The Ethics of Perspective

Let’s try this one as a hypothetical: suppose you had taken your kids to McDonald’s for Happy Meals, and when they got to the bottom of the bag, the cheap plastic trinket being offered as a premium with your purchase was a cartoonish representation of a self-proclaimed genocidal maniac who barely avoided courts-martial for mass murder, mutiny and gross dereliction of duty because he and his personal command were finally caught and slaughtered by the same people they had been victimizing. Would you be outraged, demand your money back, take the story to the media, make contact with national advocacy groups, stage active protests?

Now suppose that you saw an article online about some people who received a cheap plastic trinket in the shape of a character from a children’s move and were so incensed by its very existence that they raised a huge media circus and began making plans for national protests, on the basis of the toy’s racial and historical insensitivity. Would you find our where and when these rallies were being held, so you could go and show your support? Or would you think to yourself, “What difference does it make? It’s just a Happy Meal prize, for crying out loud! Why does everyone have to take offense at every possible thing?”

If you’ve been reading these posts for more than a few days, it probably won’t surprise you to learn that these events are one and the same, stemming from the same news story. According to the account published by the Missoulian online site, one of the Happy Meal prizes being given out as part of the “Night at the Museum II” tie-in promotion is a depiction of Lt. Colonel George Armstrong Custer, riding a motorcycle. This has outraged a number of people in the Native American community, and the executive director for the Society for the Advancement of Native Interests has compared giving out these toys in areas of the country that have significant Native American populations to merchandising an Adolf Hitler action figure in Israel. It probably doesn’t help matters that there’s a famous type of motorcycle called an “Indian,” and the bike the Custer figurine is riding bears some resemblance to one…

Now, a lot of people are pointing out that the figurine isn’t intended to represent the actual George Custer; it’s the character from the movie, effectively an effigy of Custer which is magically animated at night in the movie. The effigy doesn’t appear to know any more about the real Custer than the folks at McDonald’s do, and therefore it behaves as a courageous (if somewhat dim-witted) hero rather than a genocidal racist. It has also been pointed out that given the many social problems the Native American Nations face in real life (not least of which is ONGOING genocidal racism), expending time and energy on an event this insignificant seems a bit misdirected. But as far as I can tell, none of the people raising these objections had any of their lineal ancestors murdered by Custer or his men…

I’m going to leave the issue of whether the inclusion of the Custer effigy as a positive character in the movie is an outrage or not to people who know more about movies, racism and Native American Affairs than I do; I’m also not going to debate the obvious suggestion that McDonald’s and the licensing company making the figurines should probably have just selected another character and avoided this whole controversy. My question here is, does McDonald’s have an ethical responsibility to make sure that nothing offered as a Happy Meal prize could possibly offend any of their customers or have a bad influence on the minor children of those customers? Should the company demand creative control over the (3-D) images used in these product tie-ins and discard anything that might offend someone? Or do they have a responsibility to present images (and characters) from the movie just as the film makers intended them to be?

In effect, should McDonald’s be censoring some minor element of the film for fear of angering a specific element of their customer base? Or should they be upholding the First-Amendment rights of the filmmakers (and their contract) and just offering to provide an alternate Happy Meal prize to anyone who is offended by the Custer figurine? Would that answer be the same if there was a Genghis Khan action figure? What about Hitler, Stalin, Ivan the Terrible, Slobodan Milosevic or George W. Bush?

It’s worth thinking about…