Day 177 - 26 Oct 95 - Page 56
1 torture and murder" -- not "are they" -- "but we will tell
2 you how they are". Then over the page the only, what one
3 might call, genuine open question, "What's it like working
4 for McDonald's". The cartoon in the middle of the page:
5 "If the slaughter house doesn't get you the junk food
6 will."
7
8 My Lord, can I express what I am trying to say about the
9 impact of this leaflet will have on any ordinary person
10 and, perhaps, even on learned lawyers in terms of
11 grammatical -- in grammatical terminology. This is not, I
12 am suggesting, how the ordinary reader would approach this
13 in any way at all, but I believe that it may help to
14 illuminate what I am submitting is the immediacy of the
15 impact of this leaflet. Put in grammatical terms, there is
16 nothing in this leaflet of what one might call a
17 subjunctive nature. Its whole mood is present or future
18 indicative: "If the slaughter house doesn't get you the
19 junk food will". The whole leaflet, from start to finish,
20 asserts certainties and not possibilities or even
21 probabilities. There is no trace in this leaflet anywhere
22 of a doubt or a reservation or even an argument.
23
24 It is, perhaps, supposed to be two things at once, and this
25 is how it would strike the reader: Both a polemic and an
26 expose. It is not really susceptible of any kind of
27 careful thought at all. It is the sort of thing that goes
28 in one ear and either stays there or goes straight out the
29 other ear. If it stays there, which is why this libel
30 action has been brought from the fear that it is staying in
31 far too many minds, if it stays there, then the ordinary
32 reader (we submit) must necessarily say to himself at the
33 end of it all: "Do not go near these people, do not touch
34 them with a barge pole".
35
36 One reason for that is that he will have read -- and
37 perhaps the most important reason of all -- he will have
38 read the passage about nutrition which, again, is all
39 expressed in factual, assertive, positive terms, present
40 tense, nothing about "Oh, well, it may or may not be the
41 case that you shouldn't eat too much of this, that or the
42 other; be careful; treat the food respectfully" -- nothing
43 of that kind -- "There is an element of argument about it"
44 and so on and so forth -- it is all in terms of positive
45 assertion.
46
47 When he says to himself or to his wife or to his children,
48 "Don't go near that place", quite apart from saying "They
49 are a bunch of crooks who try to hide everything that's
50 wrong with them", he will surely (we would submit) be
51 saying, "Their food is dangerous".
52
53 I have read this leaflet, and what it asserts is that
54 whether one uses the root of diet or not -- and frankly (I
55 have to say) I do not believe that is a relevant
56 consideration -- at the end of it is a large red warning
57 sign: "Do not eat this stuff. It may kill you", which is
58 what I take the words, McCancer, McDisease and McDeadly to
59 mean and what I take the cartoon to mean. After all,
60 according to the leaflet, it is not just a piece of polemic
