The Fat Diaries: Why Are We Proud of Our Fast Food?
I mention Christine O’Donnell these days and all air seems to disappear from the room. I don’t really get that incensed by her, but I realized this morning that it was because I kept mentally picturing her as Elizabeth Hasselbeck from The View. O’Donnell’s tricked my brain into thinking she’s a TV personality and not a politician. More fool me, I guess.
Well, there was one comment she made last weekend, at the Values Voter Summit, that got me thinking, purely in a “Fat Diaries” context. She mentioned that she was proud for America that Russia had a McDonald’s.
…As the Berlin Wall came down, we sa[t] in front of our televisions and saw a hunger for freedom from the heavy boot of government coming from East Europe. The golden arches went up in Moscow and here on our own land, family businesses became national chains, Walmart, Home Depot…
Again, for clarity, she did not state that she could see it from her house. A friend of mine stated that she didn’t see why McDonald’s should be the epitome of America’s gifts to the rest of the world – especially regarding its hunger.
I suddenly had a violent movie-style flashback to my childhood. From the ages of four-to-six, my family was stationed in Warsaw, Poland. It was 1985-88 and the Iron Curtain had yet to fall. I have some vivid memories of that country: I remember the lilac tree in our front yard. I remember the colorful folk dresses that the women wore on sanctioned holidays, and I remember that everything was grey. Poland was still relying on coal for most of its energy needs and it covered the entire city with a pall of grey cloying coal dust. Whether as a result of the coal dust, or whether it was aggravated by it, my lungs began to develop asthma.
The American base in Warsaw had no facilities to treat me, nor did the one in Moscow. To get treatment and medicine, my parents had to seek help in Berlin, West Germany. Several times we made that trek across The Wall. At that age I didn’t fully appreciate the significance of the Berlin Wall. I only knew that as we approached the border my parents were suddenly sober and unsmiling. There was an anxious tension in the car as an imposing German soldier approached my dad and barked questions at him. Sometimes we made the drive at night, and I recall the soldier marching up to the windows of the backseat and shining flashlights in our faces. I’d never seen an Indiana Jones movie, and I didn’t know that he was checking to see if I looked enough like my parents and my passport photo to erase suspicion that I wasn’t some East German/Polish/Russian girl being smuggled across the border. I was scared nonetheless, and since I was usually having an asthma attack in the backseat at the time, those were unpleasant trips.
The only thought that comforted me and buoyed me up when I endured the scary border guards and the sharp syringes of the English doctors in Berlin, was that when it was all over, mom and dad would take my brothers and I to McDonald’s. There were no McDonald's on the east side of the Wall; there was hardly anything, so it seemed like an oasis of American culture in my foreign travels. When we moved away, and in years later when the wall came down and the Soviet Union fell, I realized the changes that would begin in the Poland I’d left behind. When I’d heard about the first McDonald’s opening in Moscow, it really was a monumental thing for me. It was actually a minor shock. It made me smile that the people inside that horrible blockade were beginning a new life and culture where anything that we could achieve, they could achieve too.
It’s been about twenty years now, however, and I’m sorry to say, Christine, the glow has faded. Americans have so much to be proud of; we’ve contributed so much to the world. We’re home to amazing individuals who’ve introduced technologies and ideas. We’ve entertained the world with movies and novels and television shows. We’re a part of the global consciousness in a way we can be proud of, in spite of the mistakes and missteps. I really think that merits more than being represented by a fast food chain’s gray hamburgers, don’t you?
Sadly fast food is very much a representative of our international presence. I keep thinking of the French animation, The Triplets of Belleville, where Belleville (a satiric analogue of America) is populated almost entirely by 300 pound manatee-humans, waddling down the street with burgers clutched in their chubby fists. It seems that more people know and recognize Colonel Sanders (of KFC) than Steve Jobs (although it’s not like Apple laptops bear the image of a bespectacled man with a “Moby” haircut etched in white light). Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for consumer businesses flourishing, and I recognize the role of iconic marketing, but I don’t want our country’s ambassador to the world to be Ronald McDonald. The most prominent feature of our culture shouldn’t be our crippling obesity rates and heart-health related deaths.
We need a representative that embodies our ingenuity, our imagination, our love of life, and mostly our desire to improve ourselves and the world around us. I think Superman is a good candidate, but I’m open to suggestions.
