The Eternal Colonel

Anyone who has spent some time in Asia can attest to the strange popularity in those lands, so far removed from the Kentucky pastures, of the restaurant chain known today as KFC. It is not, however, to the universal appeal of deep-fried battered chicken that I attribute the franchise's success, but to the universal appeal of its icon, Colonel Sanders himself, whose smiling, near life-size replica in plastic seems uncannily more at home in Asia than at home.

Of course we all resemble each other as we age—the hair turns white, eyes sag, ambitions fade, regardless of our race—culminating naturally in the greatest equalizer of all, death. But the Colonel's decidedly Asiatic cast cannot be chalked up to age alone. As some have remarked, he looks like a podgier (and yes, jollier) version of Ho Chi Minh—what Ho Chi Minh might have turned into had he been given a lifetime’s supply of counterrevolutionary fried chicken à la Kentuckienne.

I mention this by way of introduction to another curious fact concerning the Colonel which appears in this recent article about the much feared madrasas of Pakistan’s Nort-West Frontier Province. A Taliban-like regime has been imposed there by radical Islamist political parties, “banning the public performance of music and depictions of human form. The one exception to this, bizarrely, is the image of Colonel Sanders outside the new Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant in Peshawar. This was apparently because the Colonel was judged to be sporting a properly Islamic beard, and so was spared the iconoclasm imposed elsewhere.”

The enormity of such a decision becomes apparent when one stops to consider the kinds of icons that the Taliban could not spare; for example, the giant Bamiyan Buddhas that were carved out of a cliffside well over a thousand years ago, the only monuments of their kind, ordered destroyed by Mullah Mohammed Omar. Already defaced beyond recognition and amputated, the Buddhas resisted their destruction as anti-aircraft weapons exploded upon them, succumbing in the end only to massive quantities of dynamite.

Colonel Sanders, you might say, survived this fanatic destruction of false idols by just the hair on his chin. Perhaps when all the monuments of civilization lie in waste and ruins, today's KFC statuary in durable plastic will still stand smiling, no doubt in Asia.