DEVON GRANDY (Honolulu, Hawaii)
Our first order of business: Break Out The Oreos has intended for a while to give another shout-out to Jeff Deck, whom we originally mentioned in an Ivy League Round-Up on April 11th. In case you don´t remember, Mr. Deck is a Dartmouth graduate who now travels the nation as a member of the Typo Eradication Advancement League, eliminating errors in spelling and grammar through the age-old method of property defacement.
Well, it just so happens that Mr. Deck stumbled upon our humble blog to correct us on a fine point: it appears that Dartmouth´s notorious frat culture did not, in fact, contribute to his willingness to correct storeowners on the suitability of their signage. BOTO regrets the error, and as such would like to make Mr. Deck our BOTO Pick in the category of “Greatest Protector of the English Language”. The honor is ours, Jeff.
Devon demonstrates that you cannot, in fact, build a fence to keep the Mexicans out of Hawaii, after the jump:
Recently, it seems, everybody from the average blue-collar worker to the average secretly-perverted television pundit is concerned about illegal immigrants hijacking the American workforce. Indeed, despite several drastic steps that have been undertaken by the more suspicious (ahem, vigilant, rather) sectors of the American public to combat this virtual economic influenza, fears of an imminent pandemic of brown people who work harder, longer, and for less pay and benefits continue to plague the public’s consciousness. Thankfully, those living in states away from this 700-mile border battleground haven’t had to witness firsthand the devastation wrought by these vicious, brutal, fiercely impoverished migrant workers; after all, those 690,000 Canadian illegals will only take our jobs if we’re working in the funny-accent or hockey industries, right? And so, we thought, any American north, east, or west of the newly-dubbed “battle belt” was safe. Safe, that is, until now.
Honolulu City Councilman Rod Tam recently spoke out against what he perceived to be a potential crisis with undocumented Mexican workers taking over the labor jobs for the construction of a planned University of Hawaii campus in West Oahu. His oh-so-elegant words follow:
They got to be skilled licensed workers. We don’t want any wetbacks basically. We have been having contractors, developers bringing in wetbacks from New Mexico… from Mexico, I’m sorry.
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That’s right: anybody seeking to do construction work for this future Penn (State?) of the Pacific must be (a) licensed and (b) not a wetback. If you are (a) an unlicensed worker and/or (b) a wetback, please do not apply for the job; you’ll probably have better odds finding a job with Mitt Romney’s landscapers. Not being from New Mexico will probably also help to avoid any confusion.
Councilman Tam quickly apologized after receiving numerous letters of objection from Hawaii’s hispanic community (yeah, BOTO didn’t know they were there, either), stating that he didn’t know the meaning of the slur and had first heard it in a 1950s Rodgers and Hammerstein (Columbia ’21 and ’16, respectively) musical called Flower Drum Song (you can’t make this stuff up). You can’t really blame him; he’s probably never seen a Hispanic person before or been remotely close to the “battle belt,” and as such wouldn’t know how to subtly mask his racism like the politicians on the mainland have so sophisticatedly learned to do.
News of the Councilman’s use of the slur has quickly spread far beyond Hawaiian politics, and has even made appearances on prominent progressive online community Democratic Underground. And there’s the obviously necessary “Google test,” which confirms that any online search for “Hawaii+wetback” leads straight to Rod Tam. The crazies all came out of the woodwork, too, most of them claiming that “wetbacks don’t belong in America” and that calling somebody “ignorant” is just as offensive as calling them a wetback (thank you, Ken Chang of Kaneohe).
Just another beautiful day in paradise, right?
Cheers, readership. Keep coming here to read our drivel, and not just because you’re Googling “redhead in gold thong“ (we’re totally not joking, BOTO monitors all search engine referrals to the site).
Devon Grandy is a writer, blogger, humorist, filmmaker, and musician. The creator and Editor-in-Chief of Break Out The Oreos, Devon is chiefly responsible for the alternatingly time-consuming and mind-numbing process of turning his brainchild into a legitimate entertainment website. 
BOTO Pick for Best Referral Ever?
Proposal for new racial slur that is a suitable comeback for Ken Chang to be offended about: Hawaiian. After all, I’ve never been there, so I have no right to speak of them in such a fashion.
I sent Rod Tam an email thanking him for his courage for telling it like it is. And I sent a copy of that email to Joe Loya, who is the father-in-law of imprisoned Border Patrol agent, Ignacio Ramos. Joe Loya responded to me agreeing that Rod Tam’s comment was justified, and that there is NOTHING “racist” about using the word “wetback”. Joe Loya is Hispanic, and he uses that word himself, because it describes ILLEGAL ALIENS. And there are LOTS of illegal aliens in Hawaii. I know, because I lived there and saw them myself.
If this Jeff Deck is the idiot who defaced the old sign at the Grand Canyon, I invite him to correct the spelling on this: Jeff Deck is a dickhead.
Deliberate typos are one thing, but organic, not to say historic typos are something else altogether. They are folk art. And Jeff Deck is a putz, plain and simple. So is his pal, Hernson.
Bert Woodall
Arizona