The eponymous Blogging Curmudgeon has jumped ship and left full responsibility for curmudgeonry in the hands of this diminutive "ette." I shall do my best, although I lack his capacity for unbridled meanness. For a fuller explanation, see the first entry in this blog.
"If you can't say anything good about someone, sit right here by me." -- Alice Roosevelt Longworth
I was venting my spleen last night about Dunkin' Donuts idiotic decision to cave to Michelle Malkin and her band of crazies in the right wing blogosphere. And the inimitable skippy stopped by to give me an action alert.
As skippy points out, by playing Malkin's game, Dunkin' Donuts not only insults one-time bohemian college students, like myself, who wore the ultra-hip keffiyah, but THE ENTIRE ARAB WORLD.
Of course, Malkin glosses over the fact that the kaffiyeh is a staple of Arab wardrobes all over the Middle East (Jordanians prefer red-and-white ones, Kuwaitis all-white ones, etc.), not just among those using violent means to create a Palestinian state. Simply saying that anyone who wears a kaffiyeh is demonstrating solidarity with Islamic terrorists is like saying anyone who wears a beret believes in Cuban-style communism as espoused by Che Guevara. True, Arafat made it his trademark, but it's critical to remember that to a vast number of Arabs, the kaffiyeh's basically just another kind of hat, and that to equate kaffiyeh-wearers with terrorists sets a dangerous precedent in a country that should have learned by now the pitfalls of underestimating the complexities of Arab (and Muslim) cultures.
Unless Malkin actually is saying that all kaffiyeh-wearing Arabs are jihadists and terrorists, which is certainly something she'd conceivably say.
But let's face it. That's how Malkin and her ilk think, as they stoke racist hate against Muslims... and some Sikhs and others who have the misfortune of looking somewhat Arabic. And now Dunkin' Donuts corporation has joined the appallingly ignorant in legitimizing prejudice.
we say, what's good for the batshit insane is good for the logical.
here's dunkin' donuts contact form. why not email them and let them know that you will no longer be buying their donuts or coffee or any product because their actions, at worst, in effect condemn all who wear scarves, and at best, are just plain looney?
be nice...and point out what epicurious says...a kaffiyeh is merely a piece of wardrobe worn by most people in the arab world, and to ascribe a political philosophy to its usage is moronic.
and we don't need to buy from moronic corporations.
This is really one of the most stupid, craven things I can imagine.
Does Dunkin’ Donuts really think its customers could mistake Rachael Ray for a terrorist sympathizer? The Canton-based company has abruptly canceled an ad in which the domestic diva wears a scarf that looks like a keffiyeh, a traditional headdress worn by Arab men.
Some observers, including ultra-conservative Fox News commentator Michelle Malkin, were so incensed by the ad that there was even talk of a Dunkin’ Donuts boycott.
"The keffiyeh, for the clueless, is the traditional scarf of Arab men that has come to symbolize murderous Palestinian jihad," Malkin yowls in her syndicated column.
. . .
Said the suits in a statement: "In a recent online ad, Rachael Ray is wearing a black-and-white silk scarf with a paisley design. It was selected by her stylist for the advertising shoot. Absolutely no symbolism was intended. However, given the possibility of misperception, we are no longer using the commercial."
You know it's funny. Those scarves -- the actual keffiyeh, not Rachels Ray's silk paisley -- were the height of fashion when I was in college. I had a couple of them, actually. I also drank a lot of Dunkin' Donuts coffee back then. The latter, I won't be doing again.
Remember when flying was fun? Remember when flight attendants... attended? Not anymore. Now, apparently, their comfort comes first. Remember this waitress in the sky who forced a woman off the plane because she wouldn't drug her fussy toddler? Now comes a story of Jet Blue attendant who consigned a passenger to the bathroom because she didn't care for her jump seat.
Gokhan Mutlu, of Manhattan's Inwood section, says in court papers the pilot told him to "go 'hang out' in the bathroom" about 90 minutes into the San Diego to New York flight because the flight attendant complained that the "jump seat" she was assigned was uncomfortable, the lawsuit said.
. . .
The pilot told him 1 1/2 hours into the five-hour flight that he would have to relinquish the seat to the flight attendant, court papers say. But the pilot said that Mutlu could not sit in the jump seat because only JetBlue employees were permitted to sit there, the lawsuit said.
. . .
The aircraft hit turbulence and passengers were directed to return to their seats, but "the plaintiff had no seat to return to, sitting on a toilet stool with no seat belts," court papers say.
. . .
Mutlu's lawsuit, filed Friday in Manhattan's state Supreme Court, says JetBlue negligently endangered him by not providing him with a seat with a safety belt or harness, in violation of federal law.
[Nebraska] State Sen. Ernie Chambers sued God last week. Angered by another lawsuit he considers frivolous, Chambers says he's trying to make the point that anybody can file a lawsuit against anybody.
Chambers says in his lawsuit that God has made terroristic threats against the senator and his constituents, inspired fear and caused "widespread death, destruction and terrorization of millions upon millions of the Earth's inhabitants."
The Omaha senator, who skips morning prayers during the legislative session and often criticizes Christians, also says God has caused "fearsome floods ... horrendous hurricanes, terrifying tornadoes."
He's seeking a permanent injunction against the Almighty.
An Atlanta woman wants an apology from Continental's Express Jet Airlines for kicking her and her toddler off of the plane -- all because, she said, a flight attendant wanted the woman's son to stop talking.
. . .
"She leaned over the gentleman beside me and, ah, said, 'OK, it's not funny anymore, you need to shut your baby up.' And, you know, my first reaction was she had to be kidding. So, I asked her, you know, 'Are you kidding?' And she said, no, she was tired, she'd been stranded at the airport all day, and she did not want to hear it."
Penland said she replied that Garren would probably be asleep by the time the plane lifted off.
"I said, 'Well, he's been here at the airport for 11 hours, stuck in a stroller, you know, you should be lucky he's not screaming his head off.' And she said, 'Well, it's called Baby Benedryl.' [She made] just a little, you know, drinking motion, and I thought she's got to be kidding me. And I told her, 'I'm not going to drug my baby so that you'll have a pleasant flight.'"
Dissatisfied with Penland's unwillingness to dope up her kid, the flight attendant apparently told the captain she'd been threatened and had the plane turned around and Penland and her talkative 20-month-old removed.
Anyone who has ever flown on a plane with their kids knows it's hard; harder these days than ever. Endless check-in procedures, long lines, and grumpy, underpaid security people nitpicking your personal belongings and taking away your toiletries. Kids don't have the self-control to affect the disdainful but patient expressions of adults. Many of them lose their shit. My own daughter was very good, if impatient, during our last plane trip. That is, until some over-zealous security guard took her most precious stuffed animals away to inspect them. (You never know what might be hidden in a well-chewed and thread-bare stuffed kitty-cat.) Then the woman had the temerity to glare at me like I was a bad parent when my, then, three-year-old had a melt-down.
Traveling with a small child teaches you a very important lesson: A lot of people hate kids.
Bring on the child haters, the airline critics, the lazy parenting theorists! If you think this story sounds like an urban legend designed to foment sippy-cup culture wars, I don't blame you. I too would have found it difficult to swallow had I not experienced a similar treatment on an airline just last month. The details are tedious -- they involve me tapping the flight attendant on the shoulder trying to pass along some trash, him informing me he didn't appreciate "being touched," and me asking why he was being so rude. He then snarled at me: "Your children are totally out of control! If you'd just discipline them, you'd be much better off."
Granted, my kids often give an unfortunate impression given that they both look two years older than they are, but definitely act their age. In public situations, I've been known to whisper, hiss, threaten, cover a screaming mouth, and take away beloved privileges until I'm literally dripping with sweat. But this wasn't one of those occassions. When the flight attendant -- a young man who I assumed had no children -- told me off, both children were sitting absolutely silent, enraptured by a Hello Kitty DVD. Perhaps something had happened while I was in the bathroom and they were with my husband, I'll never know. After the event, I had 20 more hours of traveling to soul-search. Perhaps my children are monsters and I would never really be able to see it. Maybe in the wake of 9/11, flying and the jobs of flight attendants had become too stressful and high anxiety for them to be able to deal with squirmy passengers with squeaky voices or anything out of the ordinary. (Do a search for "kicked off airplane" and you get all sorts of stories about American flights dumping passengers for virtually nothing: a coughing fit, a political T-shirt, for a father asking if a pilot is sober.)
Once we switched flights to Lufthansa and a number of smiling, toy-bearing German flight attendants charmed the socks off my kids, I couldn't help thinking that it wasn't air travel but an American cultural divide about the place of children in society. The recent story about a woman who was kicked off a Delta flight for not covering her toddler's head with a blanket while breast-feeding offers more evidence of some weird attitudes toward children. The experience of Kate Penland vindicates this hunch...
