While reading Jean
Comaroff’s paper on the Politics of Convinction I couldn’t shake the ghost of a
passage in Robert M Pirsig’s Zen and the
Art of Motor Cycle Maintenance. The passage goes as follows:
“You go through a heavy industrial
area of a large city and there it all is, the technology. In front of it are
high barbed wire fences, locked gates, signs saying NO TRESPASSING, and beyond,
through sooty air, you see ugly strange shapes of metal and brick whose purpose
is unknown, and whose masters you will never see. What it’s for you do not
know, and why it’s there, there is no one to tell, and so all you can feel is
alienated, estranged, as though you didn’t belong there. Who owns and
understands this doesn’t want you around. All this technology has made you a
stranger in your own land.”(Pirsig; 1976:16)
It was this idea
of alienation from something so present in one’s society that really struck me.
We never really think about how the structure and means of production are
alienating – unless you read a lot of Marx. And I came to focus on the fast
food industry and in particular about fast food’s being served with messages of
the Lord on its packaging. And the connection between the known and the
alienating force of the fast food industry. Processed food that bears no
resemblance to a home cooked meal, or even the thing which it is supposed to represent. If you have
ever watched the movie Clerks 2 and seen a processed egg, which comes in the
shape of a large polony roll, you will know what I’m talking about. There is
something unnatural about it, yet you still eat it, but hate the fact that you
are eating it. You know you shouldn’t, but it is convenient. Right there all
the time, 24 hours a day 7 days a week. And you hate it, in a sense it
alienates you from yourself with your love hate relationship with it. And then
it started coming in religious wrappers as Comoroff puts it “mass-merchandised
hamburgers now come wrapped in biblical homilies.” (Comoroff 2009; 18)
Two thoughts occurred at this point in the
text for me, firstly Comoroff’s point that religion had started using the means
of capitalism to spread its word. This was nothing new, driving past Rhema
Church on a regular basis you cannot help but be overwhelmed by their massive
sign board slamming some message of faith into your brain whether you want it or
not. But perhaps the extent that it is happening in the states is on a far more
worrying scale as to make it seem like a cultural phenomenon to be examined.
The second idea was this: Do those slogans of faith on one’s burger wrappers
dealienate one from their processed food by putting something familiar on the
face of an alienating product? Instead of thinking about the grossness of what
one is about to eat, all the factory farming, deforestation, and general making
into machinery that those employed by fast food establishments have to suffer,
do people instead get distracted and think rather about their love or hate of
religion? Or perhaps if God loves these burgers I can love them too? Seeing as
I have not encountered this phenomena in South Africa, yet, I could not say
from personal experience. But it seems like a canny means of shaking off the
preconceived negative connotations that are attached to fast foods - by
replacing them with positive messages of faith.
I guess at the
end of it you really have to ask yourself “What would Jesus eat?”
References
·
Comaroff, Jean. 2009. “The politics of
Convivtion: Faith on the neoliberal Frontier.” Social Analysis 53(1):17-38
·
Pirsig, Robert. M. 1976. “Zen and the
Art of Motor Cycle Maintenance.” Corgi Books: London
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