An Open McLetter
by Steff Green

I am writing to you from the future. You shall have to take that on my authority for the moment, as explaining how I managed to get this letter past the deadly McSecurity and post it fifty years into the past requires an explanation of quantum physics too complicated to contain on this parchment I have crafted from fossilized lettuce leaves. Let me simply say that if I have done my work correctly, this letter has appeared fifty years before I wrote it, in the slush pile for your illustrious magazine.

I remember your magazine well, even all those years ago, because I myself was a subscriber. I even submitted a work of my own. Unfortunately, I was not granted publication. It would seem my riveting expose: “Life Through the Eyes of a Decorative Vase” was not riveting enough for you.

But I am not writing of such a trivial matter as your callous distaste for my literary works. Not when the salvation and freedom of the planet is at stake.This is no joke, my friends. For fifty years into your future, the entire human race—myself included—are held as slaves. We are forced every day to build industrial deep fryers and sew cheap polyester uniforms, and at night when we lay down in our cells to sleep we are tortured by continuous customer service seminar tapes playing at full volume over our weary heads.

It all started when McDonalds took over the world.

No please, don’t laugh! Don’t dismiss my letter as mere fiction and replace it in the stack of unmentionably bad stories (where “Life Through the Eyes of a Decorative Vase” no doubt lies right now). Listen! For it all begins this very week!

 

I shall tell you what will happen if you do not do as I ask. It is a terrible tale of unimaginable horror, but it is the truth and I will tell it as best that I can:

It began when a small group of entrepreneurial hostile aliens landed inconspicuously in the Nevada desert in 1939. Seeing a hole in the fast food market of America, they opened up a small chain of burger joints, and named them McDonalds. Why? Nobody knows. Can you claim intimate knowledge of the thinkings of hosile Aliens? I sure can’t.

The franchise proved so popular the McAliens expanded and covered the globe. This gave them the profit margin necessary to begin evil scientific experiments.

The evil scientific experiments culminated in the invention of an addictive serum known as McVirus. If ingested by a human, McVirus seeps into the brain, leading victims to become extremely open to ludicrous advertising strategies, increasingly likely to become obese, and severely addicted to the serum. The McAliens injected it into their Big Macs, and slowly but surely, more and more people became addicted to McDonalds. The McAliens delighted to discover sales had doubled now that most of the worldly population depended on Big Macs as their only means of sustenance.

In 2004, the McAliens had another idea. They created a new menu of salads and healthy foods, all injected with McVirus. Now they had the vegetarians and Atkin’s dieters under their thumb. What was next?

The only sensible answer was world domination.

 

 

By 2008, everyone in the world has eaten a McChicken or McSalad or McSundae with a dose of McVirus in it. It is on this day that the McAliens release the chemical McAtastrophe, into the atmosphere. This reacts with the McVirus in the brain and turns the entire population of earth into McZombies.

I was lucky. My brain did not properly absorb the McVirus, but I watched my friends and family turn into McZombies. The horror!

They walk as if in a drunken stupor, their skin permanently slick from the oil deposits in the atmosphere, their vocabulary consisting only three sentences ‘Can i take your order?, ‘Would you like fries with that?’, and ‘My mum says I’m cool’. They are completely dependent on McDonalds food for all their nutritional needs (I use the term nutritional lightly here), and they are given a daily dose of McVirus to keep them in this horrific state.

The McAliens are now taking their franchise to other inhabited planets of the galaxy. Their ten year business plan is to own a franchise more gigantic, more unhealthy, more diabolical than anything Richard Branson could ever conceive of: a McUniverse.

Forget nuclear warfare, forget Global Warming and massive armies of killer robots. Forget everything scary they ever told you would come out of the Altantis. These aliens have found the most awesome weapon of all time: our love of greasy food.

Earth (or McEarth as it is now known) is the major manufacturing plant for the McDonalds universal franchise. The McZombies toil day after day, making machinery and uniforms and signs and plastic trays and waste disposable bins and old-fashioned non-biodegradable Styrofoam containers. All to aid the expansion of McDonalds universe-wide.

My native country of New Zealand is now a desolate, inhospitable place. Our native forests have been cut down to make tiny novelty pencils for children to do the puzzles printed on the Happy Meal boxes. Andrew Mehrtens now drop kicks over posts shaped like golden arches. Our booming movie industry now only makes burger advertisements and Lord of the Rings rip-offs. Frodo and Sam are now both happy McDonalds employees who find themselves in possession of a counterfeit onion ring and must return it to Saurons Burger Joint down the road before Gollum, the mooching hobo, steals it for himself.

We are kept in cages like animals, and fed only Happy Meals with broken toys and flat Coca-Cola. My two children attend McUniversity where they learn McEnglish and McMathematics. The only recreational activity allowed is swimming races through huge tanks of plastic balls.

It is unbearable, except for the plastic balls.

There is but a small group of us who are still sane. We live by eating the arms and legs from our Happy Meal toys and faking a zombie-state for our work. We call ourselves the McRebels (it isn’t imaginative, I know, but it is the movement that counts, not the name of the movement. Some called Satyagraha a stupid name, too). Together we have spent months collecting enough fossilised lettuce leaves (stuck for centuries on the insides of rubbish bins) to squish into paper so that so I could write this letter to you.

I can foresee no other way; only you can save us. All we need is some strong followers to promote our cause. Print this story in your magazine, have your readers tell everyone they know, call the news stations, the radio, the newspapers. Have this letter embedded as a subliminal message in a porn movie, anywhere where people will listen.