Learning From McDonald's

Imagine a version of It’s a Wonderful Life, only the main character is not George Bailey (James Stewart) a bank executive with financial problems but McDonald’s. Imagine the guardian angel Clarence Odbody (Henry Travers) coming down to earth and showing us what the world would be like without McDonald’s. Surely all the foodies and health advocates would be in utter ecstasy. We’d have a world without Big Macs, McNuggets or the Filet-O-Fish and the best French fry that the universe has ever created would either be a gleam in someone’s eye or have already met its maker. Everyone bemoans the fact that when you travel you're no longer going anywhere and that one of the symptoms of this is the ubiquitousness of the big fast food chains like McDonald’s. But imagine coming into some strange country like Russia or China, ruled by an authoritarian government whose arbitrary edicts create fear and uncertainty. Suddenly you see the big M and you’re reminded of the connectivity of the global economy. Monopoly capitalism used to be the villain and in the l9th century the Opium Wars a more nefarious form of imperialism laced with capitalism sought to addict a vulnerable population. OK fast food can be addictive too, but it’s not opium and the Big M is a reminder that the liberal minded mercantile spirit greases the wheels of commerce. Can we even see McDonald’s as an aspect of McLuhan’s Global Village? Indeed, the picture of the world the angel might paint without McDonald’s is neither necessarily more sanguine nor sanitary than the one that George faces. McDonald’s kitchens are likely to be a lot more sanitary than what you find in oppressive societies where health officials may turn out to be party hacks and epigones. And there is something beautiful about the McDonald’s arch, which appears on the horizon like the golden minaret of a Byzantine Church. For more on the post-modernist conception of architectural beauty, see Robert Venturi, Steven Izenour and Denise Scott Brown’s Learning From Las Vegas: The Forgotten Symboism of Architectural Form.

Thailand Journal VIII: Opium Wars

Tunnel of Hall of  Opium Museum (Watercolor by Hallie Cohen)

Most people may think of a perfume by Yves Saint Laurent when they hear the word “opium." They’ve never heard of the Opium Wars or the Treaty of Nanking which allowed the British to engage in the kind of free trade in China, aka Imperialism which addicted millions. The current king of Thailand has been instrumental in curbing poppy cultivation and his mother was responsible for the creation of the Hall of Opium Museum in Chiang Saen. The museum is entered through a long tunnel lined with haunted Blakean images. The museum then traces the history of the 70 species of Papaver Somniferum or poppy from Summerian and Assyrians times 3000-5000 BC through the Greeks and Romans and onto Paracelsus, the Renaissance physician who immersed opium alcohol to make Laudanum. It ends with a whole exhibition on addiction that deals with famous addicts like Billie Holiday and even boasts a historic diorama of Ben Franklin who , it turns out, was hooked, despite his famed advocacy of moderation. It closes with a Buddhist proverb, “He who conquers many men in battle is not the noblest victor. But he who conquers himself is, indeed, the noblest victor.” If you ever visit the Golden Triangle, which has been transformed from the mystique of drug smuggling and opium dreams, to the nightmare of modernity, you can ride elephants in the luxurious Anantara Golden Triangle Elephants Camp & Resort and cross a four lane highway to the museum. How times have changed!

Opium Wars

It’s not surprising to discover that Iran has been building a weapons-grade nuclear reactor near the holy city of Qum. War and religion have gone hand in hand since ancient times, the conjunction of the two seemingly opposing phenomena reaching its apotheosis with the Crusades in the Middle Ages. Furthermore, the most fought-over piece of real estate in the world is Palestine, the cradle of the three Adamic religions, Christianity, Judaism and Islam.

The expression “no good deed goes unpunished” comes to mind in response to this contrariety of human nature. What is religion but an organized aspiration for the greater good? But curiously, the desire to disseminate good works and helpful information has historically ended in violence.

Family life is a microcosm of religious wars, and what greater description of domestic conflict than the stories of the Old Testament patriarchs and their rivalrous broods? Parents pass on experience to their children, who find the phenomenology tainted by an outlook they consider foreign to their own. Baby boomers who became the flower children of the ‘60s were perennially at odds with their Depression-era parents, who unwittingly educated their children into an opposing worldview. Few graduates of elite colleges would cotton to Polonius’s famous advice to Laertes, “Neither a borrower nor a lender be.”

The other thing that religion and war have in common is the notion of an army. An army of believers is hardly distinguishable from a military army, and members of both subsume the self to a higher authority. As Shinto kamikazes and Islamic suicide bombers illustrate, belief is a powerful weapon that can produce destructive, not to mention self-destructive, results. Very few modern religions have been founded on principles of skepticism, and few would subscribe to Wittgenstein’s famous last proposition from his Tractatus Logico Philosophicus, “What we cannot speak of we must pass over in silence,” which limits the possibility of grandiose proclamations.

Many of the most violent battles of the past decades have been in places where there is religious conflict, whether Serbia and Croatia, Afghanistan, Israel, or Sudan. (Curiously, the First and Second World Wars were secular conflicts motivated by desires for political and economic hegemony). Marx said, “Religion is the opiate of the masses.” The French philosopher Raymond Aron went on to say, “Marxism is the opiate of the intellectuals.” In the l9th century, the British fought the Opium Wars with China. But aren’t all wars opium wars? Religion just happens to be the most powerful opiate that fuels the delirium.