McDonaldland Hamburger Patch

Yes, this still is a dispatch from an Age of Hallucination: the Clown with Jodhpurs—we will not use his name here—and the headsmack of a world where every object is sentient. Add to that the hit of nostalgia you get (if you were born circa '66), and you might very well miss the big picture. The big picture is not red wigs, dancing "apple pie" trees, or milkshake volcanoes. (Good lord, but those were unsettling times!)

No, the big picture is the powerful statement this makes of the Doctrine of Inanimacy, one of suicidefoodism's lesser-known tenets. (The primary precept, of course, and the subject of most of our reports, is the Axiom of the Willing Victim. For examples of this, see just about any of our analyses.)

Simply put, the Doctrine holds that animals, being inert—mere blobs of matter—have no interests, and certainly no rights. (Rights? Ha!) Quailing at the thought of butchering a pig, say, is no more rational than second thoughts about scraping gum from the bottom of your shoe.

In McDonaldland, the Doctrine finds expression in hamburgers that grow like weeds. Literally. The twist here is that they are inanimate objects—plants—that can still want to be eaten. But that surreal point is just a pebble in the mountain of mindfuck that is this advertisement.

The way the Doctrine plays out in McDonaldland is not dissimilar to the "farm fresh" rhetoric so common in images of farm life. Rhetoric we have scarcely begun to document.