Wednesday, December 17, 2008

Having Your Hitler Cake...And Eating It Too

SOMETIMES I’M NOT SURE WHY CELEBRITIES get such a bad rap, especially for the stupid names they choose for their kids. Apple Martin, Dweezil Zappa, Kal-El Coppola Cage, Pilot Inspektor Lee, Moxie Crime Fighter Gillette and Jermajesty Jackson are all ridiculous in their own ways. But why pick on them so much when there’s the Campbell family from Easton, Pennsylvania? The Campbells made the news recently because their local grocery store, the Greenwich ShopRite, refused to put their 3-year-old son’s name on a birthday cake.

"We reserve the right not to print anything on the cake that we deem to be inappropriate," ShopRite spokeswoman Karen Meleta said. "We considered this inappropriate."

The kid’s name? Adolf Hitler Campbell.

Seriously. Not just Adolf Campbell. And not just Hitler Campbell. But Adolf Hitler Campbell.


All right. And celebrities are the fucked up ones for naming kids Kal-El, Pilot, Moxie or Jermajesty? Really? Celebs are the fucked up ones? Not these “salt of the earth” Pennsylvanians? These "real Americans"? Right.

Hey, guess what? Meleta also said she had denied similar requests from the Campbells the last two years, including a request for a swastika. Those were denied as well. But don’t feel sorry for the kid or his parents, the family ultimately got the Wal-Mart to decorate the cake just like they like it. Thank goodness for that.

All right, I have a few things to say about this story, and I’m NOT even going to focus on the parents who said they named their son after Adolf Hitler because the father liked the name and because "no one else in the world would have that name." (No one but Adolf Hitler, of course.) These are the same parents who named their 2-year-old JoyceLynn Aryan Nation Campbell. That’s not what I really want to talk about. Sure, I could focus on the fact that the parents try to brush this whole thing off as discrimination against them, because they’re not racist or supremacist at all. Who could even think that about the parents of Adolf Hitler and Aryan Nation Campbell? That’s like racial profiling or something, right?

Here’s the part that bugs me: Meleta also said she had denied similar requests from the Campbells the last two years. Never mind the part in the news story that said the Campbells had also requested a swastika. Never mind that bonkers shit. Let’s focus on the fact that it took the Campbells three years to finally get what they wanted: a news story about them and their fucked up names for their kids.

Look, they just liked the names, okay? And they, like any parents, wanted their entire kid’s name on the birthday cake. Even for the kid’s first birthday, they wanted little Adolf’s full name on the cake. Because kids remember that shit. If you skimp on that first cake, the kid will hate you for it forever. Obviously “Happy Birthday Adolf!” would seem insufficient. So why not have them put “Happy Anniversary of the Day of Your Birth, Little Adolf Hitler (Not the Dictator…It’s Just a Coincidence) Campbell” on the cake? Is that so hard for you, Greenwich ShopRite?

I mean, how fucking big was this cake? It’s hard enough to write “happy birthday” in cursive in icing on an ordinary cake of standard size. I can’t even imagine trying to write that whole mother effing name on anything smaller than, let’s say, a six-foot by four-foot sheet cake.

You know what? Fuck the Campbells. Fuck them for naming their kid after Hitler. And fuck them for trying to pretend like that’s okay. And while we’re at it, fuck the AP for just reporting this story like, “Isn’t this a crazy human interest story?” No, it isn’t. It’s the story of a douchebag couple that tried for three years to get attention (going back to the same grocery store over and over again) by naming their kid after Hitler. Until finally some other douche on the city desk at the local paper sat up and noticed and thought, “That’s interesting.” But it's not interesting. It's a little gross really.

So fuck the Campbells, fuck the AP and fuck the local Pennsylvania reporter who first wrote about this in the Easton Honest Shopper-Intelligencer, or whatever the local free paper is called.

I feel like we all owe Pete Wentz and Ashlee Simpson an apology for making such a fuss over Bronx Mowgli Wentz. In light of these recent developments, I have to say, that's a pretty okay name.

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