'Gay Billy' doll brings
ideas for other toys

In your June 9 edition, there was a short article about the "Gay Billy" doll. Apparently, it is selling quite well around the world. I think it is only politically correct, then, to start production of other dolls as well.

Perhaps a "Lesbian Lisa" doll, the "O.G. (Original Gangsta) Jason" doll that comes with a gun, the "Transvestite Sam" doll dressed in office wear and a briefcase that holds all of his nighttime apparel, and the "Welfare Sally" doll, that comes with six children and food stamps.

Or how about the "Homeless Jim" doll, who comes with his own shopping cart full of aluminum cans.

This may seem as though I'm making fun of the status of many Americans, but there is some truth to what I have to say. If one lifestyle is recognized, it is only fair that all lifestyles should be acknowledged with their own doll.

After all, isn't that what being politically correct is all about?

Michelle M.K. Judd

Media aren't reporting
new French revolution

It may just be my own socialist bias, but it sure strikes me as peculiar that Honolulu's dailies have ignored the landmark French elections.

I wonder whether they're merely avoiding reporting such politically incorrect news, or whether they fear that the breed of democracy unleashed by French voters may be as contagious in our home islands as it appears to be in its current spread throughout Europe.

It only makes sense though, that on the heels of Labour's destruction of Thatcherism in Britain, newspapers and their allies would want to keep a tight grip on the news from France.

Otherwise our public might learn that there is, in fact, an alternative to the unrestrained power of corporations and that "globalism," while omniscient in the volume of its ideology, is only as omnipotent as voters deem it .

The French voters have cried out that they know democracy is the only threat to uncontrolled free markets.

Ikaika Valdez
Pearl City
(Via the Internet)

Hawaii's poor economy
is real-estate driven

If A.A. Smyser thinks that "the only big investors we have now are bottom fishing at fire sale prices" (June 10), he'd better think again before he tackles economic questions with mixed metaphors.

Real estate prices will decline before they go higher, as they attempt to find a bottom in our present economy. The main effect of Japanese investment in real estate during the late 1980s was the doubling and tripling of land prices. The desertion of Japanese capital imposed this recession on our island economy.

We have struggled economically and socially ever since, trying to maintain these land values with less job creation and deflating wages. This has forced people who have always worked hard to work even harder, has forced twentysomethings to emigrate from Hawaii, and has devastated our small-business community with higher rents and insurance.

While Smyser would have us believe that we are economic losers because of tedious regulation, unionism and a cynicism toward profits (i.e. socialism), it is clear that Hawaii's recession is real-estate driven.

Smyser's rhetoric about privatizing schools, shrinking state services by displacing workers, fighting regulation, remaking ourselves into New Zealanders, etc. is more a travel bureau pitch that economic analysis.

Keith Chudzik
Kaneohe
(Via the Internet)

Global warming is bad sign
in once cool islands

I can't believe how unbearably hot it's gotten in Hawaii. I don't remember it being this consistently muggy and broiling back when I was growing up in the 1970s, where the norm ranged between the 60s and mid-80s.

I attribute this to the overdevelopment of a once-lush rainforest in the unholy name of boosting business. Mufi Hannemann, anyone? There's economic incentive, and then there's greed. Reducing hoops that businesses must jump through with overtaxation is incentive; blind growth for the sake of fast cash with little regard for the consequences is greed.

Hawaii's natural resources are being depleted. It's obvious when all I can see are concrete blocks stretching toward the blue sky but nary the ocean or the green mountains that it's time to stop the insanity and think about the burden placed on this fragile island chain.

Carol Banks Weber
(Via the Internet)

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Same-sex archive

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