Sunday, June 22, 2008

I didn't realize my daughter was a "fashion statement!"

How's this for clueless, ridiculous and infuriating? Does anyone else want to help me set this idiot straight? His contact info is at the bottom of the article, and the title below links to the paper's website.

Adopting Asian kids becoming latest fad

TRIBUNE-REVIEW
Thursday, June 19, 2008

Though I may not be ready for sainthood, I am owed some accolades for having sat through not one, but two, chick flicks with my wife in as many weekends.
Few experiences are as emasculating and downright testosterone-sapping as viewing films made exclusively for and marketed toward the female gender.
Their plot lines are centered almost entirely around emoting and the dashed expectations of true love. I often find myself enduring their 120-plus minutes by thinking, "Boy, she's going to watch six World Superbike races and a whole season of 'Tank Overhaul' for this one!"
Although I spent most of my sentence, I mean time, during this all-estrogen double feature counting lint balls in my pockets and fishing for popcorn caught between my bicuspids and gums, something in both these otherwise interminable films did manage to pierce my thick fog of indifference.
In "Then She Found Me," Helen Hunt portrays a neurotic mess of a woman who screws up every relationship in her life and can't tell good men from rotten ones. Unable to conceive a child naturally, Hunt's character decides to reward herself with something guaranteed to make her character and the audience smile: a Chinese baby girl.
The film ends with long, lingering shots of the kid's smiling face, and half the women around us were fighting back tears. I was, too, but mine were because I'd never recover those lost two hours of my life.
One week later, I suffered through an afternoon screening of the glitzy handbag commercial cleverly disguised as a major motion picture known as "Sex and the City." In that one, Charlotte, one member of the quartet of ditzy, clothes-obsessed main characters, couldn't conceive a child naturally.
The solution? She adopts one of those adorable Chinese babies you've heard so much about -- forcing viewers to spend much of the next 90 minutes of film watching these four screwed-up women as they screw up some kid who would be better off in a rice paddy 7,000 miles from any of them.
Call me cynical, but since when did Asian children become "must have" fashion accessories for upper middle-class Americans?
Along with Calloway golf clubs and season tickets to football games, paying $30,000 to $40,000 to adopt an exotic baby is suddenly viewed as the most chic purchase this side of a pair of Manolo Blahnik pumps.
Never mind that thousands of babies of other races -- most of them black -- go without foster homes and adoptions here and elsewhere in this country every year. It doesn't cost tens of thousands of dollars to adopt a black, Latino or mixed-race child.
But for some reason, even Hollywood is marketing Asian babies as somehow superior and more desirable.
That's a shame. Because if people really wanted to adopt children because of a desire to become parents, they'd just adopt babies, not fashion statements.
Mike Seate can be reached at mseate@tribweb.com or 724-320-7845.
Pittsburgh Tribune-Review
Letters to the Editor
Pittsburgh Tribune-Review
D.L. Clark Bldg.,
503 Martindale St., 3rd Floor
Pittsburgh, PA 15212
E-Mail address:
opinion@tribweb.com
Fax number:
412-320-7965

13 comments:

Unknown said...

Ughhhhh.... I am speechless over this one.... I wish he was too.

Anne said...

That is the most offensive thing I have read in, well...maybe ever! What a complete idiot. Adoption is not a fad, children are not fashion statements. He should be fired.

M. said...

LOL!! That's so funny, Heather. I agree- I wish he was speechless, too.

M. said...

Anne-
How about a letter to the editor saying something to that affect? It's not like you're busy with other things- lol! I sent one to the idiot writer AND his editor. If I get any kind of response, I'll post it.

Laurie said...

I just wrote the editor in response to this article- something I have never done before. I did ask how many black children Mr. Seate had adopted out of foster care himself. My guess is none.

Anonymous said...

I think this is the FIRST TIME I've EEEVVVVVEEEERRR been on the leading edge of fashion!!!!!! I'm usually 2 years behind the curve!!

He probably needs to pay a doctor to remove the foot he has sooooo deeply embedded in his mouth. What he really NEEDS is another foot embedded equally as deep down on his other end!!!

Aren't ignorant people just sooo stupid!!!

M. said...

Thank you, Laurie! I appreciate that! I said something similar in my letter, too.

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And, Anonymous, You cracked me up! Hilarious.

sassy chic said...

This man is a stupid stupid man! Obviously completely out of touch, perhaps never to return as his head appears to be securely stuck up his backside!

sassy chic said...

I did it! I sent letters to both Mike Seate and also to the editor. I will let you know if I hear anything back. I told the editor that Mike Seate owed his readers a written apology! We will see what happens...

Anonymous said...

The guy clearly takes pride in writing from the viewpoint of a neanderthal. But that said, I have to say he has a point. Don't kill me for saying so, but I think it *has* become a fad IN HOLLYWOOD to adopt internationally - or at least talk about doing it. And frankly it bothers me when people don't think through the repercussions of transracial adoptions - they just assume the child will make all the adjustments. I mean, I haven't watched either of those movies but I doubt they showed either woman doing research into Chinese culture or making an effort to choose an ethical agency, KWIM? It bothers me, after all we went through in our adoptions, to see people on TV and in movies practically just snap their fingers and have a child handed to them. So, on that level, I hate to but I guess I kind of agree with the neanderthal.

Anonymous said...

Unreal. I guess he gets all of his information from movies. He obviously did NO research before writing that crap. I wrote a response to both him and the editor too.

M. said...

Christina,

Don't you have a box to pack or something? Why are you arguing with me on my blog? No... I kid. I DO know what you mean, and I totally agree that, for Hollywood, that's true. It is the trendy thing to do, but even celebrities are not just adopting Asian babies, for one thing. Also, if this idiot were keeping his remarks limited only to Hollywood, it wouldn't be so offensive. But it sounds to me like he's applying his opinions across the board, to the rest of us, and trying to boil it down to being solely an issue of race, which is nauseating to me.

Laura L. said...

I saw this on Sunday and was so disgusted by it.
I sent an e-mail to Mr. Seate. What a complete bonehead --to put it nicely.