Jihad vs. McWorld - Benjamin R. Barber [79]
McWorld as a Theme Park
THERE IS NO better emblem of the transformation of reality by commerce and the displacement of the actively imaginative reader by the passively receptive spectator than the commercial theme parks that increasingly dot our landscape. They are temples to modernity, our secular churches in which the values of play, health, fun, travel, leisure, and the American way are sanctified in a painless liturgy that draws together entertainment, information, and an effortless hint of instruction. The themes in McWorld’s theme parks are the themes of McWorld.
I mean to use theme park generically, not just to allude to the Six Flags parks and Walt Disney Worlds and MGM Studios, but to highway commercial strips, malls, and chain eateries. There is a sense in which McDonald’s is a theme park: a food chain featuring its own Mickey Mouse (Ronald McDonald), its miniature nonmechanical rides in the “playlands” outside, its commercial tie-ins with celebrities like Michael Jordan and Larry Bird and with hit films like Dances with Wolves, Batman Returns, and Jurassic Park, and its pervasive claim on American lifestyle—all of which make it far more than just a fast food restaurant chain.20 Its annual report rightly focuses on the role of “one of the strongest brand names in the world, with instant recognition” as it seeks to position itself as “the leading foodservice retailer in the global consumer marketplace.”21 It opens as many as one thousand new franchises each year,22 and can boast that one of its newer branches overlooks the intersection in Tiananmen Square where a seeming eon ago a young man captured the imagination of the world by stopping a column of tanks dead in its clanking tracks. It spends $1.4 billion a year on advertising, and projects a planetary capacity of forty-two thousand restaurants (only fifteen thousand built so far).23
Jim Cantalupo, president of international operations, explains how McDonald’s “is more than just price. It’s the whole experience which our customers have come to expect from McDonald’s. It’s the drive-thrus … it’s the Playlands … it’s the smile at the front counter … it’s all those things … the experience.”24 Brand names sell an experience, and the experience becomes the defining attribute of a food marketplace that is also a theater of consumption and a theme park of lifestyles. The experience sold must be more than just a quick lunch. Fast food fits life in the computer world’s fast lane, the bites and the bytes propelling our bodies and minds through the day at breakneck pace, not a second to lose. Eat fast and serve the business world’s god of efficiency. Serve yourself and reduce the number of jobs available. Stand up and eat or take it with you, and transform eating from a social into a solitary activity. Switch (in Eastern countries) from rice or vegetables to meat and increase fat intake, medical costs, and the pressure on agriculture (growing grain to feed cattle that go into the beef we eat is radically inefficient, using up to ten times more grain than is consumed by humans who make grain their diet). The McDonald’s way of eating is a way of life: an ideology as theme park more intrusive (if much more subtle) than any Marx or Mao ever contrived.25 The theme park metaphor rests on the theme park reality.
Theme parks have their origin in the great world’s fairs and industrial expositions that, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, were intended as Enlightenment advertisements for a better future by the people who were converting science into industry and technology into commerce for an already globalizing market. In his vivid essay