DISCLAIMER: I HAVE A DREAM
I have a dream. Well, not so much a dream, really. More like one of those, what do you call the wakey-time dreams? Incredibly detailed and elaborate assassination fantasies? Right. So. I have a dream. In my dream I abseil from the top of a sky-scraper right through the front window of McDonalds. Ronald McDonald is there. Waiting. Waiting for me. I have a piano wire with me. I do what needs to be done.
Then I fly - slowly, majestically, like an eagle - back to the top of my sky-scraper. It's a nice dream.
I guess it's a little disturbing, but now I've shared it with you I feel much better. Also, I'm probably not the only one who has these thoughts - these ideas - am I?
[#i'mtheonlyonebraveenoughtosharethemonasweetnewblogcalledTotalDisinformationAwarenessthough.]
INTRODUCTION: ROCK'N'ROLL MCDONALDS
So as I was having a flashback to my detailed assassinate Ronald McDonald with piano wire fantasy [wait what? I had a flashback to a fantasy? WOW! SO WRONG!] I'm sure you can imagine my happy surprise when I found an article about a group in Finland called The Food Liberation Army who have done just that. Let's see what this reputable, mainstream publication has to say about it:
Children look away now: Food campaigners carry out sick spoof threat to behead Ronald McDonald after taking statue as 'hostage' [Daily Mail online, February 12, 2011]
Campaigners for ethically produced food today carried out their threat to behead Ronald McDonald - in a sick publicity stunt that has been branded 'poor taste' by the restaurant chain. Members of a group calling themselves the 'Food Liberation Army' staged the beheading in a Helsinki art gallery, after sparking outrage last week by releasing an Al Qaeda-style spoof video in which they were seen holding a hooded Ronald McDonald hostage.
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| Who's smiling now, clown? Huh? Who's smiling no- wait, never mind. |
Members of the group stole a Ronald McDonald statue from a Helsinki restaurant on January 31, posting their videoed demands on YouTube days later. Finnish police later recovered the statue and arrested two of the members. But the group had prepared their own version of the iconic fast food character, which was executed in a performance with a guillotine today. Artist Jani Leinonen was present at the event - unmasked this time as he posed for photographers with the disconnected head of Ronald.
Mr Leinonen is one of the two members of the group who was arrested earlier this week. In the original YouTube video, the group are seen in black balaclavas with Ronald in the foreground, wearing a hood. The spokesman threatens to execute the character if the fast food chain refuses to answer questions about how it produces its products. McDonalds told MailOnline after the footage was released that the stunt was 'in very poor taste'. It also denied the group's suggestion that it was attempting to hide details about its food quality and manufacturing processes.
A spokesman said: 'McDonald’s is always available to engage in constructive conversations with our customers, stakeholders and the media. This stunt is in very poor taste and not a responsible approach to meaningful dialogue. Meanwhile, we are focused on our customers and are fully transparent about our high quality food and industry-leading standards and practices.' The food group had demanded that McDonalds release information about its manufacturing process, and the additives used in its product.
Accusing the company of 'greed and indifference', the spokesman added that the company's short-sightedness had made their products nearly inedible. 'We are not alone but represent a rapidly-growing population,' he said. 'It is in your interest to answer our questions publicly... only this way will you survive in the future. Listen to our message... We will reward you by eating more of your burgers.'
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| Don't lose your head! [See what I did there?] |
Another short film released by the group was seemingly filmed undercover. It showed members stealing the mannequin from a McDonalds branch, in full view of restaurant staff. Dressed in high-visibility jackets they walk into the branch, place a docket on the serving counter and wheeled the figure out of the building unchallenged.
So, let's review: A Finnish art group called The Food Liberation Army "walk[ed] into the [McDonalds] branch, place[d] a docket on the serving counter and wheeled the figure out of the building unchallenged." After they had "kidnapped" the statue of Ronald McDonald they threatened to "behead" it if the McDonalds corporation did not meet their demands, as shown in this "Al Qaeda style video" below.
As we can see, the FLA state that they have taken this "extreme action" in the hope that it "will take us towards a better and safer food future" and that, some may say paradoxically, their actions are motivated by "love" specifically: "we love burgers, fries and McDonalds, but we can no longer watch silent when the food we love is being destroyed and BROUGHT to shame because of greed and indifference." [emphasis mine.] Their demands are essentially that McDonalds answers their questions relating to health, animal cruelty, wages/labour practices and pollution.
Now, you might be curious as to why the following discussion of this incident is relevant to a blog that is devoted to total disinformation awareness. I intend to use this incident to explore some issues relating to culture jamming and the politics of consumption. Secondly, I will briefly mention some of the limitations I have been thinking about in terms of this kind of activism [for lack of a better term.] Finally, I will try to address the issue of predictive programming and cultural creation, specifically the myth of McDonalds itself, and how it has been used to alter people's consciousness in a very real and concrete way, not least by altering people's perceptions of themselves from an holistic understanding of human beings as individuals and members of a community to an epistemological understanding of human beings as consumers.
PART I: I HAVE THE MUNCHIES FOR JUSTICE
First of all, there are lots of things I dig about this action. Here is a list, in order of importance:
1] Ninja stylings.
2] If you look at the logo they use carefully, it's the McDonalds slogan "I'm Lovin' It" but upside down to look Arabic and underneath a picture of a big fuck off sword [#alsotolookarabic.]
3] The FLA's manifesto which is actually a pretty comprehensive document with lots more information than the video alone would suggest.
4] Seeing young people today take a little bit of fucking interest in the world they live in and producing something entertaining and informative for others to think about.
5] The way he pronounced "gmail" as "gaymail." [#hahagaymail.]
6] Subtle use of both French and Russian revolution visual tropes.
7] OMG DID YOU SEE THEY CHOPPED OFF RONALD MCDONALD'S HEAD!!!?!1 !!!
I highly encourage readers to check out the manifesto and follow it up with more research of their own. And, if you find any of it compelling or convincing, would it fucking kill you to just stop eating at McDonalds? Well, would it?
Part II: IF I CAN'T HAVE JUSTICE I'LL SETTLE FOR TRUTH
Having said this, there are a few things I do not dig about this campaign. If you only watched the FLA's "Al Qaeda style video" and didn't read their manifesto, you would be forgiven for thinking that their demands were quite naive. You would be further forgiven for thinking that their demands showed a fundamental failure to differentiate between spin and reality. After having read their manifesto I now know that isn't the case, but, while it sounds incredibly simplistic and patronising when stated plainly like this, for anyone who only watched the video it bares repeating: while McDonalds corporate spin seeks to convince consumers that they are interested promoting their consumers' health and happiness, the [what we laughingly call] reality is that McDonalds are about and only about maximising profit for their shareholders.
This does point to a deeper issue here: by claiming that they "want to help McDonalds to save food" the FLA appear to have bought into McDonalds rhetoric, at least to some extent. As we have already seen elsewhere on this blog, the global food industry is set up to speculate and profit on food scarcity and insecurity. Therefore, the question must be asked, is the existence of McDonalds and the global food industry that it represents actually compatible with a world in which individuals and communities have any "food safety" at all?
Let me answer my own rhetorical question by just saying it again: despite their spin, McDonalds only exist for profit. They do not exist to provide healthy food, treat animals nicely or pay their workers a living/fair wage. McDonalds only. Exist. For profit.
Or, to put it another way, McDonalds is like this:
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| Note: you can't tell in this photo but that's shit the clown's feeding him there. |
Not like this:
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| Actually that looks pretty fucking scary too. |
But for the purposes of this post, I will limit my critique of this campaign to saying this: I have strong concerns with any approach that demands that our oppressors reform themselves, or that the global food industry and corporation like McDonalds would in some way be OK if ethics that would appear to contradict the very nature of their existence were applied to them. I will also say that I think any discussion of McDonalds that doesn't address the incredibly fucked up cultural effects of this institution and the way that it alienates people from their own individual and communal responsibilities [and abilities] to ensure their own "food safety" is necessarily limited in it's practical and philosophical importance.
Sometimes this is how disinformation works: by limiting the scope of the argument. So the debate becomes not whether should we be supporting McDonalds and this type of consumption or even why does the global food industry exist in the way it does at present, but how do we soften this institution's edges so we can continue to consume? Not how do we as individuals and in our communities help ourselves and each other to achieve a “better” future of "food safety" but how can we can pressure multinational food corporations to "save" food for us - in other words, so we can continue to consume.
PART III: IF I CAN'T HAVE TRUTH I'LL SETTLE FOR HOTCAKES
The FLA correctly claim that McDonalds is a "big and global player that reaches a significant part of the Earth's population." In this section I would like to briefly examine why this is the case and what it is about McDonalds that is apparently so appealing to people. I will argue that McDonalds makes extensive use of predictive programming and as such, McDonalds itself is a myth. I will further argue that this cultural element is something really important to examine when considering how to understand, and by extension address, the problems we are all facing in regard to “food safety.”
I am certainly not the first to make the claim that McDonalds is a myth. In fact, it openly promotes itself as such: it's advertising is not merely designed to sell burgers, it's designed to sell feelings. That's why they're called "happy meals", dig it? As customers we're not only purchasing food [#ifyoucancallitfood] we're being given the opportunity to purchase happiness. So, as long as there are a lot of people who seem to be embedded within this myth [and not only embedded, because when we go to McDonalds, we are literally consuming the myth itself] it's going to be very difficult to help people understand that their own "food safety" as well as the fate of exploited workers, animals and the Earth itself does not depend on McDonalds and the global food industry, and in fact that the existence of McDonalds and the global food industry represent a great threat to “food safety.” Or to put it another way: attempting to convince these institutions to behave in a more ethical way misses the point that we are not only dealing with physical, political and finical entities here, we are engaging with predictive programming, cultural creation and myths.
But why is this myth so successful and so compelling? I really don't know, but my ideas keep coming back to this: because life under our current social and economic system is so inherently dissatisfying for so many people, the myth that McDonalds creates holds great appeal. The literary critic Fredrick Jameson has some useful thoughts about this. In his 1979 essay Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture, Jameson cites the work of the Russian philosopher Ernst Bloch. Both Jameson and Bloch argue that popular culture reinforces ideology in many ways, and that in order to do this, it must first "capture" our imaginations. In his book The Principal of Hope [written in 1938] Bloch talks about the idea of utopia and the way that, in order to capture our imaginations, every pop cultural text [or meme, or trope, or myth] must have some element of utopia to it, some kind of hope that seeds our consciousness and allows us to glimpse a better kind of reality, and this is what appeals to us and keeps us captivated. Jameson calls this process of captivation a "fantasy ride." While we engage with this fantasy, or myth, we are engaging in, to use Jameson's terminology, a form of "escapism" and this is very powerful and very addictive. [Incidentally, this is a point of view that a lot of new age thought has never come to terms with.]
But, however useful and interesting this idea is, it doesn't really engage with the question of why we feel the need to escape? What does it actually mean that we now view our everyday experiences as something that we need to escape from? And how do we disengage from the myth in order to bring about real solutions to the problems we're facing, not least the problem of mass starvation?
But, however useful and interesting this idea is, it doesn't really engage with the question of why we feel the need to escape? What does it actually mean that we now view our everyday experiences as something that we need to escape from? And how do we disengage from the myth in order to bring about real solutions to the problems we're facing, not least the problem of mass starvation?
Ideally this post should have included a discussion of the culture of work and leisure time and the economic system that deprives us of the time and resources that would enable us to more easily reject McDonalds as a source of “food safety.” Perhaps it should also have included a discussion of potential ways to education or even “rehabilitate” people in order to allow us to perceive and reject the myth that McDonalds promotes, which is that people are not individuals and members of a community, with all the freedoms and responsibilities that this implies, but only consumers and therefore dependent on these institutions and captivated by their myths.
For the moment I will simply raise these as issues that require more discussion, and will simply say that, despite it's limitations, I actually do dig what I think the FLA were trying to achieve with this campaign and I wish more people at least had the punk rock moxy and ninja stylings to engage in this kind of work.
I would like to conclude this article with a quote from Hakim Bey and with the suggestion that the word "police" be read as "Ronald McDonald" and the further suggestion that I'm not talking about literally slicing off anyone's head here:
The IDEA of the POLICE, like Hydra, grows 100 new heads for each one cut off, and all these heads are live cops. Slicing off heads gains us nothing, but only enhances the beast’s power till it swallows us. First murder the IDEA - blow up the monument inside us - and then perhaps the balance of power will shift.
[SockRatEz says: Awesome I hope all Communiques of the Revolution are done in Finnish now across the world. What a brilliant language. Maybe if I finally get active and start attacking targets of the pitiful helpless giant across the world I will announce all my communiques using the Swedish Chef.]
References:
1] Children look away now: Food campaigners carry out sick spoof threat to behead Ronald McDonald after taking statue as 'hostage' [February 12, 2011]
2] Jameson, Fredrick: Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture [1979]
http://www.jstor.org/stable/466409 [note: this is only the abstract, I will try to find a copy of the full text to link to.]
3] Bloch, Ernst: The principle of hope, Volume 3 [1938] http://books.google.com/books?id=wuDbbU6zRiwC&lpg=PP1&ots=-HCyVzJ73c&dq=ernst%20bloch%20principle%20of%20hope&pg=PR4#v=onepage&q&f=false [at books.google with some bits missing.]
4] The FLA Manifesto [http://www.freeronald.org/en/kidnapping]
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