Banning Barbie in Iran (and West Virginia)

It's so tough to be a Barbie. In Iran especially. And now West Virginia?

"There is no fun in Islam," the Ayatollah Khomeini famously said a few years before his ultimate embrace of funlessness. His acolytes do their best to prove him right. About this time last year an Iranian cleric with too much time on his hands went on one of those periodic anti-Barbie rampages the Islamic Republic indulges every few years. (In 2002 similarly bored Iranian police raided toy stores to take every Barbie hostage). "The displays of personalities such as Barbie, Batman, Spiderman and Harry Potter... as well as the irregular importation of unsanctioned computer games and movies are all warning bells to officials in the cultural arena," Prosecutor General, Ghorban Ali Dorri Najafabadi wrote in a letter to Iranian Vice President Parviz Davoudi.

"The irregular importation of such toys, which unfortunately arrive through unofficial sources and smuggling, is destructive culturally and a social danger," the Barbie buster said.

You expect that sort of perverse paranoia from an Iranian cleric (although truth be told I wasn't that different from an Iranian cleric when it came to my daughter's Barbiturates). But from a West Virginia lawmaker?

Turns out Jeff Eldridge, a Democratic member of the Florida House, is taking his cultural cues from Tehran and giving my beloved West Virginia once again a bad name (I lived there for five years, and my heart is still hung up there in one hollow or another). Eldridge wants Barbie dolls banned from the Mountain State. No kidding. He introduced a bill to that effect yesterday.

To wit: "It shall be unlawful in the state to sell "Barbie" dolls and other similar dolls that promote or influence girls to place an undue importance on physical beauty to the detriment of their intellectual and emotional development."

Eldridge, who's apparently worked with children as a social worker, counselor, teacher and volunteer coach, told the West Virginia Daily Mail that he wants to "stress more on education than just on beauty. And that's the message I'm going to try to send not only to the kids but to the parents and the education administration as well."

It's not that I don't sympathize. But what message is he sending to kids about cavalier autocracy--the very thing that enables Iranian clerics to spout of their obsessive-compulsive derangement about western dolls, and Iranian police to go on doll-raiding parties? And what kind of birthday present is this for Barbie, who turns 50 on March 9? (Barbie and Joan Rivers are getting together to compare plastics. Maybe they can decree to have Ayatollahs and similarly tuned legislators banned.)

One more thing. Also not a joke. Eldridge represents Lincoln County, W.Va., southwest of Charleston. That's where he's from. The name of the community where he grew up? Big Ugly. The nickname children give him out there, according to Eldridge himself? "Big Ugly Dad."

Mattel may have just got itself its newest Ken doll.