Maybe it’s an esoteric reflection on the quality of the comestible fare on offer in the burger joint or maybe the waitress was tardy in supplying the required “Big Mac” in greater haste .Who knows? Whatever it was that prompted one diner to bite out a piece of his fellow-diner’s ear in a McDonald’s in Donegall Place in Belfast ,last Thursday, is a statement of some savage degree.Who knew that hunger could drive city -dwellers to cannibalistic acts in the heart of plenty?Apparently a 24 year old man has beeen arrested for grevious bodily harm and another has been left without part of his ear.Is civilisation already crumbling? I never could dine in McDonalds, myself ; I’m not a big fan, but I doubt that I would take my hunger to this kind of extreme action. Maybe it was a critique on the quality of the food.A man like that , with that kind of appetite really should learn the art of the five minute medium rare steak.It would save him a whole lot of bother.
Elsewhere it has been a busy week in the wake of Minister Jim Wells being swept under the carpet to join all the other carpet -trolls ….like the story of the new-build, illegal bonfire on land already proposed for a school sports day .Apparently these new -fangled gas- burner substitute bonfire jobs haven’t got the same visceral blaze of the good old -fashioned, mattress, rubber tyre and pallet jobs that have sustained the celebratory pagan ritual in the past. I wonder will the already- granted public funding grant be kept or will the local council get off its knees and clear this lot of carcinogenic rubbish up before the children’s sports day..
Then there’s the Red Sky Scandal which slips off the tongue so busily. It’ll lie there in the dark gathering fluffballs aplenty. Apparently our man Nelson McCausland can peer owlishly and myopically with his butter -wouldn’t melt in my Ulster-Scots mind… and escape any sanction for any housing Executive jiggery -pokery …because….well because he can’t be touched. Now isn’t that a novel idea . It seems to mean that there is no mechanism in place to sanction anyone caught with their fingers in the cookie jar.Oh …we can catch them .we can poke them and laugh at them …but we can’t fine them, ban them or otherwise lock the buggers in the stocks for the peasants to throw rotten fruit at. It could only happen in Norneverland …the Land that Time Forgot.
Of course Our Wee SammyWilson could be relied on to come out eyes ablaze with venom, to squeal that it was all a political witch hunt and was all politically motivated .What game did Sammy think he was playing besides a political one ?…Snakes and Ladders, maybe?
A wry article Pk and put with verve. Tax cuts for multinationals will include of course the Mac Donald’s sprawling franchise,-Progress report…Nil.
A scoundrel of a multinational corporation if ever one was to be opened to the light. Mac D preside over every cheating, exploitative, murderous, Machiavellian move right down to the assassination of trade unionised, or eco-indignant indigenous peoples who see the Earth’s leafy lung fall to the ever whirring chainsaws to make ever more land available for Mac Cows.
The list goes on as I’m sure many people know. The illusions of capitalism, and with Big Macs homely sell, of a congenial place of harmony….
That some fella’s ear was substituted for a Mac Burger, was indeed unfortunate, and we can certainly wish the victim a speedy recovery, and hope his ear salvageable.
In the States a couple of years back, a man who lived opposite a Mac Donald’s, resented the fact that he as white Caucasian could not often afford to eat there. Sadly, bullets are as cheap as chips in ASDA over there, Sorry, I mean Walmart who own ASDA, so he shared his miserable exclusion from this American price of the home spun yarn. Tragically, patrons, and poorly paid staff alike suffered from this man’s fracture from Reason, or feelings of disenfranchisement.
Is madness endemic in this confused selling of illusions in ever greater concentrations? Eric Fromme, in “The Sane Society” argues adeptly zi believe, that conformity demand subjugation of Reason, and the disgruntlement springing from Alienated person as consumer, can results in most potent psychological pathologies. Roll on tax cuts to multinationals say we. James Connolly may have had a thing or two he might suggest as an alternative way of living, distant from this Brave New World of supersize vaacuousness, and in the case of Mac Donald’s, junk food mass produced to fill a different type of hunger that a patron might not be fully aware of. My older son when younger, used to ask me to buy Coco pops. “But you didn’t eat them, as you didn’t like them when I did my son”….The powers of illusion in advertising are strong indeed, and strongest still in the most useless of junk.
Isn’t our wee corner of the world full of wonder, Francis? Where else would you get the like of it?
Its the centre of the Known Universe Paddykool. Sure why would we need explore wider when a microcosm of the while shebang, lies in the nutshell here. To get to the kernel though….its a tough nut to crack.