Arches of Democracy

Patriotism with a side of fries

This piece is part of a larger set of letters written to my prospective granddaughter, due this spring.

January 14, 2025

Dear Baby,

Last weekend I found myself with a two-hour slot in my Saturday afternoon between a nap and a trip to church, where I would be the lector for the 5:30 p.m. Mass. I wasn’t sure what to do with it. Work? No, I’d spent the morning reading for the chapter I’m writing. A trip to the bookstore? No, I had a stack of new Christmas books across the room. A walk? Too cold. I realized I had a couple of errands to do—a trip to the drugstore to get a prescription for your grandmother; a tank of gas for the car—and then it was on to a place I periodically visit in these situations: McDonald’s.

I love McDonald’s. There are plenty of reasons not to: the food is not particularly good for you; the company is a morass of what economists call negative externalities in its environmental impact (trash, carbon dioxide from waiting cars, et. al.), its décor is both cheap and tightly controlled by a corporation—a real estate corporation, in fact, that sublets its properties to franchisees—that imposes strict rules on them in its quest for quality control. The only nice thing I’ve ever heard an intellectual say about McDonald’s is that it has offered an entryway for ambitious working-class entrepreneurs from minority communities (notably African Americans) to get a foot in the door for climbing a capitalist ladder that is typically regarded with suspicion. I acknowledge the validity of all of this.

But for me, McDonald’s is a great, and increasingly rare, arena of authentic democracy. Everybody—I mean everybody—goes there at some point in their lives. The one near my house in Hastings-on-Hudson is a little over a mile away in northwestern Yonkers, and its staff and clientele are a potpourri of colors, languages, and generations that’s difficult to find jostling anywhere else. McDonald’s can be crowded, and on this day I’m annoyed by a woman who’s listening to a video on her phone without earbuds. Sometimes I have to wait longer than I’d like. But I also experience bona fide contentment on my plastic chair looking out the window and watching the cars on Nepperhan Avenue go by.

McDonald’s is a bargain. When I go there for dinner these days (usually about twice a month, typically with your uncle Ryland before we go to the movies on Saturday night; tonight we’ll go to Taco Bell), I get the Value Meal: double cheeseburger, 4 chicken nuggets with buffalo sauce, fries and a drink for six bucks. I love the price as much as the food. And I do love the food. One can argue about who makes the best burgers, and indeed there are now whole tiers of fast food that specialize in them. But nobody makes better fries. I’ve been eating them for over half a century, and they’ve never been surpassed. I’ll be having them today—that’s all, just a snack along with a soda—and will savor them without ketchup.

There’s a certain kind of perfection that you experience at McDonald’s: concentrated intelligence that has achieved marvelous calibration in terms of consistency, efficiency, and an occasional dash of novelty (like the periodic return of McRib sandwiches). Loss leaders with Happy Meals, whose cheap trinkets bring joy to toddlers and relief to harried parents. We all love the idea of the town square with its connotations of community, but as often as not, the old-timers are congregating over coffee in chairs bolted to the floor. I wonder how long it will be before the get the first museum to shopping malls.

As I write these words, it’s been over 85 years since the McDonald brothers, sons of Irish immigrants, opened their first restaurant in California (of course—land of hope and automobiles, and automobiles as hope), and 70 since Ray Kroc turned it into a hugely successful fast-food chain. Now of course, McDonald’s is worldwide—as common as a church in any given town and much better attended—and a symbol of America itself, perhaps one of the few things some people abroad still like about this country.

I do hope you’ll be going to McDonald’s soon, sweetheart, and that the fries will still taste as good to you as they always have to me. But I don’t take either for granted. I’m just sitting here wondering what flawed beauty you will be savoring many years from now.