San Francisco Chronicle: Thai Police International Laughingstock Over "Hello Kitty" Humiliation Campaign

The Great Hello Kitty Humiliation

Late for work? Hello Kitty! Cheat on your taxes? Hello Kitty! Kill some guy? Hello Kitty!

Friday, August 10, 2007

Those Thai police, they know what for. Those bad-boy coppers know how to stick it straight to your fragile manly ego and twist that knife until you bleed and scream and whimper like an itty-bitty wide-eyed freckle-faced twinkle-toed girl. Oh yes they do.

It's all about the fear, baby. All about the dire threat to the macho self-esteem. See, those cops have figured out what hunky men just like themselves really dread, and it turns out it's not gay sex, and it's not peeing in public restrooms and it's not having it openly revealed to the world that you enjoy some nice chilled sake on a hot summer day, and maybe the occasional pedicure and some overpriced French lip balm and copious amounts of dark rum to numb the giddy dread accompanying the quiet meltdown of the newspaper industry. Or maybe that's just me.

No, what real men truly fear is, of course, unfathomably insane levels of gut-wrenching, eyeball-gouging, unicorn-in-a-rainbow girly-girl cuteness, particularly in the form of a tiny insidious white-faced feline cartoon character rumored to have been scientifically designed by encephalitic rat-demons in nefarious underground torture labs to turn Japanese schoolgirls into giggly murderous sociopaths and drive the rest of the world utterly insane with its menacing mouthless meta-cuteness, its sour-urine scent of pure evil, its global status as the Terror That Will Not Die.

We speak, quite naturally, of Hello Kitty, perhaps the most unspeakably evil icon of horrific cuteness since that time My Little Pony and Smurfette had a dirty threesome with a Cabbage Patch Kid at Circus Circus back in '98, resulting in a mutant bastard offspring so repulsively adorable the U.S. government must now keep it locked away in an ironclad Area 51 bunker lest humans see it and instantly explode into bloody piles of candy canes and glitter and 2 billion pink Swarovski crystals.

Ah, Hello Kitty. You look into those tiny, black, wide-set eye dots, those razor-blade whiskers, that blank, oval, impassive face topped with a nuclear pink bow and you see the roughly countless ridiculous spin-off products, and you want to reach deep into your own throat and rip out your esophagus as you rub yourself all over with a spasmodic nail gun just to counter the thing's uber-saccharine ooze. It's just that kind of cute. This is why Thai cop management has apparently instituted a particularly brilliant, deeply inhumane new punishment for "bad" cops on the force. Seems that for any sort of infraction - illegal parking, littering, killing an innocent bystander in a prostitution-ring drug bust - Thai officers now must endure the ultimate punishment: the wearing of a bright pink Hello Kitty armband around the station house.

Oh the humiliation! Oh the endless taunting by their peers! Oh the quiet cooing murmurs of secret Hello Kitty worship in the bathroom! Oh wait.

"This new twist is expected to make them feel guilt and shame and prevent them from repeating the offense, no matter how minor," said Police Col. Pongpat Chayaphan, acting chief of the Crime Suppression Division in Bangkok, snorting a large bowl of live spiders through a golden straw. "Hello Kitty is a cute icon for young girls. It's not something macho police officers want covering their biceps," he added.

Continued


The solution to out of control rogue cops: Hello Kitty. Don't the Boys in Brown have better things to do, like chase after taxi drivers with anti-junta bumper stickers.

I wonder if citizens can hand out there own Hello Kitty armbands to cops when we get shaken down for bribes, or, better yet, UDD should get a huge Hello Kitty banner and wrap it around the police headquarters.