Philip Weiss and Zo‰ Heller
Dear Philip,
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StumbleUponAustralian? South African? Please. I have a few quarts of German Jewish blood, but that's as far as my supranationalist credentials go.
You ask what ails Barbie? I'll tell you. It's that Jill Barad woman who's running Mattel these days. She came up with the Holiday Barbie idea--limited edition, seasonal Barbies with different professions and pursuits. The idea was to work little girls into an acquisitional lather and have them owning bushels of Barbies rather than just the one ur-Barbie. It worked for a while. In the mid-'90s, the average American girl owned eight Barbies. There was this whole Barbie black market thing going on among adult collectors, with dolls from previous years selling for 10 times their original prices. Ms. Barad wanted more. She kept upping production and expanding distribution. Despite being promoted to CEO of Mattel in 1997, she remained, according to the Wall Street Journal, "intimately involved" in the fate of her brainchild, personally picking out the Holiday Barbie's eye color, hair ornament, and background packaging. For Christmas 1997, she flooded the market with 3 million of the first-ever brunette Holiday Barbie. She forecast sales of $100 million. Oh, hubris!
Clearly, Barad made two fundamental mistakes. One, she didn't preserve the scarcity of the product. (The kind of nutbags who collect these dolls want to have to work to get them.) Two, she gave Barbie brown hair. Christ, what was she thinking? Barbie isn't meant to be a brunette. She's meant to be a platinum-tressed, glinty-eyed, Aryan bitch, standing on perpetual tippy-toes, with tits that can pierce tin cans. That's what little girls like. You'd think Jill would have figured that out by now.
About the Serbs--you may not want to care, but you kind of have to, don't you? We've bombed and humiliated them for more than two months and we still haven't worked out what the long-term future of Kosovo will be. If we now bugger off and leave the Serbs to stew in their own miserable juices, it won't be long before Milosevic, or a Milosevic replacement returns to haunt us. No?
Love,
Zoë
P.S. How adorable that you used to write about the weather. FYI, it's 94 degrees in Bucks County, I'm 8 months pregnant and my house has no air conditioning. So count your lucky stars.
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