Drive-Thru Dreams - Adam Chandler Page 0,38

at Wendy’s, McDonald’s, Starbucks, Del Taco, Taco Bell, KFC and Dunkin’ Donuts locations in Maryland, Florida, California, Texas, Louisiana, Pennsylvania, Oklahoma, Georgia, Alabama, North Dakota, Michigan, North Carolina and Washington.” Murphy suggests that it’s an easy, affordable, and anonymous way to propel joy and goodwill out into an otherwise indifferent-seeming world.

These tales of lardy benevolence also sweep across a wide emotional gamut, from the lieutenant colonel on leave from Fort Benning buying dinners for two hungry kids he encountered at a Taco Bell in Greenville, Alabama, to Marshawn Lynch, the All-Pro NFL running back, who handed $500 to a McDonald’s worker and aspiring fashion mogul in Dallas to buy a pair of the same Buscemi shoes that Lynch was wearing. Each act expresses a hopelessly American spirit of generosity in a country where fast food is the closest thing we have to a collective home, and where the closest thing we have to a collective safety net is each other.

All of these changes speak to the unwinding of a social order that began in kitchens and dining rooms and emanated out to the roadsides. When the twentieth century began, a plurality of Americans lived either on farms or in rural areas, and dining out constituted a rarefied luxury. By the century’s end, a dynamic had emerged in which cooking and dining in had become the luxury. Explanations for these developments are political, cultural, economic, and sociological, and, as we’ll later see, they would become divisive and controversial as the twenty-first century got underway.

While these transformations were setting in at home, the singular power of the United States was newly taking shape abroad in the final decade of the millennium. In many ways, American clout projected itself differently from that of all other behemoths before it; rather than just using brute force, America with its cultural and economic leverage spoke to adaptation and aspiration. The proliferation of American fast food into the world afar would draw all of these disparate strands together.

10 GLASNOST

The most beautiful thing in Tokyo is McDonald’s. The most beautiful thing in Stockholm is McDonald’s. The most beautiful thing in Florence is McDonald’s. Peking and Moscow don’t have anything beautiful yet.

—ANDY WARHOL

In early 1990, the Soviet Union was in the midst of a severe crisis. Its economy was in shambles and hyperinflation had rendered the ruble inconvertible to Western currencies. Amid intense internal political strife and disaffection, Soviet satellite states demanded and declared autonomy, and in a spiritual depression Communism flailed under the weight of its corruption and concentration of power.

But in January of 1990, in the Soviet empire’s last days, a symbol of hope, freedom, and possibility first glistered in downtrodden Moscow: Russia’s first McDonald’s, of course. This would be no ordinary outpost. The product of fourteen characteristically unhurried years of negotiations with a Russian novel’s worth of Soviet bureaucrats, the store would be a leviathan within a leviathan. Nine hundred seats. Twenty-seven cash registers. The largest Mickey D’s in the world. The project had first been announced two years earlier with no less triumphalism. “The McDonald’s Golden Arches will be appearing on the Moscow horizon,” one McDonald’s official declared. “A Big Mac will taste the same in Moscow as it does in New York, Tokyo, Toronto, or Rio.”

In a now-famous image, over five thousand customers queued up that winter day for as many as six hours in a line that extended for blocks. Together they stood, waiting for nothing short of the promise of salvation in the form of American-style hamburgers, apple pies, and politesse. Together they huddled as comrades in Pushkin Square in the shadow of a bronze statue of the square’s namesake, who, 170 years earlier, had been exiled to southern Russia by Czar Alexander for writing “Ode to Liberty,” a tirade against despotism.

In the days leading up to its Moscow debut, America’s most seductive emissary of soft power had been issuing this coded slogan on Russian television: “If you can’t go to America, come to McDonald’s in Moscow.” And now the moment was here. When the doors finally swung open, an awakening began. “Connoisseurs of fast food and human behavior were doubly satiated today,” one reporter wrote, “as anxious crowds of Soviet customers engaged in traditional pushing and shoving to place Beeg Mek orders at the nation’s first McDonald’s restaurant, only to be calmed by uniformed compatriots dictating that they have a nice day.”

It was January 31, 1990—forty years to the day after President Truman publicly announced the escalatory intention to develop the