July 26, 2012

• VOR: Have Your Chick-Fil-A and Eat it?

  

  I love the internet. I've always believed this marvelous invention, (which wasn't around when I was a young man) could one day be a pathway to enlightenment, could open level headed discussions amongst a variety of disparate people, and could hopefully help to spur mankind, usually so stubborn and naively single minded into mass tolerance and understanding. A sort of digital "free press" filled with the idealism and the promise of mass communication for a true global community.

  I love the internet. I've always been quite humored by the fact that "truth and bullshit" can settle side by side without any seeming irony in the wilds of cyberspace. Even though we've come pretty far along with cyberpublishing, and we can marvel at a medium more powerful and beautiful than simple "television", containing wondrous graphics, and eye popping webpage layouts, we are even more overcome with advertisements (with wondrous graphics and eye popping webpage layouts) now targeted to our every seeming want and need. There's more "information" than ever, and more distractions as well. The global "Algonquin's Table" I envisioned the internet "could" be never happened.

  Truth and bullshit still sit side by side, however. And sometimes when I really stop to think about it, the age of information has become a deluge of facts, hearsay, and lies, with no cohesive analysis or context unless one is truly committed to making an attempt to find it.

  From where I sit this evening, one of the more troubling bits of "information" on my personal "scanner" is the ongoing violence which has been happening in the fair city of Anaheim, California, a few miles south of where I live. There have been clashes, looting, and rioting in the streets for most of the week, following a couple of police shootings over the weekend. Up to 1000 protesters were involved, and 24 were arrested. This must just be a local news story. The folks at Disney probably don't think it's too important for tourism if everybody on the internet thinks they're going to walk into a riot on the way to Cars Land. I'm overemphasising, of course, but you know what I mean. This is just not a "trending" item on the internet.

  What I seem to see all over the place is a big fight over some remarks the CEO of fast food joint Chick-Fil-A made about marriage. Even on Xanga, I've read entries where people are REALLY UPSET over this latest story du jour.

  The brouhaha, which so far has not involved anyone being killed (except the poor chickens with the bad luck to be a part of CEO Dan Cathy's extended family) or hurt, is over an interview which, had it occurred "pre internet" would not have made a dent in anyone's personal news cycle. I will admit, until a couple of minutes ago (truthfully, about two hours) I hadn't an idea what this was about, and didn't care. I don't care now, but after a few informed clicks of my mouse, I know what's going on, and why it's important to some. The Voice of Reason tells me it's somewhat ridiculous to be "trending" at all.

  The riots (they aren't really riots by the way, not like soccer riots in other parts of the world) which to me is a more troubling story, should be trending. The reasons why the Chick-Fil-A story is trending is because it can stand in for someone's agenda, and therien lies the rub. I'll get to the facts in a moment.  If gays were tearing down West Hollywood, maybe I'd see mention of it on Yahoo's Today's Highlights ticker on my internet home page. The protest in Anaheim involves people the media keeps calling "Latinos" (a dreaded term amongst Mexican Americans, Salvadorian Americans, Chilean Americans, you get the idea) whose children were killed by policemen. The L.A. area has a long history of trigger happy cops. It's an election year in America. And the Chick-Fil-A story boils down to "Christians vs. Gays". Always a good battle to stir up the blogosphere. The "mainstream media" now quotes from the blogosphere. Journalism drowned a long time ago in the deluge of information on the internet.

  The facts are these. Chick-Fil-A is a company which sells 380 calorie chicken sandwiches. The company has no political views. They just want you to "eat mor chikin (sp.)" They always had a gal in a short skirt giving away free samples in the Del Amo mall years ago when I shopped there. Some people have questioned how the chickens are treated. It's fast food. It's a business. They get their chickens from Pilgrim's Pride. These aren't free range chickens. But I digress. In an interview on July 2nd in North Carolina's Biblical Recorder newspaper, and later published online in the Baptist Press, CEO Dan Cathy simply stated his views on traditional marriage. After a few days in the 24 hour news cycle, his "message" is being interpreted as "anti gay." At a time when roughly 50% of America could be thought of as championing "Christian values" and the other half championing gay rights, I guess it's not a stretch of the imagination to see why this small interview in a regional church newspaper has become the kindling for the latest battle in the Christians vs. Gays war. Now celebrities and sports figures are tweeting their support, or lack of it. Kermit the frog has jumped ship and the Henson company won't be spokesfrogs for the chain anymore. (Frogs don't usually snack on chicken, by the way)

  The mayors of Boston and Chicago don't want any Chick-Fil-As in their towns. Everyone is throwing bits of chicken into everyone else's face. It's a chicken fricassee  of almost Biblical proportions. Possibly most of the people "weighing" in on the subject at this late date are hopelessly clueless about the facts. The "pro gay" forces will protest against Chick-Fil-A for being intolerant and outdated. The Republican Righteous and the Christian Coalition (I'm making these names up, but hey, this is the internet) will speak out about how "traditional values" are being trounced by those wacky liberals. Christian news organizations (and possibly Fox News, but this is just conjecture on my part) are already calling for all the faithful to boycott the boycott by going right out and digging in to those fatty cholesterol filled chicken sandwiches!

  When I listen to the Voice of Reason, it tells me that no matter what the facts of any argument are in these cyberspecific times, opposing parties are going to pounce on anything that can be considered as fodder for their own misbegotten arguments. Dan Cathy believes in the "traditional" union of a man and a woman as marriage. I held this view up until a couple of years ago. I changed my mind. (I was a member of the Baptist church and I wanted to be a preacher at one time in my life. I'll just throw that out.) I'm sure somebody on the internet is writing possibly right now that if men can marry men, and women can marry women, then the (il)logical next step must be bestiality. People will want to marry their pets. "At what point will this madness stop?" they are possibly asking.

  So what if Dan Cathy believes in what he believes? Chick-Fil-A is just a fast food joint, not a political lynchpin. I won't be eating there any time soon, but I'm watching my weight. I don't eat a lot of meat, even chicken, partly because of how they treat those poor animals in order to fatten them up. Frankly, it makes me sick. I mean, really sick. But that's beside the point. And so is any brouhaha raised over something that someone at some point in history could have said in a regional newspaper or magazine, before the age of Twitter and clueless blogwriters endlessly feeding on any bits of chicken they can process for their own means and agendas.

  For some reason, I'm reminded of a little "sales pitch" I used to give back when I was in retail management in the nursery trade. We used to sell steer manure and chicken manure, which cost a lot more. When customers would ask about the difference, I'd go on and on about why chicken manure was better all around for nurturing their plants and flowers. I could wax poetic about the positive results they'd obtain when they purchased more expensive chicken manure. I always ended the spiel by saying "There you have it. Chicken shit is what you should be using on your garden, and bullshit is what I've been feeding you for the last ten minutes."

  Well, gotta go and read about riots in Anaheim. I hope when you listen to the bullshitters, and read the various tweets, retweets, and detritus of our beloved internet, you don't listen to the obvious mistruths and fallacies, but do a little more digging into the chickenshit and bullshit and hear the Voice of Reason.

   

  Michael F. Nyiri, poet, philosopher, fool

   

  EDIT: 7/27/12 7:00am pdt. According to the O.C. Register, cops "opened fire on a burglary suspect" last night. That's all that seems to be known at this point in time. The Times L.A. Now blog posted an entry last night which states there is some mobilization online involving protests of the Anaheim police shootings. Protests can ignite pretty easily into rioting. BTW, for those interested: HERE is a Voice of Reason column I wrote about guns and shootings in the Los Angeles area back in early 2011. Tonight I'll be watching the opening ceremony of the 2012 Olympics and tomorrow I think I may be up in downtown (L.A., not Anaheim) taking pictures of the just opened Grand Park. (before any more Occupy L.A. protestors ruin it like they did City Hall's lawn last year. MFN/ppf

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