Sunday, July 15, 2007
I took a break from my internet café marathon for an evening walk at sunset. Sidewalk cafes line the Kralia Milana in Belgrade with their wood tables, flower boxes, and bright colored umbrellas. Waiters in white shirts and black pants rush from inside the restaurants behind to tend the customers who chat lively as the colors of the sunset reflect in the evening air. Irish pubs, Italian restaurants, French bistros, and restaurants offering more traditional Serbian fare blend one into the other, the table umbrellas changing from green to red to yellow, creating a brightly colored quilt if looked at from above. There, arm in arm with the others, sat a McDonalds. Yes a McDonalds. There were no waiters in black and white, but the tables, the bright colored umbrellas, the light easy chatter over dinner, even the flower boxes were the same. This struck me as particularly odd to see a McDonalds with flower boxes, strutting like a sidewalk café, though it took me a moment to understand why. In America, McDonalds has become a shiny plastic icon, plastic booths, plastic tables, plastic food. It is the last place I would think of going with my friends for a dinner and chat at sunset. Yet here it was an experience, an evening out.
Back at the internet café, I noticed for the first time the building that housed the McDonalds across from me at Slavija Square. It was a beautiful, free-standing, neo-renaissance structure. White fluted columns crested by ornate flourishes flanked the doors with intricately designed cornices and friezes and other decorative embellishments. Greek style pediments sit atop the entry way and each of the windows. Nestled into the ornamented triangle pediments, above every other window, stood a small tasteful golden arch, a proud moniker. The building in America would have housed a bank, here, in a particularly high commercial rent district, it held instead a McDonalds.
My mind flashed back to the last year of traveling and the several photos I have taken of McDonalds situated in stunning or quaint locations, always on pedestrian walkways or otherwise vibrant areas of town. I took the pictures out of some sense of oddity, this contradiction to me of McDonalds and something beautiful or classy or quaint. I never realizing it was a contradiction to me because I am an American. We equate McDonalds with blue-class, Walmart shopping workers, or families with small children screeching for happy meals. To the Europe though, McDonalds is a status symbol; the bright yellow arches a symbol of opportunity and success as it was once in our country.
After the second World War, after the men who survived returned home and the shock of it all began to wear off, people were left were to pick up the pieces of their lives and move on. And move on they did, getting married, having sex, finding jobs, having sex, mowing their lawns, having lots of babies from all that sex, and striving desperately to create a “Father Knows Best” world that left the atrocities of war far behind them on shores of a distant land. They were searching for something, something that reflected the ease of life, the joy of family, the prosperity of the victors. “Fast Food” became a fad of the day. Little shacks outside the cities and towns boasted fun, family food, prepared by others, that a family in their shiny new post-war car could “drive thru” to get. Picnic tables were scattered around back where families and neighbors could gather and eat as the sun disappeared from the sky. These restaurants were varied and numerous but one began to stand out – McDonalds.
It became, in time, a symbol of America, of this time, of recovery after the war, of life going on, of the victors. Golden yellow arches that rose high in the air looking toward a prosperous future, one where we could afford little conveniences like fast food shared at picnic tables amongst family and friends while children played in brightly colored play parks.
And then something happened. Instead of a country that could afford convenience, we became a country that demanded convenience. And later a country that lived for convenience and then, sadly, a country that no longer knows how to survive without convenience. Life began to come packaged in boxes and cans, losing both quality and nutrition along the way. And with it, we lost much of our ability to enjoy the things that take time. I remember helping my grandmother strip string beans as a little girl. I remember wondering why she took so long to prepare something that she could just buy at the store. But there was a beauty to the work of food once, aside from the mere fact it actually tasted like food and not a can. There was beauty in the camaraderie of women or families who worked together to strip the peas or thrash the pecan trees. There was pride in the preparation of something from scratch that simply can’t be found in carrying a cardboard carton to the microwave. I was struck again and again in Italy by the pride and preparation that went into making food. I think in some haunting way there is a link between their passion for life and appreciation that it is in the preparation of things that they find their quality their value.
In America, convenience became the prize, more important than quality, more important than health. Convenience and constancy. We wanted to know what we were getting and we wanted it now. Nothing else mattered. We now see the price of that prize – the most overweight country in the world with the highest rate of heart disease, cancer, and stress.
Time changes and symbols move on. In America, McDonalds became relegated to gas station corners and fast food rows and shopping malls, the picnic tables and play areas have slowly disappeared. The convenience, once a sign of the prosperity of the victors has become a symbol of the franticness of a society of plenty filled with scarcity. Run to McDonalds. Its cheap. Its quick. That’s important because in America there is never enough money, and never, ever enough time.
In Europe, though, especially the new parts of Europe breaking into the mainstream, McDonalds is still the icon of dream, a dream of a life of ease, of opportunity, of convenience, of picnic tables in the sunset. Perhaps they do not see, as I do, what we have paid for that life of convenience and ease - a lightness in life, a sense of family, a loss of institution, an emptiness in our souls.
It is interesting, in this vein of thought, to note that we have now created a new icon. A siren cast in green. In Starbucks I see, or at least saw in its conception, an effort to reach back to a slower time. Starbucks with its warm comfy chairs and muted tones of olive and orange, the colors of Tuscany, offering us a place to sit and linger, to meet with friends or on blind dates or just sit and commune with our books or our computers. Of course this new icon still reflects the prosperity of the victors, in price certainly. It still offers the convenience and constancy we demand, but I have always loved Starbucks for its effort to flesh out a bit the feeling of community, the spirit we have lost through the years. Perhaps we are moving backward on the pendulum. Perhaps we are finding again substance, in community, in conversation, in spirit carries as much value as convenience. Perhaps we are beginning to see this rampant sense of scarcity, that there isn’t enough time, never enough money, is a foolish misperception for those living in the land of opportunity.
some say starbucks is somewhat restrictive as it focuses on french roast; some say that it fosters smug elitism (I spent $4.95 for my coffee; you spent 50cents- of course, mine is better); some say it is merely a device to convey a sense of urban hipness when one is drinking their coffee in a mall in idaho. Comments on this topic made to me this afternoon from someone who is wiser than I; as I taught her that a virtue of sitting in the balcony of a movie theatre is tossing popcorn over the railing. Written quite nicely. jsg
Posted by: jerry | July 15, 2007 at 08:54 PM