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

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