Now that Osama bin Laden is dead, we can turn our attention to another remorseless enemy who for years has sown death and destruction among blameless innocents. I refer, of course, to Ronald McDonald.
The McDonald’s mascot may qualify as one of the more annoying characters on the planet. But to his credit, he doesn’t compound his unappealing personality by bossing you around. In that respect, he is far less objectionable than the people who make a fetish of finding him objectionable.
Last week, they took out ads in several newspapers blaming the clown for childhood obesity and demanding that McDonald’s “stop marketing junk food to kids.” The signers range from the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, an anti-meat group that the American Medical Association has accused of “perverting medical science,” to alternative-healing huckster Andrew Weil.
The general rule of critics is that McDonald’s can do nothing right. Some years ago, they insisted that the company get rid of the beef tallow in which it cooked French fries. It did so, in favor of a supposedly healthier oil containing trans fats. A few years later, the activists demanded that it abandon trans fats, which it soon did.
How much credit did it get for those changes? Not much. The class of people who detested McDonald’s went right on detesting it.
These ads are part of a larger campaign against everything McDonald’s represents. Were the company to retire Ronald McDonald, its enemies would step up their calls for an end to Happy Meals. Get rid of Happy Meals, and they would demand that McDonald’s thoroughly revamp its menu to incorporate their superior notions of nutrition.
Ultimately, the only way to please the critics is to become something unrecognizable.
Yeah. That seems a rather consistent trait, doesn’t it: transformation sold as reform, and reform sold as in the public interest.
Meaning that the only reasonable reform is a complete transformation into a society unrecognizable as our own.
Which is of course the point.
(Or, put another way, once the government outlaws blah blah blah…only outlaws blah blah blah.)
Soon the US will have all the beauty of an ant hill. Fuck all the Dr. Cocteaus… sideways.
Kinda like the “Center for Science in the Public Interest” which is none of those things. It is, as Rush Limbaugh described it, “a couple of activist lawyers with a fax machine”. Yet, whenever they put out another patently absurd press release, the MBM treats them as if they were the New Scientific Consensus.
Clowns are evil. Everyone knows that.
So why the fuck does the Cookie Monster get off the hook? He promotes sugar, and he’s a monster.
Scientific and Consensus don’t belong in the same area code… just sayin.
Cranj-d: I’ll take evil clowns over clownish doctors any day.
Amen, cranky. Clowns are of the devil. Midgets too.
It doesn’t seem that long ago that ghetto leftists were harassing fast food businesses like McDonald’s to open more franchises in the hood. That’s the problem with caving to these cocksuckers, you never know which way the wind will blow tomorrow.
It’s like you’re prescient or something.
Ultimately, the only way to please the critics is to become something unrecognizable.
I do hope that more people wake up to this reality. Sometimes, the best course of action really is as simple as telling your critics to fuck off.
You can never win with progressives. You are wrong and will always be wrong, no matter what you’re doing, even if it’s what you demanded you do. Just consider pr0n. If you are pro-porn, you’re expoliting women. If you’re anti-pron, you’re a moralistic fuddy duddy who wants to tell people what to do. Then there’s housing. They demanded that banks give loans to people with no regard to whether they’d be able to repay them. Then, when the inevitable happened, the banks were “predatory lenders” for writing the loans the proggs insisted on. You simply cannot please these people and the sooner we stop trying, the better.
Here, there and everywhere we look; “[I]t is this single-minded pursuit of the irrelevant by the self-important that constitutes the greatest catastrophe of our time.“
McDonald’s opened in 1940, and the other burger franchises and junk food have been around about as long, yet the obesity epidemic is fairly recent.
But then proggs were never very good with concepts like “correlation” and “causation.” For these people, the process of bullying a big entity into compliance is the whole point. And because you can never get enough of what you don’t need, they’re never sated, never content, never finished.
Fanatics is fanatics is fanatics.
dicentra – a more direct correlation? A greater percentage of irresponsible parents. Let’s graph that sucker and see what we come up with on the cause of the childhood obesity epidemic.
#4 ProfShade, the Cookie Monster is not exempt. He now mostly eats fruit and vegetables, and cookies are a “sometimes food”.
And I think Bert and Ernie’s wedding is scheduled for June 2012.
As someone who has lived in a barely gentrified neighborhood full of poor fat people, I think it’s safe to say that McDonald’s is the least of their problems. I had to walk ten blocks just to find a store that sold 2% milk fer Gad’s sake. Every mom & pop bodega or restaurant had nothing but shit because that’s the only stuff the people were willing to buy. And the saddest part to me was watching all these places go out of business because they were too stubborn or stupid to adjust their offerings as more and more yuppies moved in.
I had enough of the McDonalds demonizing when that jerkoff Morgan Spurloff made his “Super Size Me” film. Morgan proved, beyond a doubt, that eating 4 or 5 Big Macs, 4 or 5 large order of large fries and not exercising would cause one to become overweight to obese. Even though I’m sure Spurlock went into the project with the noblest of intentions, oddly enough, Spurlock was hailed as a mighty crusader against an evil corporation. I’m sure Mr. Spurlock had no idea he’d win an award and make a few dollars from his propaganda.
Meanwhile, Me and Mickey D, staring Soso Whaley, got virtually no press because it showed a woman losing weight while eating only McDonalds.
Read a great interview with Mrs. Whaley here: http://tinyurl.com/3r2feg9
Btw, McDonalds? Go back to blanching your fried in lard. Please. For the children.
fried =
firedfries.Meanwhile, Me and Mickey D, staring Soso Whaley, got virtually no press because it showed a woman losing weight while eating only McDonalds.
Exactly. Likewise, that leftist scrunt Barbara Ehrenreich drew effusive praise for holing up in a hotel room and writing about how horrible her existence was pretending to be a waitress, whereas some just out of college kid wrote a book about checking into a homeless shelter and building a life from nothing and he was dismissed by lefties because in spite of the circumstances he put himself in, he had an education. These people are a joke.
Abe,
I need to get hold of that book. I’ve been meaning to read it.
I give the Sheppard credit. Taking off with just a backpack with a few belongings takes nerve.
Google the web site for “Scratch Beginnings.” Great intro to the project here:
http://www.scratchbeginnings.com/read-the-intro
I meant to read his book as well, but totally forgot about it until now.
You know, all of these “crusaders” should perhaps concern themselves with getting folks to stop patronizing McDonalds, if they really believe the stuff they spew, instead of trying to have the government shut them down. Why don’t they lecture the drive-through-parents instead? Why not hold “workshops” with the bodega owners, so that they realize they should stop carrying ring-dings, cheetos, and hostess fruit pies and switch over to pita chips and hummus to serve all the hipsters that move into the neighborhooods, as Abe mentioned.
Because no one will listen, that’s why. All they have is a resort to nuisance lawsuits and appeal to nanny-state-lovin’ politicians. They’re every inch as bad as the “moral majority” types they so often decry for wanting to meddle in people’s lives.
LEAVE MY STOMACH ALOOOOOOOOOOOONE! I HAVE A RIGHT TO EAT FRENCH FRIES!11!1!
It’s not hard to see how these would be chanted mantras in an alternative set of circumstances.
And if they are successful, what are all these “people of conscience” going to do when the professional malcontents, fresh off their success at shutting down McDonals, decide to go after their favorite ethnic retaurant, deli, or diner instead?
“…next thing you know, the Clown’s up on the roof with a Schmisser. 27 dead and they blame Marine training.”
If you eat at Mickey D’s once a week, you won’t have a problem. If you eat there every day, you probably will.
McDonalds? Go back to blanching your fried in lard. Please. For the children.
Lard is all natural. That makes it good. Inherently.
And if they are successful, what are all these “people of conscience” going to do when the professional malcontents, fresh off their success at shutting down McDonals, decide to go after their favorite ethnic retaurant, deli, or diner instead?
Nonsense! Everybody knows that foie gras is good for you!
dicentra – a more direct correlation? A greater percentage of irresponsible parents.
My money’s on cultural nihilism, which includes irresponsible parenting and also hedonism and unhappiness and self-medicating with food.
At least when people self-medicate with cigarettes, booze, or drugs, you don’t have to tear down the bedroom wall to haul off the corpse.
If you eat at Mickey D’s once a week, you won’t have a problem. If you eat there every day, you probably will.
For me, it’s less about the food than it is about the lifestyle. If you don’t feel like making a decent meal for yourself and/or your family once in a while, you can be forgiven for taking an evening off. But if you seldom (or never!) cook a decent meal for your family, that just might indicate that you have some behavioral habits/issues that contribute a lot more to your personal problems than does your diet.
That’s exactly the behavior I was referring to when I characterized some people as “drive-by parents”, Squid.
That’s redundant, I think.
I believe you have the right of it again, Squid.
Theodore Dalrymple wrote an interesting essay relevant to these very good points by Pablo and Abe. Here’s the key conclusion:
The whole thing, published in 2002, is well worth reading. As is everything Dalrymple has written about social and economic decline in Europe –on the present trajectory, our future is their present.
Dalrymple’s book “Life At The Bottom” is really good. It’s especially interesting because the social pathologies in the UK parallel our own, except that the mostly white underclass he deals with puts the exclamation point on the fact that this is all about human nature and the stupidity of government rather than race – as the American left would have it.
“…instead of trying to have the government shut them down… why don’t they lecture the drive-through-parents instead?”
Possibly because that would risk acknowledging the role of individual agency, which would undercut the preferred narrative of consumers as passive dupes. And to attack consumers for making proletarian choices – of which the campaigners, who are of course superior, disapprove – would jar with the campaigners’ egalitarian credentials. Which may be why a common strategy is to insinuate some variation of “false consciousness,” whereby fast food enthusiasts are effectively sidelined as victims of some ill-defined but morally corrupting influence.
They, unlike the campaigners, can’t see through advertising. They, unlike the campaigners, don’t know their own minds. But saying that out loud would make the campaigners sound presumptuous and conceited. And saying it face to face with Those Who Need Saving might invite a suitably frank response.
A most excellent comment David,
You articulated very well what I might have summed up as “the irrational exuberance of the elitists!”
Oh and, by the way, I am a fan of the airplane porn you often put on your site; and especially of the Spitfire in your logo :)
My Regards
Haven’t read Life yet, Abe. Just finished Our Culture. Plan on getting around to Not With a Bang sometime in the not too distant future.
It’s especially interesting because the social pathologies in the UK parallel our own, except that the mostly white underclass he deals with puts the exclamation point on the fact that this is all about human nature and the stupidity of government rather than race.
I found chapter 6 of Orwell’s “Road to Wigan Pier” especially illuminating. Not so much in relation to my earlier “won’t cook” argument, but rather to the “people really like junk food” aspect of things.
so all that food labeling stuff was just a “false flag” adventure to get to the next stage?
The problem is that as long as they are part of your society they will ruin it. They will have no compunction about lying, sabotaging, anything it takes; the end justifies whatever means they want to use. At some point, we are going to have to throw them out just as we did the Tories after the Revolution.
I have always shied away from guns (while not judging others for their preference). I thought that a gun would attract other guns.
But my new HK gives me a woody, and a fantasy that Trumpka will show up at my house and try to tell me the way it is, with his manly flabby man tits, and the fists of his henchmen. Why should he have to get his hands dirty when he can call on goons to do the shit work?
But, if he asked me to take a walk with him, I would now probably say: “It will be your last walk (German accent).”
What the fudge? He wouldn’t think twice about telling me the same, would he?
WTF? Why are there only about ten of us left on PW?
My guess (due to my eleven year old son) is that education is about promulgating ignorance, and replacing facts with bullshit. Try using logic to refute those who have no idea what logic is.
Logic will truly confuse them, which will then piss them off, you racist, homophobic, sexist, Hasta Vaginaists.
Right now, it’s between Sao Paolo, Panama, Belize, and Bali.
I am winnowing, but I want to know where I can be zino3.
Cheers…
That is all…
What is really scary, is that my 11 year old son believes all this bullshit, and is immune to any facts. I can’t wait to see his first girlfriend…