Racist Theater Review?
An Asian American who acts the “squinty-eyed Oriental” (“West Side Story” by Chris Rohmann, Aug. 12)? This is a racist phrase that is offensive to Asian Americans. I hope this is the reviewer’s poor choice of language, and not a description of the portrayal of a character. Racial stereotypes have no place in productions by a theater company that promotes itself as a progressive cultural force in the community.
M. Fung
via online comments
Thanks for your comment. I used that term because the character, Jack, an Asian American, “plays” the Oriental stereotype— including squinting up his eyes—because his employer expects that of someone who looks Asian. When he’s not “in character,” i.e. in the presence of the boss, he’s a regular American guy, which is part of the humor of the piece. When we first see him he’s doing that act, and we are meant to cringe, and then he breaks out of it, for the first big laugh of the show.
I didn’t have the space in my piece to say all that, and I’m sorry it wasn’t clear. Unfortunately, Orientalism is still alive and well in these “enlightened” times.
Chris Rohmann
via online comments
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Whose Side Are You On?
Thank you for this authentic reporting (“Stein’s in the Race—If Anyone Cares to Notice,” Aug. 12). The only hope for us to enter the Honesty Arena of clean elections is to call the media on their exclusion/collusion. They must be held up as unethical for portraying themselves as gatekeepers.
The Boston Globe‘s website has been carrying pictures of all four candidates this summer, but they are also dragging their feet. Now that the Green-Rainbow Party has more news-making potential (i.e., the only strong stand against casinos, exposing that the “jobs” are a sham, and advocating real job creation/living wages across the Commonwealth) the press will have to choose “whose side are you on?”
Jesse de la Rosa
via online comments
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Vote Against OPEC
While running for office, President Obama promised that if elected, he would get us off OPEC oil within 10 years.
Two years are gone and we still don’t have a plan. In fact, there is some evidence that we’re going in the wrong direction. In July 2010, we imported 388 million barrels of oil. That’s the single largest import month since President Obama was inaugurated.
The NAT GAS Act will create jobs, clean up the environment and improve our national security by providing tax incentives to organizations which operate fleets of vehicles that are fueled with imported oil to be replaced with vehicles that run on domestic natural gas.
Election Day will soon be here. Those who are running for office—be it open seats, incumbents or challengers—need to take a look at this legislation and make promising to reduce our need for OPEC oil a central part of their campaigns.
Mark Arthur
Agawam
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Why So Insipid?
Oy!
First to go was the clever “This Modern World” (which the Hartford Advocate retains). Then “Ask Isadora.” “Mild Abandon” is not funny. Insipid is more like it. Whassup?
Ken Levine
Petersham
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Disappointed in Mexico
I wish to express my disappointment with Mexico’s Supreme Court for upholding a Mexico City law allowing adoptions by same-sex couples. This is a totalitarian, anti-religious trend that has already forced all Catholic adoption agencies in England and Wales to cease providing charitable services. The law is a form of child abuse.
Homosexuality is abnormal, immoral and anti-life. It is not innate as some believe. The so-called “gay gene” has never been found.
Scientific studies have also proven that homosexuality is linked to pedophilia. For example, a 1992 study in the Journal of Sex and Marital Therapy found that homosexual men are three times more likely than straight men to engage in pedophilia. A 1988 study of 229 convicted child molesters published in the Archives of Sexual Behaviour found that 86 percent of pedophiles described themselves as homosexual or bisexual. Dr. Richard Fitzgibbons, a U.S. psychiatrist with vast experience in treating priests with pedophilia, has stated: “Every priest whom I treated who was involved with children sexually had previously been involved in adult homosexual relationships.”
Dr. Michelle Cretella, a board member of the American College of Pediatricians, also concluded from multiple studies that children reared by gay couples have gender confusion and are put at high risk for sexually transmitted diseases.
Cretella noted that homosexually behaving teens and young adults suffer increased rates of depression, anxiety, eating disorders, addictions and suicidal thoughts. In addition, boys who adopt a homosexual lifestyle because of the influence of their same-sex parents face a 30 percent chance of being dead or HIV-positive by the age of 30.
At the core we are dealing here not with loving couples but with homosexuality and the destruction of the family unit—the fundamental cell of society.
Paul Kokoski
Hamilton, Ont.
