Sometime in 1998, a man entered a McDonald’s establishment in Santa Monica. It was a sunny Wednesday, thirty-nine-cent hamburger day, and he purchased roughly one hundred burgers, loaded them into a large sac and exited the business. He then claimed one of the medians that separate east and westbound traffic on Santa Monica Boulevard as his own personal pitcher’s mound, and calmly unwrapping each individual burger, began to hurl them at full speed upon the windshields of passing motorists. He did not gently toss the sandwiches; he paused thoughtfully between pitches, maybe enjoying the swell of anticipation among the thousands of imaginary attendees of his mental stadium, wound up dramatically and whipped those fuckers like his career depended on it. It took nearly an hour before anyone summoned the courage to call the authorities, much less confront their burger-wielding assailant; he was a huge man, and most people in Los Angeles are afraid of everything. When the police arrived, the man made a gallant effort to fend them off, but sadly had exhausted his supply of beef-ammo after only a few additional fastballs and sliders, at least two of which impacted directly the well-kept uniform of Deputy Duane Fischer. The man was subsequently tazed and fell in a twitching undignified heap of yellow wrappers and ketchup.
For me, it was an act of greatness and of bravery, completely without supplication or compromise. It is not a thing which may be visited in one’s spare time, hung, framed, or purchased; he made both the media and the median his medium. It represents everything that is just and valuable in terrorism. He made the jackass anchors at KCAL-9, along with their viewing audience, his unwitting collaborators, and McDonald’s his official sponsor. And that he did not bother to call it art, or anything else, rendered the act all the more authentically artful. He did not cavort with hipster grad students throughout the interstices of “up-and-coming neighborhoods”, or kiss ass through crowds of nepotistic gallery owners, shamefully begging for an opportunity to show; he wordlessly took on the fucking LAPD with forty dollars-worth of burgers, and never asked for a thing in return.
In the present age, the bar could not be much lower; most people will applaud just about anything, so long as they are told that it is officially laudable. No one better understood this than that shit-slithering king of all modern hucksters, L. Ron Hubbard; the mark perceives value only in things or services for which he must pay an excessive fee. Visitors of museums would like to believe that their fifteen dollars was not pissed away viewing scores of innocuous trees stenciled in garish pastels or other sorts of inert shit that so closely resembles a Target commercial, and so suspend their critical faculties and content themselves with exchanging a few forced pleasantries concerning the neat uniformity of the collection, or struggling to unearth in the empty works a poignancy which simply is not there. Next time, sucker-punch the docent, demand an immediate refund and spend your fifteen dollars printing vinyl bumper stickers which read “My Son Butt-Fucked Your Honor Student”, and apply them liberally to the bumpers of strangers’ cars under cover of night.
And our hero did not need a cause, but only an occasion. He did not insulate himself behind a curtain of like-minded individuals shaking identical signs. Anyone can do that, and despite the unoriginality and evident uselessness of protest, most would maintain that because his little gesture lacked any direction or theme, it was of less value than if it were clearly conjoined to messages of vegetarianism, or anti-consumerism or anti-militarism. I do not agree. That his actions were so unwaveringly absurd, so obviously disconnected from the specificities of faction, association or even self-concern, place them squarely within the non-category of timeless art. In that act, he was bare and abandoned, and no one was at or even on his side. It is easy to petition on behalf of Tibetans, whales, and polar bears, or conversely against wars, the IMF, an imaginary New World Order, and so on. But it requires guts and grit maybe something like genius to hurl steaming dead animals at police officers. To be sure, those cows did not die in vain.
I'm not sure why McDonald's eventually discontinued thirty-nine cent hamburger Wednesdays. But I'd like to believe it had something to do with him.
