Want Fries With That?

French people are not against McDonald's. They are against the Bush administration," José Bové, the radical farmer and French presidential candidate, said in an interview.

How, HOW do you get to the point where you make something as meaningless as a retail outlet that is a vast sanitary improvement over the cruddy corner “Sandwicherie” an object of “philosophical” discussions, a bit of shorthand for a nation five times as populous that they refuse to understand, and a dagger of the mind?

Easy. Have an empty life, nothing to say, and let a unexplainable cancerous well of envy grow inside you that you actively ignore:

Last year, McDonald's sales in France grew by 8%, almost doubling its growth in American sales, which have also rebounded in recent years. Every 12 months, one out of two French people visit McDonald's at least once. Annually, they consume 22 million McDonald's salads, 60,000 tons of French fries, 32,000 tons of beef patties, 12,000 tons of chicken, and 600 million buns.

"We hate it and go to it. It's our paradox," a journalist for the French magazine Challenges, Alice Mérieux, said. "We're very anti-American in principle, but individually, if you're going to the movies and have to eat in 10 minutes, you go to McDonald's."

Things are truly hopeless when Merlin the Wizard Bové himself barely realizes that Mickey D’s predates (even “semioticly” in the French left’s banal tradition of illogic) the object of his weird fixation, George Bush.

It takes an infantile mind to associate a product, logo, or fast food joint for that matter with the characterized culture of a whole society. Nonetheless, a culture so obsessed with touting its’ own ubiquity of intellectualism is reduced to being blinkered by just that. To do otherwise just wouldn’t be simple enough, I guess.

-H/T to Valerie