Questions hubbub over doll

Ah, the Valley, where people come unglued over a toy doll they think has a pro-Islam agenda (“Local shopper questions doll’s religious message,” Frontiersman Dec. 3).

Why do they believe this? Because if you activate the doll’s speech program, it appears — to some — to say, “Islam is the light.”

Full disclosure: I haven’t been to our new Target to personally hear Fisher-Price’s Little Mommy Real Loving Baby Cuddle & Coo make her subliminal come to Mohammed pitch. But shopper Nicole Engman and others have, and they’re upset with Baby Cuddle & Coo, thinking the doll sends an insidious message that’s dangerous to our 4- and 5-year-old children, and probably that she should be pulled from Target’s shelves and sent back to Tehran where she belongs.

Cognitive scientists tell us that we humans are hard-wired to connect the dots and see patterns. It’s the reason we are superior to the beasts in the jungle and make sense of the universe. Because of our hopes, fears and biases, it’s also the reason some people think 9/11 was a government operation, while others make pilgrimages to Roswell, N. M.

Might the people who are so exercised over Baby Cuddle & Coo be the same sort of people who see the Virgin Mary — or Elvis — in a potato chip and phallic symbols in all the animated Disney movies? The sort of people who a few years back demanded that all the Cosmo magazines at the Carrs checkout counters be covered high enough that impressionable pubescent male minds would not be distracted from purer thoughts by all that Cosmo girl cover cleavage?

Lastly, what would Valley shoppers think if Baby Cuddle & Coo seemed to babble the phrase, “Jesus is my light? That would be OK, I take it?

Bill Siedler

Wasilla