past three months. Half of a department store aisle is reserved for stocking five boxes of these animatronic dolls, that detect customer movement and simultaneaously drone to the same recorded baby-cooing audio. The effect of this chorus of robot-infants is nothing short of terrifying when experienced without due warning.
Everytime I work in the toy department, I expect their batteries to have died by now, but they never have.
Their sound is so insidious that customers are now hearing terrorist propaganda in those voices. Get this, Fox News reported on Oct. 9th that Target stores in Pennsylvania and Oklahoma received complaints from outraged customers who had heard the phrase, "Islam is the light," in the doll's audio track.
But here's the damnedest thing about it: Those customers are right.
Every time someone sees Jesus in a pizza crust, hears Satan in a warped Beatles record and God from eating bread mold, I treat the phenomena like an exercise in distraction, and worse, a flimsy premise for escaping horrifying realities that have actually been explained, but are disbelieved nonetheless.
Two customers, one with a video camera, brought this to the attention of my boss, my coworker and myself and, like the natural skeptic that I am, I resisted validating them until I prompted the toy myself, after they had been taken them off our shelves and moved to the Receiving Department.
It was a weird feeling when I heard the startlingly coherent utterance in my own ears, some vaguely navigated emotion: total clarity within monumental improbability. Like going to Vegas, with one bill, and hitting the jackpot on the first slot machine you saw.
All I could say to myself, then, was: "Well, is Islam the light?"
Even two broken clocks, one with a video camera, are right twice a day. Fine. Okay. So what? Did I feel threatened by this realization? No. Did I feel its propaganda had infected my thinking in one way or the other? No. Did I comfortably go on with the rest of my life? Of course, because everybody, including myself, has more to be worried about than the topics of discussion among talking-fucking-dolls.
I consider this story to be really be about the most elaborate inside prank within the Mattel Corporation.
One that doesn't validate the prophesying of quacks and kooks unless you also validate the idea that creating a terrorist requires little more than to insert four words into a toy.
One that gives understanding of and clarity to our real fears by creating fake ones.
One that might be aimed at making the public actually look stupider for being right than they would for being wrong.
One that makes for inspired blogging at the very least.
If there is a good kind of terrorism, this would be it.
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