Medium Raw

10 Lower Education

My wife and I are speaking in hushed tones directly outside our daughter’s bedroom door, where we’re sure she’s pretending to be asleep.

“Sssshhhh!! She can hear us,” says my wife, with a theatricality intended to sound conspiratorial.

“No, she’s asleep,” I hiss—a little too loudly. A stage whisper. We’re talking about Ronald McDonald again. Bringing up the possibility of his being implicated in the disappearance of yet another small child.

“Not another one?!” gasps my wife with feigned incredulity.

“I’m afraid so,” I say with concern. “Stepped inside to get some fries and a Happy Meal and hasn’t been seen since…”

“Are they searching for her?”

“Oh yes…they’re combing the woods…checked out the Hamburglar’s place—but of course, they’re focusing on Ronald again.”

“Why Ronald?”

“Well…last time? When they finally found that other one? What was his name—Little…Timmy? The police found evidence. On the body…They found…cooties.”

This is just one act in an ongoing dramatic production—one small part of a larger campaign of psychological warfare. The target? A two-and-a-half-year-old girl.

The stakes are high. As I see it, nothing less than the heart, mind, soul, and physical health of my adored only child. I am determined that the Evil Empire not have her, and to that end, I am prepared to use what Malcolm X called “any means necessary.”

McDonald’s have been very shrewd about kids. Say what you will about Ronald and friends, they know their market—and who drives it. They haven’t shrunk from targeting young minds—in fact, their entire gazillion-dollar promotional budget seems aimed squarely at toddlers. They know that one small child, crying in the backseat of a car of two overworked, overstressed parents will, more often than not, determine the choice of restaurants. They know exactly when and how to start building brand identification and brand loyalty with brightly colored clowns and smoothly tied-in toys. They know that Little Timmy will, with care and patience and the right exposure to brightly colored objects, grow up to be a full-size consumer of multiple Big Macs. It’s why Ronald McDonald is said to be more recognizable to children everywhere than Mickey Mouse or Jesus.

Personally, I don’t care if my little girl ever recognizes those two other guys—but I do care about her relationship with Ronald. I want her to see American fast-food culture as I do. As the enemy.

From funding impoverished school districts to the shrewd installment of playgrounds, McDonald’s has not shrunk from fucking with young minds in any way they can. They’re smart. And I would not take that right to propagandize, advertise—whatever—from them. If it’s okay for Disney to insinuate itself into young lives everywhere, it should be okay for Ronald. I see no comfortable rationale for attacking them in the courts. They are, in any case, too powerful.

Where you take on the Clown and the King and the Colonel is in the streets—or, more accurately, in the same impressionable young minds they have so successfully fucked with for so long.

My intention is to fuck with them right back.

It’s shockingly easy.

Eric Schlosser’s earnest call to arms, Fast Food Nation, may have had the facts on its side, but that’s no way to wean a three-year-old off Happy Meals—much less hold her attention. The Clown, the King, the Colonel—and all their candy-colored high-fructose friends—are formidable foes. And if the history of conflict has taught us anything, it’s that one seldom wins a battle by taking the high road. This is not a debate that will be won on the facts. Kids don’t give a shit about calorie count—or factory farming, or the impact that America’s insatiable desire for cheap ground meat may have on the environment or our society’s health.

But cooties they understand.

What’s the most frightening thing to a child? The pain of being the outsider, of looking ridiculous to others, of being teased or picked on in school. Every child burns with fear at the prospect. It’s a primal instinct: to belong. McDonald’s has surely figured this out—along with what specific colors appeal to small children, what textures, and what movies or TV shows are likely to attract them to the gray disks of meat. They feel no compunction harnessing the fears and unarticulated yearnings of small children, and nor shall I.

“Ronald has cooties,” I say—every time he shows up on television or out the window of the car. “And you know,” I add, lowering my voice, “he smells bad, too. Kind of like…poo!” (I am, I should say, careful to use the word “alleged” each and every time I make such an assertion, mindful that my urgent whisperings to a two-year-old might be wrongfully construed as libelous.)

“If you hug Ronald…can you get cooties?” asks my girl, a look of wide-eyed horror on her face.

“Some say…yes,” I reply—not wanting to lie—just in case she should encounter the man at a child’s birthday party someday. It’s a lawyerly answer—but effective. “Some people talk about the smell, too…I’m not saying it rubs off on you or anything—if you get too close to him—but…” I let that hang in the air for a while.

“Ewwww!!!” says my daughter.

We sit in silence as she considers this, then she asks, “Is it true that if you eat a hamburger at McDonald’s it can make you a ree-tard?”

I laugh wholeheartedly at this one and give her a hug. I kiss her on the forehead reassuringly. “Ha. Ha. Ha. I don’t know where you get these ideas!”

I may or may not have planted that little nugget a few weeks ago, allowing her little friend Tiffany at ballet class to “overhear” it as I pretended to talk on my cell phone. I’ve been tracking this bit of misinformation like a barium meal as it worked its way through the kiddie underground—waiting, waiting for it to come out the other side—and it’s finally popping up now. Bingo.

The CIA calls this kind of thing “Black Propaganda,” and it’s a sensible, cost-effective countermeasure, I believe, to the overwhelming superiority of the forces aligned against us.

I vividly recall a rumor about rat hairs in Chunky candies when I was a kid. It swept across schoolyards nationwide—this in pre-Internet days—and had, as I remember it, a terrible effect on the company’s sales. I don’t know where the rumor started. And it was proven to be untrue.

I’m not suggesting anybody do anything so morally wrong and unquestionably illegal.

I’m just sayin’.

Posting calorie information is, according to a recent New York Times article, not working. America’s thighs get ever wider. Type-2 diabetes is becoming alarmingly common among children.

It is repugnant, in principle, to me—the suggestion that we legislate against fast food. We will surely have crossed some kind of terrible line if we, as a nation, are infantilized to the extent that the government has to step in and take the Whoppers right out of our hands. It is dismaying—and probably inevitable. When we reach the point that we are unable to raise a military force of physically fit specimens—or public safety becomes an issue after some lurid example of large person blocking a fire exit—they surely shall.

A “fat tax” is probably on the horizon as well—an idea that worked with cigarettes.

First they taxed cigarettes to the point of cruelty. Then they pushed smokers out of their work spaces, restaurants, bars—even, in some cases, their homes. After being penalized, demonized, marginalized, herded like animals into the cold, many—like me—finally quit.

I don’t want my daughter treated like that.

I say, why wait?

I don’t think it’s right or appropriate that we raise little girls in a world where freakishly tiny, anorexic actresses and bizarrely lanky, unhealthily thin models are presented as ideals of feminine beauty. No one should ever feel pressured to conform to that image.

But neither do I think it’s “okay” to be unhealthily overweight. It is not an “alternative lifestyle choice” or “choice of body image” if you need help to get out of your car.

I think constantly about ways to “help” my daughter in her food choices—without bringing the usual pressures to bear. “Look how nice and thin that Miley Cyrus is” are not words that shall leave my lips, as such notions might drive a young girl to bulimia, bad boyfriends, and, eventually, crystal meth.

So, when I read of a recent study that found that children are significantly more inclined to eat “difficult” foods like liver, spinach, broccoli—and other such hard-to-sell “but-it’s-good-for-you” classics—when they are wrapped in comfortingly bright packages from McDonald’s, I was at first appalled, and then…inspired.

Rather than trying to co-opt Ronald’s all-too-effective credibility among children to short-term positive ends, like getting my daughter to eat the occasional serving of spinach, I could reverse-engineer this! Use the strange and terrible powers of the Golden Arches for good—not evil!

I plan to dip something decidedly unpleasant in an enticing chocolate coating and then wrap it carefully in McDonald’s wrapping paper. Nothing dangerous, mind you, but something that a two-and-a-half-year-old will find “yucky!”—even upsetting—in the extreme. Maybe a sponge soaked with vinegar. A tuft of hair. A Barbie head. I will then place it inside the familiar cardboard box and leave it—as if forgotten—somewhere for my daughter to find. I might even warn her, “If you see any of that nasty McDonald’s…make sure you don’t eat it!” I’ll say, before leaving her to it. “Daddy was stupid and got some chocolate…and now he’s lost it…” I might mutter audibly to myself before taking a long stroll to the laundry room.

An early, traumatic, Ronald-related experience can only be good for her.