Pond Scum: I Name the Guilty Bearded Men
By Steve Finbow
-------------------------------------
As I left the hospital last Thursday, after a routine check-up – no, they were not removing my foot from my mouth, nor had I shot myself in said foot – I passed a Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet. This particular one is not very big; I’d say it was about the size of Gertrude Stein's coffin. It was 12:15pm; it was jammed to the roosters with builders, nurses, doctors, and even some hungry patients. The day before, I'd finished reading Haruki Murakami's Kafka on the Shore, in which Colonel Sanders appears as a spectral pimp avatar. The following Sunday, a Salon headline read 'Demand for KFC soaring in China.' Was the Colonel haunting me?
Art by Nicholas Allanac
He reminds me of a negative image of TC Boyle – white goatee not black, corpulent not svelte, producing tasteless crap not artful prose. My meetings over the years with the Colonel (well, his products) have always been calamitous. Bear with me while I list them, and apologies to the squeamish.
Camden Town, circa 1999: it is just before midnight and I’m drunk, hungry, and lazy. What's open? Kebab? No. Pizza? No. KFC? Hmm. OK. I order a chicken burger-type thing. While I wait, a group of lads who seem to have already consumed tomato and cheese pizzas, and done so through facial osmosis, verbally abuse me. I ignore them and pull out a book to read. I have found that reading in public is tantamount to taking my pants down and defecating in the open air and writing in public is equivalent to committing cunnilingus on my granny in the local Tesco. Satirical bon mots worthy of Swift, Voltaire, and Wilde come my way: ‘Poof!' 'Queer!' 'Wanker!' Now the bloody counter staff join in. 'Your ordure, sir!' 'What? Oh, my order. Thanks.' I take the warm bag and leave. Ten yards down the road and it still reeks of restaurant. The lads are carrying family-size buckets; actually, they are carrying Korean-family-size buckets. 'Shit.' I think. I up my pace. Something hits the back of my head. I look down – a chip, as we call them. Then another and another. I’m not going to run but I’m not going to wake up in the morning with fun-fry fever and cooking-oil contusions. So, what do I do? I get into a food fight and respond to their potato pot shots with a greasy grenade of my own. And then I run.
This is where it gets gruesome. 1989 or thereabouts: friend's house, friend's parents on holiday. Earlier, we’d ironed a felt football field to the dining room table; the glue beneath the mahogany veneer seeped through and made the miniature pitch a permanent fixture. I’m drunk and in charge of the record player (yes, record player – not gramophone). I've also eaten a tribe-size bucket of KFC. I’m leaning over the deck, shakily placing the needle on the opening grooves of Iggy & The Stooges' Raw Power. A sudden shudder shoots through my abdomen. I go cold. I go hot. I pull back. A frothing spurt of nearly-but-not-quite digested chicken, fries, coleslaw, and beer shoots across the deck and covers the immediate area in congealed Colonel Sanders.
Is this what is happening to KFC? Is its successful distribution, its coating of the world with its secret recipe, a metaphor for American imperialism? The Chinese boast more than 1,200 outlets and the menus pander (arf) to local tastes by incorporating bamboo shoots and lotus roots. Is this a metaphor for American culture as a whole? In an earlier Pond Scum, Mutatis Mutandis, I argued that American cultural, technological, and political hegemony is now circumscribed and that America is inward looking. KFC's and McDonald's popularity is declining in America. Does this point to a re-examination of America's self-image? KFC and McDonald’s are still popular abroad. Is the world caught in a time lag, still seeing KFC, McDonalds, Microsoft, and Coca-Cola as expressions of freedom and democracy? Or is it that other cultures welcome outside influence? The UK's favourite food has changed from fish and chips to chicken tikka masala – an Anglo-Indian hybrid.
Is America resistant to outside influence instead of being a creation of outside influence? And is the world open to American ideas and not just fast food and computer systems? Will these two cultural signifiers be America's legacy to the world by the end of the 21st century? Chicken zingers rather than free elections. Windows 2026 rather than self-determination. Does the world recognise America for anything other than fast food, acceleration culture, and quick-response teams? What is the special recipe for American culture and its expansion into and influence on the rest of the world? Let’s look at America’s 11 special ingredients:
Young. Fun. Simple. Replicable. Bland. Short-lived.
Disposable. Instant. Tacky. Narcissistic. Violent.
Maybe I’m paranoid. Maybe like the character Kafka Tamura in Murakami’s novel I mistrust a cultural icon resembling a more corpulent and cheerful Uncle Sam. Maybe the spread of KFC around the world is not malevolent. But there have been other KFCs – Kentucky Fried Citizens – in Vietnam, Cuba, Laos, the Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Cambodia, Oman, Chile, Angola, Iran, El Salvador, Lebanon, Honduras, Grenada, Bolivia, Libya, the Virgin Islands, the Philippines, Panama, Liberia, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Kuwait, Somalia, Yugoslavia, Bosnia, Haiti, Croatia, Zaire, Albania, Sudan, Afghanistan, Yemen, Macedonia, and Iraq… again…
Country-sized armed conflict, with a side order of fear fries, oppression coleslaw, and death cola is America’s greatest export. Do you know what it feels like? Let me tell you a little story.
I’m seven years old. It’s mid-December and I’m waiting in line in Macy’s. I have a date with Santa Claus. Frolicking amongst life-size Elastigirls, Frozones and Edna Modes, cuddly dinosaurs and puppy dogs, in the snowy mountain boxes of Microsoft product, I spy George W, Dick and Donald dressed as elves. Condoleezza’s looking hot as Mrs. Claus – my dad can’t keep his hands off the sticky pink candy walking sticks. My brow is tingling with anticipation. The other children are smiling and laughing. I’m next. I’m next. Santa beckons. I stand before him, my hands clasped behind my back.
Santa: What’s your name, young fellow-my-lad?
Me: Ahmed Paul Jean Hans Jose Odongo Smith.
Santa: And have you been a good boy?
Me: Yes, Santa Claus.
Santa
parts his moustache, fondles his beard, throws back his be-beavered head
and I’m waiting for a jolly “Ho-ho-ho!” But, no. A frog-throated,
Martian-coloured, throbbing gristle of a loogie lands smack in the middle
of my innocent mush. And that’s what it feels like. It feels like
the world is on America’s naughty list.
Click here to read previous Pond Scum columns.
-------------------------------------
Steve Finbow writes out of London, England. He has worked for the poet Allen Ginsberg, the writer Victor Bockris, and the artist Richard Long. His fiction, essays, and short plays appear, or will appear, in Eyeshot, 3am Magazine, Yankee Pot Roast, uber, Locus Novus, InkPot, Dicey Brown, The Guardian Online, and Pindeldyboz. He is currently working on a novel (Yeah, right). He can be contacted here.
©
2005 Me Three