Obligations of the Harp. Arthur Saltzman
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were a mill relentlessly working, abrading the hours into minutes and the minutes into seconds, with the seconds crushed still further down until they (and we) are dust. Time is the essential American commodity, at once the impetus and the cost of our getting and spending. Thus we not only want it all, we want it all at once. This is the philosophy that has sanctified the remote control, the cell phone, the laptop computer, the combination laundromat / tanning salon and pedicure / kidney dialysis center, and, perhaps most notoriously, the fast-food restaurant.
Every social critic worth his strictly limited salt intake argues that the proliferation of fast-food restaurants throughout America is a national tragedy. Well, “tragedy” is wrong, but it is certainly a truth universally disparaged, at least by anyone old enough that a Happy Meal does not immediately lift his spirits but sets off something tectonic in his gut. Dieticians deplore the fat calories and the relegation of the food pyramid to another neglected wonder of the ancient world. City planners denounce the numbing sameness of franchise-infested landscapes, whereby locales lose their unique architectural flavors along with their culinary ones, and any city of any size at all comes to look like Anywhere, U.S.A. Editorialists of every stripe bemoan the casualties of convenience. The complaints are as predictable as the standardized patties they target.
And there is no denying the unfortunate fact that children salivate over the prospect of a trip to McDonald’s while routinely leaving the time-consuming dinners their mothers dutifully prepare unconsumed. What inestimable damage they do to their digestive tracts! Nietzsche’s horror at the prospect of a “detestable, grimacing death, which advances on its belly like a thief” may aptly be compared to the sludgy lunches that advance on the belly of each unwitting child who eats there. Yet the shape of McDonald’s has shaped his craving. Pre-schoolers who struggle with their ABC’s manage to have the commercial jingles down, and grown-ups can only wring their hands. (Meanwhile, truth to tell, grown-ups themselves are likelier to remember the entire theme to Gilligan’s Island than be able to recite a line of Shakespeare or solve a single binomial equation). You have to hand it to the advertisers. They have imprinted the configuration and colors of McDonald’s so successfully that kids can recognize that topographic dominant at twenty times the distance that they can make out their own parents. At the same time, they have instilled in them the belief that going to what is the most obvious, ubiquitous establishment in town is a treat.
Do not be fooled by mottoes. Although they advocate their eagerness to serve us according to our idiosyncratic schedules and to respond precisely to the way we savor, McDonald’s, Dairy Queen, Wendy’s, Hardee’s, and Burger King have us their way. That’s the conventional wisdom: awful to contemplate, impossible to cure.
I testify as one who was shackled early on by this same addiction and (say it!) endures it still. Well, “endure” and “addiction” are wrong, but my heart leaps up when I behold a McDonald’s golden double rainbow in the sky. I leave it to Proust to remember more elegantly while plucking crumbs of overpriced madeleine from his teeth. (There is nothing French about my reverie save the fries.) Disdaining to sup on anything wrapped in paper or to gorge on anything less than gorgeous is snobbery, pure and simple. Along with Cole Porter, I get no kick from champagne, but the Number Eight Combo hits me where I live. And where I live, in a town of only forty thousand, my populist palate may be served by seven strategically spaced locations. Only in America, you say? Well, so far.
My mundane indulgences are indulgences nonetheless. With the sole exception of those slimy disks of salami I remember my father sawing off the gnarled club he hung in the hall closet to stiffen still further for bagel sandwiches—salami the color and consistency I imagined hardened arteries to be—no taste so satisfies my irremediably rude yearning, no aroma wakens my nostalgia better, than a Quarter Pounder can. Vegetarians, they say, find ample bliss by abstaining from all but salads, with meatless meals martyring themselves; others cultivate a cautious passion for health foods or ruminate over the sensory poverty of the sensible portions they have trained themselves to settle for. By contrast, I confess to numbering myself among the cholesterol-unconscious majority, managing to suspend for the space of the odd meal knowing better. Only hours after my annual doctor’s visit, only hours after having studied the diagram framed in the waiting room which shows the way plaque can lodge near the heart like a sated grizzly slumped against the wall of its cave, I find myself dreaming of such a form as greasy goldsmiths make of hamburgers gold and gold polyurethane to keep a growly customer slaked.
How could such dependable contentment be wholly unwholesome? There must be more to the menu here than misgiving. McDonald’s suffers the tiny, unchurched children; McDonald’s harbors the wayward, distempled teens. All who have shirt and shoes may eat FDA-inspected flesh. Here, in this place at once familiar and special, you can feel at once familiar and special, as religious mentors purport every soul to be. Here, among the billions and billions counted, you count.
I contend that McDonald’s offers more than blight so bright we cannot see past the scandalous appetites it manufactures and caters to. (“Blight” is wrong, but cynics maintain that for all their popularity McDonald’s and other franchises are disfigurements, unmistakably and nonetheless. Let them eat sugar-free cake.) For one thing, because it spreads the same cuisine, décor, and chipper disposition everywhere, McDonald’s reifies the feeling that wherever you are, you are never far from home. The Golden Arches rise like idyllic staples out of the surf and swarm of the chaos of the everyday and hold fast, where bleary-eyed truckers and the roaming homeless may find hot coffee, clean restrooms, and central heat. Centuries from now, some hypothetical Schliemann will hook a buried franchise by one of its fallen arches and winch out a representative and undeteriorated McDonald’s, salvaging a significant part of our social history along with it. Presuming, that is, that there ever comes a future when McDonald’s has gone under—one tends to predict that McDonald’s is the cockroach of our contemporary service economy and will survive any geopolitical debacle or revolution of taste.
McDonald’s is also an ideal starter restaurant. It is a place where children can learn to function in public without repercussion. Here they may mix, choose, and invent condiment combinations with an impunity denied even government-funded chemists; they may subject their sandwiches to whatever Boolean options suit their fancies. Free of metal silverware and sharp edges, purged of breakable glasses and plates, McDonald’s is the culinary equivalent of vinyl books, padded crib rails, and children’s car seats. Let the flattened ketchup packets fly and the sodden crusts fall: it takes less than half an hour to wipe down the Formica and hose off the plastic at the end of each day. Until they are ready for better than Neanderthal etiquette and real, discrepant eating, children can practice their rudimentary manners and desires at McDonald’s and insult no protocol, disturb no one. After all, anyone who might be offended by the noise or the noxious combinations kids customarily make from their meals knows not to come to McDonald’s in the first place. Here there is no aesthetic to transgress against, business meeting or lovers’ tryst to contaminate, or delicate sensibility to sully no matter how much mustard is spattered or “special sauce” slopped about. At McDonald’s, there is nothing to ruin.
A third benefit of McDonald’s is that it provides a setting where divorced parents can facilitate their joint custody and exchange their kids. It is a weigh station for relationships that circumstances have forced to persist beyond the reach of love. McDonald’s is easy to locate and (a particular advantage for the father whose displacement has landed him in a different city) typically set close to the cloverleaf, so awkward meetings between estranged parents can be handled expeditiously. On Saturdays, especially, McDonald’s teems with drop-offs and getaways. In this sense, McDonald’s is a sort of roundhouse for coupling and uncoupling, where quickly and with minimum stress, families can come together and come apart.
“Your father is late again,” grumbles Mom. “Isn’t that just like him.” Fortunately, they can get a Coke or visit the Play Place while they wait.
When Dad does show up, offering explanation instead of apology, there is no need for the parents to prolong the scene or even to interfere with their child’s navigation through the massive plastic intestine in the other room. Mom took off Lauren’s tennis shoes before she entered the contraption. Dad joins the other occasional dads swarming at the orifice to collect his charge when she’s excreted. Henry Ford could have devised no smoother