McDonald's Shows Its "Values"

Sadly. McDonald's is more concerned about repressing facts and maintaining a synthetic "image" than in letting truth be told. They fired an employee for releasing a video of a savage beating in a McDonald's restaurant. Obviously McDonald's policy is: pretend that their restaurants are a haven from the real world with McFood as a synthetic substitute for reality.

Here is a bit from an article by Maureen Dowd in the NY Times. I've bolded the key bit:

April is the cruelest month for Chrissy Lee Polis.

The 22-year-old stopped by the Rosedale, Md., McDonald’s, just east of Baltimore, last week.

Two patrons, an 18-year-old woman named Teonna Monae Brown and a 14-year-old girl, seemed to come out of nowhere and began ferally assaulting Polis.

The savage pair may have been disturbed at the prospect that Polis was transgender. “They said, ‘That’s a dude. That’s a dude. And she’s in the female bathroom,’ ” Polis told The Baltimore Sun.

The attackers spit on her, threw her on the floor, kicked her in the face and back, punched her in the nose, ripped her earrings out of her earlobes, dragged her by her hair across the restaurant and only stopped when she began to have an epileptic seizure and an older woman in a white track suit intervened.

A McDonald’s employee, who captured it all on his cellphone, was fired after his video went viral on YouTube.

Baltimore is the scene of multiple crimes:

• Sexual bigots savagely attack a transgendered woman because they didn't personally approve of this "lifestyle". (I'm waiting for people with perms and hair colouring to be beaten to a pulp by the Puritans who think this kind of cosmetic alteration insults God. In the good old days this got you into the stocks and I'm sure some are ready to put the offenders on faggots and set them afire so that the smoke of the offering can loft up to the heavens and please a most jealous God.)


• The good people of Baltimore who "witnessed" the assault acted more like Romans at the Coliseum watching a gladiatorial fight or Christians being fed to the lions. I'm surprised that the news report didn't identify whether the onlookers offered a thumbs up or thumbs down for the vicious beating.


• McDonald's management tops the list of infamy by deciding that fiction is more real at McDonalds that truth. If you dare show something inside their restaurant that undermines the corporate "image" you get fired. Truth be damned. It is the burnished image that counts.

I find this bit comical:

The suspects have been charged with assault and the Baltimore County state’s attorney office is determining whether it classifies as a hate crime.

I wonder what qualifies as a "hate" crime in this county if this beating doesn't. I can only guess that Baltimore county officials are "hard at work" trying to figure out what "policy position" they should take. On the one hand you have bigots beating somebody to a bloody pulp. But on the other hand, I guess there are just so many transgendered beatings in this county that it is hard to decide if this one is "special" and should be treated as a hate crime, or is just one of any number of run-of-the-mill beat the gays, beat the transgendered, beat the mentally retarded, beat the blacks, beat the foreigner, beat the homeless crimes that go on in that blighted part of the world. It must be tough to pick out "hate" crimes when you have so many to choose from. Right?

The good news from Maryland is that this story helps announce "open season" on beatings:

A week before the attack, Maryland’s Senate shelved a measure extending anti-discrimination protections to people who openly change their gender identity even though, as The Sun editorialized, “It would have sent a powerful signal that transgender people are not fair game for bigots.”

Wonderful. The legislators in Maryland have decided that it is discrimination if you beat up the handicapped and mentally retarded or the homeless, but it isn't a crime if you beat up the transgendered. I guess that since Michael Vick is out of the dog fighting business, maybe the more "progressive" elements of the Baltimore business community figure they can attract tourists to watch the transgendered beatings. Maybe move these from McDonald's to a bigger arena, sell tickets, and put Baltimore on the map as a tourist "destination" for non-hate crime beatings. I can see that the legislators are going to be busy trying to figure out that since transgendered beatings don't qualify as a "hate" crime, what else can they add to the mix to make for a more exciting offering to attract tourists. Maybe beatings for midgets or fly in Finns from Europe that can be put into a ring and beaten to a pulp to excite the tourists. The possibilities are endless!