Progressive trigger warnings are all fun and games until they take it too far and truly jump the shark. Brace yourselves for the most unintentionally hilarious headline of 2018 to date:
That’s certainly one way to describe a popular chicken joint making successful gains in an incredibly expensive-to-operate-in city like New York.
It’s a bit hilarious, if not sad, to imagine how much time the author spent on this 1200+ word think piece which laments the fact that ‘the Christians are coming!’ into NYC. Here’s a how the article opens:
New York has taken to Chick-fil-A. One of the Manhattan locations estimates that it sells a sandwich every six seconds, and the company has announced plans to open as many as a dozen more storefronts in the city. And yet the brand’s arrival here feels like an infiltration, in no small part because of its pervasive Christian traditionalism. Its headquarters, in Atlanta, is adorned with Bible verses and a statue of Jesus washing a disciple’s feet. Its stores close on Sundays. Its C.E.O., Dan Cathy, has been accused of bigotry for using the company’s charitable wing to fund anti-gay causes, including groups that oppose same-sex marriage.
The lack of self-awareness here is quite stunning. While attempting to stake the moral high-ground against bigotry, he maligns an entire religion by describing their mere presence as “infiltrating” his city with Christian tradition. That sounds, oh what’s the word — bigoted! If you can’t see that point, simply substitute other religions in for Christianity. Try it with Jews, for example. I’ll wait…
Bad, right?
Chick-Fil-A Owner Uses Store Marquee to Help Employee Score a Prom Date
But this non-satire disguised as satire piece was just getting warmed up:
The company has since reaffirmed its intention to “treat every person with honor, dignity and respect,” but it has quietly continued to donate to anti-L.G.B.T. groups.
This non sequitur fails because it assumes it is impossible to treat all people with honor, dignity and respect if one donates to groups that support a definition of marriage he disagrees with. This is faulty on many levels, but the primary one is self-evident to any living, breathing human being who has ever walked into a Chick-fil-A. They are staffed full of the friendliest, most courteous, helpful people on the planet. It is a one of the great wonders of the world how they are able to so consistently be this amazing at customer service – it’s almost (trigger warning) Divinely inspired.
But self-evident truths are clearly not enough to stop this hot, steaming take from continuing.
Chick-fil-A’s success here (NYC) is a marketing coup. Its expansion raises questions about what we expect from our fast food, and to what extent a corporation can join a community.
At a sandwich sold per every six seconds, America has spoken quite clearly and absolutely no one gives a flying you know what about what you want people to “expect” from fast food chains. It is painfully obvious, in fact. If the poster child for Christian owned fast food joints can absolutely dominate in the secular utopia that is NYC, all they want from their fast food chains is delicious food. Period, end of story.
Go ahead and worship the flying spaghetti monster in your spare time, for all we care. Got a delicious, spicy chicken with waffle fries on the menu? We’ll buy it.
God bless America, and God bless capitalism.
The article goes on to warn of the proselytism that “thrums below the surface” at Chick-fil-A, and seems to lament their “pit crew efficiency, but where you feel like you just got hugged in the process.” But things really go off the rails when the author launches into a warning about about the cows.
Again, I feel it necessary to remind that this is not satire:
“It’s impossible to overstate the role of the Cows—in official communiqués, they always take a capital “C”—who are displayed in framed portraits throughout the Fulton Street location. If the restaurant is a megachurch, the Cows are its ultimate evangelists… It’s worth asking why Americans fell in love with an ad in which one farm animal begs us to kill another in its place.”
No, it’s not. It’s really, really not.
By the way, is anyone else getting hungry for Chick-fil-A? I know writing this up has me practically salivating and quite honestly very much connecting with what that cow is talking about. We’re totally on the same level.
But I digress. Mercifully, he wrapped things up but not before issuing what very well may be the least popular rallying call in American history:
Still, there’s something especially distasteful about Chick-fil-A, which has sought to portray itself as better than other fast food: cleaner, gentler, and more ethical, with its poultry slightly healthier than the mystery meat of burgers. Its politics, its décor, and its commercial-evangelical messaging are inflected with this suburban piety. A representative of the Richards Group once told Adweek, “People root for the low-status character, and the Cows are low status. They’re the underdog.” That may have been true in 1995, when Chick-fil-A was a lowly mall brand struggling to find its footing against the burger juggernauts. Today, the Cows’ “guerrilla insurgency” is more of a carpet bombing. New Yorkers are under no obligation to repeat what they say. Enough, we can tell them. NO MO
Good luck with that. As we speak, friendly Chick-fil-A servers are stunning customers with their freakish ability to make a line disappear.
Light hearted rebuttals to this absurd article aside, it is evident that this author’s real beef is with Christianity itself.
While many try and attack Christians as hateful bigots, the truth is this: Bible believing Christians can, in fact, love and respect one all while disagreeing with what the institution of marriage means. The political forces that wish to keep America divided don’t want people to realize that fact, as they’d lose a major fundraising and support weapon at their disposal.
Elderly Couple Stranded in Hurricane Harvey Saved by Chick-fil-A
But if we truly learn to be open-minded, we’ll understand and live with the fact that we can disagree and yet still make our own choices. And that those choices don’t put us on separate, competing teams. They just put us on different paths, and when those paths intersect with someone different than us, we can have meaningful conversations with one another.
Life really doesn’t have to be as complicated as we make it, and we really don’t have to be as divided as we are. Pieces like this from the New Yorker only make things worse, not better.
How about we just put aside our differences and go pick up a delicious chicken sandwich? Because that is something Americans – as evidenced by the success of Chick-fil-A in NYC – clearly can agree on.