By Derrick Z. Jackson
WHEN EUROPEAN germs wiped out Indians, at least that aspect of conquest
was unintentional. Burger King has no such excuse.
The modern colonizers currently have an ad campaign called "Whopper
Virgins." Commercials are running during televised s****ts events, and
the company has a nearly eight-minute video on its website. In a bizarre
parody of an actual do***entary, Burger King sent a crew out to remote
Hmong parts of Thailand, Inuit parts of Greenland, and a village in
Romania where people have both never seen a hamburger nor ever heard of
one through advertising. The narration starts, "The hamburger is a
culinary culture and it's actually an American phenomenon [as if we
didn't know this]."
The first part of the video involved plucking some villagers to come to
a modern office in local and native dress to compare Burger King's
signature burger with a McDonald's Big Mac. Villagers are shown fumbling
with the burger, with a patronizing narrator saying, "It's been very
interesting to see their reaction to the hamburger because they've never
seen such a foreign piece of food before and they didn't even quite know
how to pick it up and they didn't know how to - from what end to eat. .
.. .It was really interesting. We were able to see these people's first
bite of a hamburger."
Remarking on the villagers' awkwardness in handling the burger, the
narrator added: "It took them awhile to understand the dynamics of it
and so that was fascinating to see because we take it for granted 'cause
we live in America where hamburgers are consumed like a staple."
After the guinea pig villagers decided (of course!) that the Whopper
tasted better than the Big Mac, Burger King sent a production crew out
to the villages to cook burgers. Under the guise of "sharing things
about both our cultures (Gee, where have we heard that before in
sanitized colonial history?), shots of a burger broiler being airlifted
and sledded in by dog are shown. The villagers, of course, like the
burger, with the narrator saying, "They told us yesterday, 'No, we want
to experience other things in this world, too. We want to taste other
foods. We want to see other people. We want to see other things.' "
Right out of the most banal of Thanksgiving scripts, the narrator says,
as one of the crew receives a coat, "And they've been extraordinarily
gracious to us." Burger King defends the ads, saying it worked hard to
respect cultural sensitivities.
All this, to spread disease to developing peoples. And Burger King knows
it. The Westernization of the global diet, led by America's fast-food
giants, is helping spread obesity and diabetes as it has never been seen
before. It's not enough that those diseases are off the charts with
Native Americans here at home. Now we want to seduce Inuits abroad. Even
if levels of obesity stay what they are now, the number of people around
the world with diabetes will explode from the 171 million people of 2000
to 366 million by 2030.
The numbers will more than triple in places ranging from the Democratic
Republic of the Congo to Bangladesh to Guatemala. They will more than
double or nearly triple in China, India, Brazil, and Mexico. According
to WHO researchers, diabetes was already responsible in 2000 for nearly
3 million deaths around the world. "Given the increasing prevalence of
obesity, it is likely that these figures provide an underestimate of
future diabetes prevalence," those researchers said. Translated, even
more people will die.
The WHO, not surprisingly, says, "Initiatives by the food industry to
reduce the fat, sugar, and salt content of processed foods . . . could
accelerate health gains worldwide."
But no, Burger King wants to colonize the farthest reaches with fat,
sugar, and salt.
The irony was when the locals made the crew their native food in the
video. The meal ladled out for them was smothered in vegetables. The
crew yum-yummed "Nice," "Wonderful," "So good," and even, "Insane." That
was the height of patronization given their mission. Burger King's
violation of the "Whopper Virgins" is an insane reenactment of the worst
of American colonial history.
--
It is simply breathtaking to watch the glee and abandon with which
the liberal media and the Angry Left have been attempting to turn
our military victory in Iraq into a second Vietnam quagmire. Too bad
for them, it's failing.
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