Taki's Mag

In politics as in life, the squeaky wheel usually gets the grease, but the other three wheels are finally telling the squeaky wheel to shut the hell up.

Fast food and public protests typically hold as much appeal for me as rectal cancer, yet last week I simultaneously exposed myself to fast food and a public protest with a pair of visits to the local Chick-fil-A franchise.

I popped in last Wednesday at around 9PM to find the restaurant still overflowing with customers like muffin-top fat rolls over tight polyester trousers because it was Chick-fil-A Appreciation Day. Many of the patrons were obese, red-cheeked, flat-topped, checker-shirted, effusively wholesome Southern peckerwoods, which is atypical for the neighborhood and suggests a smidgen of Astroturfing from the pro-Christian, anti-gay-marriage crowd.

On Friday at around 9AM I wolfed down a spicy chicken biscuit while anticipating pink hordes of French-kissing homosexuals. They’d threatened to stage a gay “National Same-Sex Kiss Day” counterprotest to Appreciation Day, which was itself a counterprotest of an initially threatened mass national boycott of the fast-food chain due to its CEO’s soul-scaldingly hateful comments supporting the radical extremist notion of “traditional marriage.” But during my tenure there Friday morning, there were no gay couples outside kissing and the restaurant was relatively empty.

By most accounts, Chick-fil-A Appreciation Day was a rousing success. The company claims it racked up record sales. By contrast, the gay kiss-in was generally deemed a flop.

Even more encouraging, a loathsomely self-satisfied super-douche who harassed a longsuffering Chick-fil-A drive-thru worker and posted the results on YouTube found his feeble attempt at shaming drowned in a vicious backlash that cost him his job.

I invest zero emotion in the ongoing gay-marriage brouhaha. I question why the state claims the power to authorize any kind of marriage, as well as why an issue that directly affects—at MOST—one or two percent of the population has such enduring “legs” in the news cycle year after year.

But I find comfort in the fact that what William Safire described as the “nattering nabobs of negativity” were ruthlessly smacked down last week by what Richard Nixon called the “silent majority,” a term he ironically seems to have lifted from JFK.

Maybe the sun is finally setting on the Era of Tantrum Politics. Maybe it won’t be so easy anymore to body-slam individuals and businesses to the mat and force them to tap out lest they be shamed and shouted and glitter-bombed and boycotted and extorted and guilt-tripped over the possibility that some hyper-sensitive professional loafer will have their fragile, glass-orchid feelings hurt.

At least that’s how things seem to be trending.

The squeaky wheels started squealing for less oil in the wake of 2010’s Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill, as Hollywood’s pelicanophiles and the rock world’s shrimp-lovers called for a boycott of British Petroleum. In typical displays of leftist compassion and kindness, BP workers were routinely harassed as the co-stalkers of Big Oil and Western Civilization sought to slay the corporate oil giant whose neglect had torn apart many waterfowl and crustacean families in the Gulf Coast.

The end result two years later? Shares of BP’s stock are currently selling for 43% more than they were during the frenzied sell-off directly after the oil spill.

Corn-knurling indigenous peoples threw violent public hissy-fits in 2010 after Arizona passed a radical, hateful, bigoted, extremist law touting the insane right-wing idea that people should be able to produce ID when they’re being questioned in connection with a routine crime investigation. Bean swastikas were smeared on government buildings. Mayors of “sanctuary cities” and pop-music performers threatened to boycott the entire state, gloating that Arizona’s tourism industry would be irreparably damaged and THEN those rednecks would be sorry for trying to resist being colonized by Mexico.

Unfortunately for the boycotters, this round of lucha libre went to the rednecks. Arizona tourism’s monetary haul increased 5.4% in 2011 compared to 2010, and several other states were encouraged to prepare bills similar to Arizona’s law.

In early 2011, Wisconsin’s overpaid, underperforming public-union workers stormed the State Capitol like 100,000 fat men in diapers, comparing Governor Scott Walker to Hitler and threatening to poop on everything in sight unless they received their colic medicine and a nice warm ba-ba filled with infant formula. They were even able to force a recall election, certain they’d bring down Boy Hitler and his sinister, teacher-hating, puppy-stabbing corporate string-pullers. They believed in People Power and knew the people would speak out against this savage injustice.

Well, the people spoke, supporting Walker by an even bigger margin than when they elected him governor in 2010.

Last September, Mongoloid hordes of sheltered brats who’d recently graduated with useless degrees in Postmodern Deconstruction of Mesoamerican Pottery took to the nation’s public parks to make lentil stew while stewing with misguided resentment that others had made wiser career choices. They claimed affiliation with “the 99%” until they realized that the bottom percentiles of that 99% weren’t quite so privileged, nor so schooled in Cultural Marxist bumper-sticker sloganeering, and that such elements were also prone to raping and mooching and screaming and stealing your drugs.

Less than a year later, Occupy Wall Street occupies nothing. Canadian magazine Adbusters, which got the whole ball o’ dung rolling, had also sponsored a “Buy Nothing Day” last Black Friday. Yet despite the wretched economy and the best efforts of Adbusters’ graphic designers, Black Friday notched record sales last year.

“Bring me Rush Limbaugh’s fat, pill-popping head on a jumbo-sized silver platter,” demanded the barking vaginas and the neutered white knights of the women’s movement earlier this year after the adipose, cigar-chomping “shock jock” and “hate speaker” suggested that if you were having so much sex that you couldn’t even afford your own birth control, you might be a slut. The unblinking remote-controlled Soros serfs at Media Matters and other gal-friendly proglodytes called for a boycott of Limbaugh’s show, rubbing their tiny bionic hands together with glee as advertisers began to drop him.

Limbaugh’s ratings initially soared as a result of all the attention, then when they gradually fluttered back to normal levels, the leftist punditocracy dishonestly depicted this as a ratings decline. But from at least one account, Limbaugh’s ratings are now higher than they were before the scandal and at least one of his advertisers is nursing the self-inflicted financial wounds from their cowardly decision to run away from controversy.

I call for an immediate moratorium on all boycotts.

A generation ago the militant queers insisted, “Leave your government out of our bedroom.” Now it’s my turn to say, “Leave your sodomy out of my chicken sandwich.” Let the record show that I found it impossible to determine the sexuality of the two meals I ate at Chick-fil-A, even though one of them was a salad.

And that’s how it should be. Not everything is political, so put down your dirty hypodermics and quit injecting politics into everything. As Sigmund Freud’s kid brother Eddie Freud said many moons ago, “Sometimes a chicken sandwich is just a chicken sandwich.”

Image courtesy of Shutterstock

 

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