Spam 2.x
SPAM: In 1998 when James Hormel, openly gay San Francisco
resident
and heir to the
meat-packing fortune, was nominated by President Clinton to serve as ambassador to the tiny nation of
Luxembourg, conservative extremists in Congress objected that Hormel would promote what they called "the gay
agenda" and feared he might show up at official functions accompanied by a man instead of a woman. In 1999, with
Senate confirmation still stalled, gay and lesbian people staged a protest in the capital city of Luxembourg in
which they fed Spam to thousands of feral cats and then built a "Wall of Shame" with the empty cans. No one was
certain how the symbolism of cat-feeding or Spam cans related to gay issues, or for that matter why the city and
the country of Luxembourg have the same name. In any case, Clinton used a tricky "recess appointment" to give
Hormel the job when Congress was not in session. During the 21st century, Hormel Foods would open a gala new Spam Museum and Visitors' Center; would
become the leading provider
of protein to all the
world's people with per capita incomes below $500 a year; and would redesign the Spam can and label 21 times
without once altering the formula for the stuff inside. Seattle's Annual Spam Carving Festival became the
single
largest outdoor event in the Western Hemisphere. Email and newsgroup spamming grew unabated into the early
2000s, when it was calculated that a majority of all Internet activity was either a spam, about spamming, or
related to Spam.
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