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I'd like to give Burger King a Whopper...

From the files of "Are You Fucking Kidding Me?", comes the latest advertising campaign from Burger King. I heard about this a few days ago, but had no idea just how royally screwed up it was until I actually saw it:br /br /object width="480" height="295"param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/xp6nTooK1wohl=enfs=1"/paramparam name="allowFullScreen" value="true"/paramparam name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"/paramembed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/xp6nTooK1wohl=enfs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="480" height="295"/embed/objectbr /br /It's really amazing to see everything that is so horribly wrong with our American consumerist culture in one defining moment. This really has it all - cultural insensitivity, jingoistic arrogance and toxic dumping. I mean - the country is in the middle of a a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/07/17/AR2008071701462.html"rising obesity epidemic/a and Burger King is forcing its crappy food on indigenous people for the sole purpose of proving... that McDonalds sucks. How about this? Both hamburgers suck, and people shouldn't eat either of them. Where's that fucking taste test? br /br /Not to mention the whole video has an air of "oh, look at the silly brown people in their funny costumes trying to eat a hamburger. Aren't they so... cute?" To hell with it - it's not "culturally insensitive", it's fucking racist. It's like something that would be on the Chappelle Show span style="font-weight:bold;"as a joke/span. br /br /Did I mention the video is called span style="font-style:italic;"The Whopper Virgins/span? Yes, because if it wasn't already dehumanizing enough, there's now a sexual context in which Burger King is somehow "devirginizing" these people. There's a whole new level of the wonderful implications that go along with that term. br /br /Doesn't everyone dream that their first time will be with Burger King? br /br /(If you can't tell by now, I am actually getting angrier and angrier as I write this.)br /br /If all that wasn't enough, the worst part of all this was outlined by Tom Hundley of the Chicago Tribune:br /br /blockquote"While [Burger King] spent millions of dollars happily tracking down people with no 'hamburger awareness' the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations has to go begging because they can only get one-thirtieth of the money they need to rebuild the developing world's shattered food systems," said Food First, an advocacy group that fights hunger./blockquotebr /br /Uh... yeah. br /br /Incidentally, Stacy Peralta, who directed this nonsense, has done some great documentaries - namely, a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0275309"Dogtown and Z-Boys/a and the equally excellent a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0389326/"Riding Giants/a, but he really should be ashamed to be involved in such a horrible, horrible campaign. This isn't "selling out" - this is selling your soul, and there is a difference.

Full post as published by Law and Letters on December 17, 2008 (boomark / email).