Interrogating Whataburger

An hermeneutic epistemology of the Original #1

Jeffrey Denny

For two weeks this summer, I spent a lifetime in Houston.

I hesitated to go there, since the eponymous Sam Houston, while a Democrat, owned slaves and stole Texas from Mexico, leading to the peaceful Alamo protest by indigenous people like at Columbia University today.

As a progressive communist Socialist post-birth abortionist and America-hater like Kamala Harris, I also refused to call my departure and arrival airports by their dystopian white cis male colonizing patriarchal warmonger names, Ronald Reagan National in Washington and George Bush in Houston.

After getting on and off a string of broken United Airlines Boeings and waiting for a crew to be brought home from the International Space Station by Boeing, I felt the need to express my identity as an PECSP (Person Experiencing Clinical Situational Psychopathy, pronounced “pesky”) to the gate agent.

As I sensitively spewed enraged invectives and flecks of recently chewed airport food, they/them/theirs thanked me for speaking my truth and desperately struggled, like all working class, to rebook me and my rescue comfort cockatoo, Señor Guano, whose previous human companion taught to scream like a colicky J6 MAGA, “9–11 was an inside job!” (Señor Guano also power-struggles that I’m their emotional comfort animal.)

As the pilots finally arrived and welcomed Señor Guano and me aboard, their muttering “thank god for gummies” gave us comfort.

Once in Texas, proudly dubbed “America’s Hell on Earth” because God defied orders not to mess with it, I was proud myself.

I respected boundaries by resisting the impulse to mention that their “not really president” Joe Biden made June 16 a federal holiday.

Juneteenth triggers Texans because they feel bullied for further victimizing slaves by suppressing the news of emancipation. Texans still appreciate suppressing news, making Fox #1 in their demographic.

Yet Texans hate being triggered when triggers don’t involve shooting immigrants. As consolation, Texans get June 16 off to celebrate how they subjugated humans. Like the Texas government still does in the name of freedom.

But let’s drill down on Whataburger.

In Texas, when you say “Whataburger,” it signals more than what founder Harmon Dobson meant when he launched in 1950 to make “a burger that was so big, they had to hold its five-inch bun with two hands.” Sounding like a certain former president bragging about grabbing women.

Whataburger is worse than microaggressive — it’s macroaggressive, terrifying, traumatizing, stigmatizing and doing violence to the marginalized as an oppressor empowering, instrumentalizing and both interpolating and extrapolating the hegemony.

To evidence:

Whataburger needs two hands?

What about the rights of Americans who have only one hand because they’re on the phone while enjoying a Whataburger?

Or — and this happens every day — you disabled a hand while drawing for a shootout at the online order pickup line because seven other customers also used the name “Sexy Texy”?

Whataburger kills.

They hatefully boast their beef is 100% fresh, never frozen and comes from a farm-to-table supply chain.

But won’t someone other than irritating children indoctrinated by their climate-woke schools worry about the innocent cattle we stop to moo at during family road trips across real America before they’re slaughtered for our enjoyment? The cattle, not the children.

Whataburger is a corporate criminal.

The despicable fast-food chain conspires with the greedy global corporate meat, bun, cheese, condiment and potato industries.

Sources say the special catsup is made from feral cats, which is why you never see any around a Whataburger. Worse, the Buffalo sauce is not actually made in Buffalo and the fries are supplied by global Big Spud agribusiness that’s frying our planet and potato digging machine workers to a crisp golden brown.

Whataburger is making America sick.

Studies by starving vegans suffering from protein deficiency while destroying the planet, parties and marriages by emitting clouds of CO2 from legume-based diets prove the Original #1 with its 10,000 calories and 2,000 grams of fat and salt has killed more Texans than their deadly climate and Covid denial.

Whataburger is driving up America’s healthcare costs.

Thanks to greedy Big Pharma, Big Insurance and Pharmacy Benefit Manager drug middlemen that conspire to make America sick to make more money, Ozempic — first choice of Whataburger addicts after diet and exercise — costs over $1,000 a month. Unless you have Socialist healthcare like Medicare, Medicaid, Obamacare or employer plans.

Whataburger is capitalist.

Founder Harmon Dobson started humbly with a single store in Corpus Christi, a town whose very name commits religious violence against people like Larry David.

Dobson rapidly rose to become a greedy price-gouging businessman. In 1950, the Original #1 cost 25 cents. Today, it’s $50 plus tax, tip, bag charge, service charge, another service charge and donation to children who can’t afford Whataburger.

Our first black woman president will put a stop to Whataburger price gouging with “SOVIET Style Price Controls,” as her rival hatefully called her plan.

In 2019, the rapacious Dobson family sold a majority stake in Whataburger to a predatory $50 billion investment firm to spread its death. “Whataburger Got Sold to Chicago. Texas Is Flipping Out,” The New York Times said. “Whatablow: A Texas icon has been Chicago’ed.”

Today’s successful woke Millennial entrepreneurs who teach MBAs on LinkedIn aren’t greedy capitalists like Dobson. They “lift up diverse community leaders, organizations and underrepresented groups by supporting and showcasing their work.” This is what Whataburger claims to do. But isn’t that just DEI-washing?

Whataburger is silent about Gaza

As the signs say, silence equals violence.

To complete my interrogation of Whataburger, I did my own research.

I visited one of the 20,000 Houston locations and ordered the Original #1. After a courageous tentative bite like Marie Curie experimenting with radium, I proceeded to jam the rest into my greedy maw as efficiently as masticating permits. While uttering “Mmmfff. Ohhhh. Iz good.”

Despite my politics, I would have given Whataburger a thumb’s up. But both hands were occupied.

Jeffrey Denny is a Washington writer.