Remora

McDonald's, McDonald's.

Do read the story of the bad burger in the NYT today. A Chilean woman named Carmen Calderon went into a McDonald's to complain that her son had gotten sick after eating some Mickey D special. Some employee said look, it is cleaner here than in your house. Calderon then went to the municipal health agency, got them to make a sweep of the place. And Mickey D's responded by suing Ms. Calderon for 1.25 million dollars.

Is this typical or what?

"Because one of the icons of globalization is involved, the dispute has become a cause c�l�bre in Chile. McDonald's says it is merely trying to defend its reputation against a slander, but consumer advocates see sinister motives at work.

"McDonald's doesn't have a prayer of collecting this money, so it is clear that what they really want is to send a message to every consumer in Chile," said Luis J�rez, legal director of the National Consumer Service, a government agency. "What they are saying to consumers is this: watch your step, be careful, think twice before you criticize us, because you'll get in trouble with the law."

McDonald's loves to do this kind of thing. Remember the McLibel suit? When Mickey D for Devil spent 38 million dollars going after two unemployed, pamphleteering activists in court in Britain? It was a circus: the two activists ran circles around the big corp, even going so far as to dig up a repentent Ronald McDonald. The guy in the clown suit wept for the slaughter of bovine innocents, of which he'd been the tool, as well as subtly directing the fragile infantile libido to alluring images of a bunch of animated dead animal sandwiches, fetishs the young tikes will take years to get over, if ever. Yes, tears, gentle tears, folks. The two activists now run a website, the Mcspotlight, which hoards anti-McDonald's news, along with the exhaustive and exhausting trial transcript of the whole bloody trial, which lasted years, and supposedly cost McDonald's 38 million dollars. Sad thing about the site is that you get the feeling, this was it for those two. The high point. The thing they can't get over. And the exploitation of it, even for the goodly purpose of throwing rocks at this mega-corps -- well, it isn't like this is Gandhi in India, exactly. To be an activist and to hit the exacta like that -- and then the life afterwards, in the guttering light of that thrill...

Years ago, my friend D. surreptitiously took a job at a Mickey D's. His junk food gig coincided with my arrival in town. I'd made the long trek from Santa Fe to New Haven. D. had promised me that when I arrived, we'd both get jobs as garbage men. This turned out to be rank optimism, on D.'s part, since the township of West Haven, as a matter of fact, was not keeping slots warm for us on one of their primo garbage trucks. Just as well, I guess. So there I was, Limited Inc., staying at D.'s place, which was the downstairs part of a house owned by a German ex-maid. Because D. was afraid that the maid didn't want me in his quarters -- I don't know, her paranoia, his rent, some concantenation of bad circs and money troubles -- he encouraged me to sort of hide by day. For instance, remaining in a closet might be a good idea, he hinted. Or had I thought of wandering aimlessly between the hours of dawn and sunset through the friendly streets of West Haven? Then he'd annouce that he had to do some task he couldn't talk about, and disappear. Eventually I wormed it out of him. He said that it was a pretty cool job. The employees value added to the pittances they were making, hourly, by boosting boxes of patties and buns. Easy way to do this was to hoist one of the boxes into the dumpster out back, then retrieve it and go home with it. Although I thought, theoretically, that the company should be bled in this way, given their adamant resistance to paying a living wage, on a more practical level I couldn't help but worry that diffusing the patties among the kids at home might not be the healthiest thing a parent can do.