I’m not a big fan of Subway’s pseudo-deli sandwiches. However, I doff my cap at them for their exceptionally interesting German advertising campaign.

Only an utter dickhead would have been offended by the main corporate campaign, which was based around the concept that Americans are lardy slobs. Coming from an American company, this is an impressive and laudable piece of self-mockery.

Of course, it’s never hard to find an utter dickhead: the one in this particular saga was the Center for Individual Freedom (that’s ‘for’ in the sense of ‘against’, presumably), which stirred up a ridiculous hate campaign against Subway and got the campaign pulled.

Some of their local franchisees took the campaign a little further. I’m awed, disturbed and amused by this picture from a promotional pack:

There’s a fairly hard-to-refute argument that US cultural imperialism and Middle Eastern policy have been a major factor in creating the environment where Al-Qaida and its co-ideologues flourish. I’m not sure, however, that cartoons in deli stores are the best place to make the case.