Posted by
Zentrist on Sunday, January 04, 2009 12:00:00 AM
The marketing genius of Burger King is now promoting something (part of me would like) called The Angry Whopper. The visual in the restaurant I visited recently is arresting: a humongous, fat-filled delight with double everything, all the stuff--and The Way You Want It.
If this isn't a sign of our times, I don't know what is.
Many of our most gifted artists, poets, psychologists--are in marketing these days. Let me add: prophets.
We are living in angry times, very angry times. Just try to get through that local retail giant discount store on a Sunday without a minor "fender bender." More tragically, come visit our "loop" or LBJ freeway and survive the drive. What with the road rage.
Actually, our TV court rooms are helping, quite a bit, with the nation's anger. All praise to Judge Judy, The People's Court, Family Court, Judge Penny, Judge Karen, Judge Mathis et. al. Kudos to Dr. Phil and Larry King and Oprah. Thanks, many thanks, to Donahue and Geraldo and that former Ohio mayor. I'm serious.
These folks have put before our eyes...ourselves. They've held the Shakespearean "mirror," for our troubled, dysfunctional times,
"up to nature." They've forced us to look at ourselves, to search our very souls. You may be unemployed, or working the second shift or retired or on your break at Wal-Mart. Judge Karen is helping you to see who you are in terms of "what is was like, what happened, and what it is like now," as they say in AA. The Secular City is the stage, the set. The backdrop is Lincoln's "civil religion." No Bible preaching here. But, nonetheless, human dignity is honored, left and right. Long live Judge Penny, Judge Karen, Judge Mathis and all the lawyers. Please don't hang all the lawyers. They know something. They know what they were taught in kindergarten, and they know what was drilled into them in law school: there is a strange, sort of secular transcendence about human dignity and honor. This spiritual thing comes out, for example, when Judge Penny holds up a photo of a young woman who is dressed up like a hooker. They young woman, the "defendent," hides her face--in shame. The people in the courtroom witness this human drama, this "turning" (for the young woman literally turned her back on the photo of herself, dressed up like a whore). Judge Penny showed the person herself--and I don't mind if all America watches, for a moment, at this young person's expense. (She signed up, after all.) Without going into all the details, this young person had to agree to not show up, at certain extended family gatherings, dressed up like this anymore. No more "working girls" will be allowed to show up looking like that, at Christmas.
The photo at the Burger King of this remarkable new Angry Whopper--this spectacle too, in its own way, may be attempting to teach us all a lesson about what makes us tick. I don't know. I do know this: I have a long way to go before I stop my meat-eating, arguably a sin . And I have a long way to go before I stop all the fault-finding, resentment and anger to the boiling point. Please join me in my typically American effort...to reform myself. (Or, if you happen to be Catholic, to become a saint.)