McDonald's claims its people were respectful but concerned that he was secretly filming customers and invading their privacy (under French law). So he shows up looking like this:
What do you think? Should the restaurant be required to leave him alone, though his looks upset the other customers? Should we get used to the future with its “computerized vision systems"? Or should we preserve our instincts about dangers?
On the evening of 2012 July 1st, my wife and children and I went to McDonalds at 140, Avenue Champs Elysees, Paris, France, after a day of sightseeing (8 museums and other landmark sights, as part of a boat cruise package)....
We ordered two Ranch Wraps, one burger, and one mango McFlurry....
Is this the right way to be in Paris? Obviously not, but freedom matters, and I'd like the French to care about freedom.
In 1888, the American chemist Wilbur O. Atwater devised a series of formulas that would help people get the most energy from the least food. Economics and physiology would be joined in what he called “the pecuniary economy of food.” Atwater pioneered a movement that came to be known as “scientific eating.” The notion appealed to French physicians, who had been looking for ways to improve working-class health and budgets. They believed that these households spent too much on meat and alcohol. Their program of “rational eating” aimed to instruct the poor to keep food expenses within the limits of their (modest) budgets. They urged the substitution of protein-rich legumes for red meat, pasta for sausages, and sugared beverages for wine.
These reformers believed that ignorance was the problem and information the solution. Nutrition facts were put next to the items on the menu cards in factory canteens and in working-class restaurants. Scales at the entrance to eating places helped customers to monitor their weight. A menu board, listing carefully calibrated culinary options, would allow workers to assemble nutritious meals from a set of limited options.
It didn't work, except in adjusting the menu in prisons, where money was saved. People wanted their pleasures. How does that historical experience apply today — as McDonald's begins posting calorie information? Our food is already cheap, and if you're eating in a restaurant, you're not going to find anything significantly cheaper than McDonald's. That 19th century experience was about saving money, and it's that pasta and sugared drinks approach to eating that is making us fat. I bet a switch to red wine and red meat would work as a weight-loss diet for most adults who've gotten fat eating McDonald's style.
Bruegel notes the obvious: People enjoy eating and they eat what they like. You can give them more scientific information, but how can you tell them what to like? Bruegel, who seems to be French, ends with drippy sympathy for the poor Americans who suffer in "an era of stagnant wages, dystopian politics and cultural anomie" and chomp cheeseburgers as their last best hope for pleasure. He says "we" shouldn't blame "the poor" — who are "we" and how does he know we're not poor? — but should blame our "culture that relies ever more on unhealthy foods to breathe meaning and purpose into everyday life."
So wethey are not chomping cheeseburgers simply for sensual pleasure — they're searching for meaning and purpose in their paltry, crushed little lives. Let me paraphrase: If life is spiritually and economically small, there is meaning in getting physically large.
Donald Lawson says "I called her and said, ‘I got a surprise for you. I won $200,000 in the Powerball.’ She goes: ‘Oh my god. Yay!’ I said, ‘All right. Are you ready, Ma? Well, the truth is, I won $337 million and $4 in the Powerball. Ha, ha.”
As Anthony Harkins observes in Hillbilly: A Cultural History of an American Icon, one of the hillbilly’s signature moves is to peak, popularity-wise, just when Americans sense that things in general are headed south....
And such ridicule has always been politically coded: The hillbilly figure allows middle-class white people to offload the venality and sin of the nation onto some other constituency, people who live somewhere—anywhere—else. The hillbilly’s backwardness highlights the progress more upstanding Americans in the cities or the suburbs have made. These fools haven’t crawled out of the muck, the story goes, because they don’t want to.
This idea that the hillbilly’s poverty is a choice allows more upscale Americans to feel comfortable while laughing at the antics before them. It also pushes some people to embrace the stereotype as a badge of honor. “Guitars, Cadillacs, hillbilly music / It’s the only thing that keeps me hangin’ on,” Dwight Yoakam once sang. For more contemporary examples of re-appropriation, you can attend any number of Tea Party rallies. The classist term “redneck,” originally coined to indicate those who worked so hard and so long in the sun that they sported sunburns in the designated anatomical location, likewise has been adopted in the name of all that’s good and holy.....
ADDED: Here's a different lottery story in the news today about a man who hadn't noticed he'd won $52 million. The money had gone unclaimed for a month, and the state circulated surveillance camera video of the winner buying the ticket:
A friend spotted the footage on the news and told Agnite, 'That's you!'
French McDonald’s running gay-themed ads for … no apparent reason
More specifically: This isn’t an ad about how awesome the burgers are, with a gay protagonist singing the praises of Le Big Mac. That wouldn’t be a “gay-themed ad” so much as a “food-themed ad” with a gay pitchman.This is a true gay-themed ad, with the product almost wholly incidental to young Jacques experiencing l’amour fou with a guy while papa blathers on ironically about being a ladies’ man. Why’d McDonald’s do it? Er … no one seems to know. Apparently there was no anti-gay incident at McD’s over there that they’re trying to atone for. The obvious explanation is “controversy for controversy’s sake,” but I can’t believe French viewers will bat an eye. Maybe they hired a director who fancies himself an aspiring Godard and he simply decided to indulge his inner auteur, burgers be damned? All theories welcome!
Actually, maybe the “controversy” theory does make sense. Below you’ll find O’Reilly making an offhand comparison to Al Qaeda, which was enough to provide Media Matters with hours of content. It’s great when everyone wins, my friends.
As stated at the end of the O'Reilly clip, the ad is part of a series, showing different characters. I haven't looked at the other examples, but it's easy for me to understand the ad. Like many American ads I've seen over the last few decades, the viewer is drawn in by something other than the product itself. We're shown characters that interest us for some reason, and the product is woven in subtly in way that feels positive. In this example, we see a young man and understand something about him — he's gay — and then we see his father doesn't really get that, but they love each other and spend time with each other... at McDonald's. They don't share everything, but they can share a meal at McDonald's. It's really a typical McDonald's ad, showing the restaurant as an easy, comforting family place. It's not about controversy at all. It's about commonality. We're different in a lot of ways, but we can all agree that it will be good to eat at McDonald's. The ad is well-done, charming, and sweet, and it creates a good feeling about McDonald's.
Obviously, it is also true that the ad won't work on people who get riled when they see gay people presented as regular people who are part of ordinary life. I'm sure, back in 1980, some people didn't like to see a little white boy give his Coke to the black football player Mean Joe Green in the famous Super Bowl ad. And Coke might have thought about that. This will alienate some people who are not ready to see black and white people sharing a simple intimacy. But Coke chose to do the ad and take advantage of the good feeling it would give a lot of people, a feeling that would halo around the product. They were right, too.
When O'Reilly jokes about McDonald's doing an ad in this series showing a member of Al Qaeda, he's revealing that he thinks gay people are a group that most people view with justified hostility. McDonald's, operating in France, hasn't analyzed things that way. That's their judgment call, and I hope it's a good one.
Some people say that gay people should keep their sexuality private: Why does anyone need to hear about what anyone else does in bed? But the reaction to this ad shows how obtuse that is. This young man is looking at a photograph and talking to another male on the phone in a way that lets us know he's in love. It isn't at all leering or overtly sexual. It's mild and innocent. It doesn't make any sense to say that's something that belongs only in the bedroom. The idea that expression like this should be kept hidden only makes sense if you actually believe homosexuality is shameful.
... stopping for that train-in-a-fireplace Magritte...
... and getting lost amid the dimly lit glass cases in glass cases in the surrealist passages.
(These are just some more of my pictures from the Art Institute of Chicago. We've moved on to Lafayette, West Lafayette, and back through Chicago, and — almost to Madison — we're picking up free WiFi (and cheap cheeseburgers) at a McDonald's near Beloit.)
Canah Chapel, Freewill Baptist Church, is in Erwin, Tennessee.
But we weren't there either to profess or practice Christianity. We went here...
... to pee, drink coffee, and access the internet. Satan let us do all that, but we don't know whether or not he was content. I understand why Satan — if he existed — would be happy to see folks professing but not practicing Christianity. I think he wouldn't care one way or the other about urination, but that he'd be pleased to see us drinking coffee, even as I think God gave us coffee in the hope that, energized, we'd turn to the good.
As for the internet, I'd say it depends on which websites you go to, and the subtle preferences of God and Satan are unknowable to us, but perhaps they are both keeping track of the entire history of all of our website visits and that we'll be called to account in the end.
But it was not the golden arches anymore than the cross that got us to take that exit. It was the sign for the Andrew Johnson National Historic Site. But then another sign said it was 31 miles away, and Satan made us go to McDonald's instead. This morning — the morning after — I sorrowfully regret not making the pilgrimage to the dishonored President's place of honor.
"Want to go back?" Meade says. No, no, we've gone too far ahead. We got all the way to Berea, Kentucky last night, where we walked around until night fell...
Everybody seems to like "Supersize Me," that new comic documentary about a guy who eats (and overeats) every meal at McDonald's for a month and gains weight. Boring quip I heard on TV: "Everybody but McDonald's." Oh yeah? I bet McDonald's loves the movie. I'll bet plenty of people leave the movie and go straight to McDonald's. They are hungry and they could practically smell the french fries while they were sitting there watching the thing. They aren't planning to overeat and they aren't going to go more than once a day, so whatever comical, horrendous results are depicted in the film obviously don't apply to them. I say McDonald's is perfectly happy about this film.
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