I recently saw something that chilled me to the marrow of my bones. This was it:
My first thought was: This is a joke. It’s a riff on the Woke 1 phenomenon of brands like 𝕏Gushers and 𝕏Wendy’s making solemn political statements. And it definitely might be that — Laughing Cow could be scoring free publicity by hitching a free ride on the Social Media Rage Bait Train. But anti-woke social media has not totally hallucinated the notion that Laughing Cow is up to something — this is currently on the web site of that august spreadable cheese:
Laughing Cow also produced these short videos:
These videos make me 98 percent sure that Laughing Cow is in on the joke. This is almost certainly a marketing ploy, and I’ll confess: The odds of me writing about Laughing Cow cheese today *absent *this marketing campaign were low. It’s a bit, it’s a bait-and-switch, and I’m almost certain that the reveal will be something like “Now I’m laughing again thanks to our Zesty Southwestern Ranch flavor!”1
But the two percent chance that Laughing Cow is about to issue a deadly-serious statement about Israel/Palestine sends shivers down my spine. I dread the possibility that some tragically deluded person has convinced themselves that they need to use their lofty perch on the marketing team of America’s #7 cheese brand to summon a rhetorical lighting bolt that will jolt the masses into collective action. That’s simply too dark of a scenario to think about — the three human variants whose existence I don’t care to ponder are serial killers, pedophiles, and dairy employees who think that Middle East peace will occur when a cartoon cow tells me what’s what.
But we can’t completely rule out the possibility that the Christ-like empathy that’s been newly drawn into the cow’s eyes is not a joke. After all: People *do *sometimes come to believe that progress relies on them making a Profound Statement. And those people *do *sometimes speak through the breakfast food or 𝕏chicken restaurant that happens to be their platform. The “I need to say something” delusion is common — it’s ripped through our celebrity community like Spanish Flu in a World War I prison camp. And if that fucking cow utters the word “apartheid” — and, yes, “utters”…there might also be puns involved — then the disease has mutated into a strain more powerful than anything we’ve previously known.
And if you’re thinking “Someone on the market team would veto that idea,”…well, maybe, maybe not. This could be a case of the bystander effect, in which nobody acts because everyone assumes that someone else will act. I can imagine a world in which this unholy afterbirth of an idea survived several rounds of “Run it by Susan,” “Run it by Dave” because neither Susan, nor Dave, nor anyone wanted to be the one to say “You have lost your fucking mind.” Big mistakes sometimes squeak through — Vivek Ramaswamy recently posted the video below because no one on his team had the guts to say “We cannot post this because Vivek swings like an old woman with stage four arthritis.”
The Laughing Cow will almost certainly just say something about cheese. Tragically, though, we cannot rule out the possibility that it will issue an impassioned statement that includes the words “Balfour Declaration”. If so, we may have found a new Worst Advocate For The Palestinian Cause, a category that seems to have a new champion every day. It’s not too late for the Laughing Cow team to change course — if they have a tweet thread full of Bezalel Smotrich quotes locked and loaded, they can still replace it with one that reads “Spreadable cheese + pear slices is mooooosic to my ears!” I deeply hope that sanity prevails. Because if that sunburnt Elsie knock-off lectures me about genocide, I swear that I will immediately switch to whichever spreadable dairy product is the most Zionist.
My real guess is that it will be something about how their cheese is sourced. Which…okay, sure, good.
