March 18, 2002

  • I remember once when I was a young whip-her-snap-her and I was paging luridly through the assorted sordities of some old Playboy magazine greedily seeking out my perfect figment of lasciviousness, when I found it: YES! The quintessential Karl Hess (Who’s Karl Hess, you say? Remember the 1964 conservative candidate for president, Barry Goldwater, and his controversially famous "Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice; moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue." speech? Karl Hess was that chief speechwriter! The very same Hess who, following Goldwater’s defeat, became a member of the radical leftist Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), a Vietnam war protestor, and tax resister. Who’s Barry Goldwater, you say? hehe).


    Anyway, in that Playboy article, I remember Hess maintaining that, in actuality, America never needed to worry about a then often-speculated Cold-War Soviet invasion because (and I paraphrase greatly from memory) "Although, in such a scenario, the Soviet tanks would grind aggressively down Main Street in every city in America, the invasion would no doubt grumble to an abrupt halt just as soon as the Russian troops would spot the first McDonald’s restaurant on a cozy corner. There the communist warriors would with predictable certainty dismount and irresistibly feast. And Ronald McDonald would, by merit of that, win the Nobel Prize for Peace."


    Damn. How visionary! So how many McDonald’s are there in terrorist-harboring countries of the Middle East? Surely the solution to terror hungrily stares us like a Big Mac in the face?!


    Yet, despite the role that McDonald’s is hypothetically prepared to play in the dawning of world peace, I cannot overcome my aesthetic bias against it in having the ugliest website of any multinational corporation on the internet. www.mcdonalds.com is the PITS! No, no…don’t go there…come back!!! whew! That was close! Now thank me for saving you from cyber-tastelessness.


    Is enough ever enough? How pervasive is McDonald’s in our world today?


    Eric Schlosser offers some poignant insights in his book, Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal:


    The McDonald's Corporation has become a powerful symbol of America's service economy, which is now responsible for 90 percent of the country's new jobs. In 1968, McDonald's operated about one thousand restaurants. Today it has about twenty-eight thousand restaurants worldwide and opens almost two thousand new ones each year. An estimated one out of every eight workers in the United States has at some point been employed by McDonald's. The company annually hires about one million people, more than any other American organization, public or private. McDonald's is the nation's largest purchaser of beef, pork, and potatoes - and the second largest purchaser of chicken. The McDonald's Corporation is the largest owner of retail property in the world. Indeed, the company earns the majority of its profits not from selling food but from collecting rent. McDonald's spends more money on advertising and marketing than any other brand. As a result it has replaced Coca-Cola as the world's most famous brand. McDonald's operates more playgrounds than any other private entity in the United States. It is one of the nation's largest distributors of toys. A survey of American schoolchildren found that 96 percent could identify Ronald McDonald. The only fictional character with a higher degree of recognition was Santa Claus. The impact of McDonald's on the way we live today is hard to overstate. The Golden Arches are now more widely recognized than the Christian cross.


    You see. We need to refocus the wrath inculcated into its youth by the Terror Jihad from a dedication to the total destruction of the Crusading Christian Cross to an embrace of the promised warmth provided belly-wise by the even more obvious Golden Arches. (But let’s tone down the MickeyD website or they’re bound to lose their appetite. )


    Question: What’s the most putrid corporate website you’ll never visit again?

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