Justin Raphael: Supersize responsibility and not fries

"Public truth is less obvious than it appears." Such might be the tagline to Supersize Me, Morgan Spurlock's documentary chronicle of his month-long McDonald's diet. We all know what Spurlock spends eight minutes telling us: we are the fattest nation on Earth and fast food only makes us fatter. Indeed, while America-as-McDonald's is the horror of the anti-globalization radicals, American exceptionalism is the very essence of our McDonald's experience: we eat a ton of Big Macs and we're damn proud of it. Imagine a country so proudly free its citizens are welcome to kill themselves eating food that appeals to their patriotism.

The shock is that Spurlock's film imagines a world where such freedom comes without individual responsibility. Once again conventional wisdom has come to be regarded as misguided naivet‚. We might think that if McDonald's nearly kills us, maybe we should just stop eating so damn much of it. Some would call this responsibility, but that domain is now apparently only the province of multinational corporations. As The New York Times' A.O. Scott put it, "Mr. Spurlock's film is as much about corporate power as it is about health."

Indeed, it would have us believe that spending billions to advertise a product to people who might be interested in buying it is nothing short of demonic. On this model, Ronald McDonald is not an exemplar of capitalist free enterprise, but a subversive poster child for a kind of corpulent, All-American fascist youth group, shirts brown with grease, marching uncontrollably toward the nearest Happy Meal.

And yet in decrying corporate America -- particularly the way the Fortune 500 manufacture our tastes at the price of our individuality -- Spurlock and other Michael-Moore-types only buttress the collectivism and illiberal institutional power they abhor. The truth is that while the radical left is horrified by influential Republican strategist Grover Norquist's goal of "making government so small we can strangle it in a bath tub," Spurlock and others want to make the individual so insignificant that nobody can notice if or why he's drowning.

The individual can no longer be blamed because he just isn't important enough anymore. Spurlock takes the position, rightly, that obesity is a problem which threatens society, but he cannot conceive that this "society" consists of individuals who are more concerned about eating what they like than the svelte-ness of the race. The individual must be saved from himself for the sake of consensus.

Though it is unclear why the antidote to the mass society is mass psychology, bulldozing personal freedom to make room for collective goals occurs across the sociopolitical landscape. Hence we can sue the tobacco companies for tempting us with a product we all know kills us. We have campaign finance reform, limiting how we use our money for political speech not because voters are unscrupulous but because "the system" is flawed. Americans believe not only that they can have freedom without responsibility, but that they are entitled to it.

Like McDonald's' clever advertising, all this is an appeal to democracy, which used to be about choice. But though billions of us have elected to eat McDonald's, albeit at their own risk, Spurlock and his ideological kin take the position that we are simply too dumb to know what we really want. Eating a Big Mac cannot mean I was hungry but only that I have been corporately brainwashed. Never mind that the beauty of corporate capitalism is that nobody has to buy anything and that maybe we eat so damned much fast food just to prove we can eat whatever we please. Forget that the ubiquitous Golden Arches would fall tomorrow if millions of Americans did not want to pass through them in search of salt and grease.

For the documentary class, such democracy is dangerous because people are dumb, which is to say, not leftist. The ideas forced down our throats by capitalists are bad enough, but worse would be to have any of our own. Hollywood and the experts know what is best and while it might be nice if Americans stopped thinking with their stomachs, it seems it would be far better if they just stopped thinking altogether. Hence Michael Moore's book asks, "Where's My Country," not "our country." For his cronies, individualism means agreeing with certain individuals; the rest of us are just too ignorant to matter.

But Moore and Spurlock have careers because they are quite explicitly on the side of the little guy. The entire Supersize Me genre depends upon our willingness to believe that our welfare was so important the movie just had to be made. So who is being disingenuous? Are we important only to the extent that we can be saved by the elite? Or could it be that the most pressing problems are always mired in conspiracy because Morgan Spurlock, like McDonald's, is out to make a buck off our impressionability?

The true issue, then, is not the one posed by Supersize Me, as summarized by A.O. Scott: "It's us or them, that we should kill McDonald's before McDonald's kills us." It is rather whether we will allow such a social ethic to destroy our free society, built as it is upon both freedom and responsibility. It is the leanness of our individualism, and not the fat of our individuals, that truly threatens America's future.

Justin Raphael is a junior American history major from Westport, Conn.

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