Thursday, August 5, 2004 |
22:58 - Subway's on thin ice—but it's holding
http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/?entry=12004_Subway_Mocks_9-11_in_Germany
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I saw this earlier today, and almost linked it, but something stopped me.
(CNSNews.com) - Picture this: a gigantic cheeseburger (with tomatoes and lettuce) slamming into two high-rise buildings, as cartoon characters run from the flaming ruins.
It’s clearly a takeoff on the 9/11 terror attacks on the World Trade Center, and according to the Virginia-based Center for Individual Freedom, the illustration appears on page 18 of a 30-page “food diary” distributed by Subway sandwich shops in Germany.
. . .
The new image shows that Subway’s advertising is “far more disturbing and anti-American than previously thought,” the Center for Individual Freedom said in a press release.
Outrageous! Making fun of 9/11 in order to sideswipe burger joints? Intolerable! I'm boycotting Subway and writing to their management!
...But hold on a minute here. I stopped short of this reaction; and what stopped me was the actual image in question:
"Clearly" a takeoff on 9/11? I don't think so. Yeah, I was outraged when I read the citation. And it's clear that Subway's German advertising does routinely seem to use condescension toward Americans as its stock in trade (Don't eat burgers! What, do you wanna end up like the Americans?). But this image stops well short of being a 9/11 parody. If anything, it's a "Godzilla"-meme iteration, and not a very skillful one at that. But if the artist had intended to evoke 9/11, he did a staggeringly incompetent job.
So I'm not going to be doing any boycotting of Subway. Particularly, as commenter Doctor Bean says:
Subway is a franchise. Each store is owned by some poor shmuck trying to make a living who pays Subway for the use of the name and the Subway stuff (like McDonald's). Subway does not own the individual stores. A boycott would just hurt the guy in your neighborhood who never heard of what's happening in Germany. Subway would still get his monthly franchise fee; they would lose nothing. Any action should be directed to the national company.
Subway's management should certainly hear about how we "Amis" feel about being characterized with an obese Statue of Liberty holding a burger and fries (I'm sure a giant statue of Michael Moore holding a lawsuit would be more appropriate anyway). But let's not go nuts and assume the Germans would flock to a restaurant that trades on 9/11-mocking imagery.
The French, though, are another story.
Anyway, I had a comment, myself:
Everybody, please pledge to look at the image in question before firing off the flame or enacting your boycott before lunchtime today. :)
I think this may be symptomatic of a larger tendency-- of people, even intelligent LGFers, to trust the quoting skills of the blogger so much that they think it's unnecessary to follow the link and see the whole story for themselves. While the bloggers in question may be in fact great at selecting what to quote, sometimes that's the problem: they become too good, and people assume that what's quoted is the entirety of what's interesting and actionable about the linked item.
I'm not saying Charles should change his linking-mostly-without-comment style. It's part of what makes LGF so demonstrably factual. But I'm saying, as a longtime LGF mostly-lurker and blogger, that it would behoove us all to add "read the original item before becoming outraged" to the list of things we do when a news story breaks, right along with "the 48-hour rule".
Yeah, I agree.
...Wait...
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