of Life, as we say in my religion. It is one more abiding model, in whose infinite index all may be ordered, familiar, and found.
2 Get Up and Get Away
It may not be the most often quoted or sighed-over scene in Casablanca, but I propose that the one that has proved the most prescient features an elderly couple who have come to Rick’s Café Americain to celebrate their impending departure for America. They ask Karl, the maitre d’ (played so indelibly by the cream-centered S. Z. “Cuddles” Sakall), to join them in a toast to their future. (Anticipating their invitation, Karl has brought out the good brandy.) Having agreed to speak nothing but English so that they will feel at home when they arrive, they proceed to demonstrate their command of American idioms:
“Liebchin, er, sweetness heart, what watch?”
“Ten watch.”
“Such watch!”
Karl buttons the scene with the following verdict: “You will get along beautifully in America.”
Let me suggest that what makes this interchange important, beyond the comic relief, which in the context of the film had become as precious and rare as exit visas under the German occupation, is the unintentional recognition of the American emphasis on time. Karl is right: American prosperity was and continues to be characterized, guaranteed, and rewarded by time management. If they plan to live in this country, they will need to master that priority. American bustle is conducted in the shadow of the clock, whose hands threaten to swipe fatally down upon us like Poe’s pendulum. Or, as Pablo Neruda observed as those hands scythed away at the night, time grinds silently, incessantly away as if his watch 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
