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© WinternachtenHOMO HAMBURGERUS
Past midnight, in a McDonald's somewhere on the West Side. The usual anxieties, doubts, the usual questions… Who am I? Where did the world come from? Did it really begin with a bang? And if so, who pushed the detonator? What is the origin of life on this planet? It is common knowledge that the ape descended from the trees, but did man really descend from the ape? And if he did, why not have just come straight down from the trees? Vertigo perhaps? Obesity? A bad case of sciatica?
Is there life after death? And far more to the point, is there death after life? It is said that science progresses with giant steps. Given the rather modest shoe size of our race, can we realistically expect to keep pace? And then, what's the good of science anyway? Will we someday be able to log on to the internet and surf atop Miss Italy? Will we be able to make love on line? Or would that short out the system? (In choosing the verb to short out I am in no way making a personal reference to anyone's anatomy.)
The world we live in has seen dramatic changes, including the toppling of the Berlin Wall -- historical determinism or just shoddy construction? History is accelerating, political blocs are breaking up, liberalism is gaining ground. What will the new geopolitical map look like? A Jackson Pollock painting? Margaret Thatcher in profile? Can one still refer to a new world order, considering the total disorder in my room? What economic challenges do future generations face? What is the latest set of rules in the democracy game, and how many players does it take to make a side?
And now for the million dollar question: why did my two year old niece learn to say the name McDonald's before my own? Is this the final conquest of consumerism, the total breakup of the family unit? I'm no biologist but I can't subscribe to such theories. I believe we are witnessing nothing less than the evolution of a new species, the homo hamburgerus. No, not another sexual subdivision but simply someone like you and me, hobbled with complexes, a social security number, and a libido that won't let us get to sleep at night. It is in no way my intent to undercut the work of the anthropologist. My point is simply this: from the ages of stone and bronze, we have come to the age of the hamburger.
Having to date consumed 332 Big Macs myself, I can vouch for the hamburger as the single most accomplished expression of post-modern society (by post-modern I refer of course to the period spanning Liz Taylor's fourth divorce and the invasion of Kuwait.) The homo hamburgerus hypothesis allows an intriguing reinterpretation of the world in which we live. Above all, it permits us to settle once and for all the issue of collectivism versus individualism, of centralization versus the dictates of the free market. The revisionist hamburger is far more than the sum of its classic parts -- meat, tomato, onion, pickle, lettuce. It holds more truth about our age than all the reports of the World Bank put together. It and it alone represents the purest expression of the collective unconscious. (One might call in Carl Jung at this stage, but in view of the lateness of the hour, I wouldn’t care to disturb him.)
Given the universal appeal of the hamburger today, it is clear that liberal pluralist and consumerist values have outlived the last gasp of economic determinism. Dire proclamations concerning the fall of America seem premature to say the least, unless the country should for some mysterious reason run out of ketchup. For now, market forces rule -- the very same forces that transformed Rabat's Soviet Cultural Center into a McDonald's. We've traded the blood of revolution for ketchup. For Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Turgenev the globalized comrades of Rabat now read Big Mac, MacNuggets, and MacChicken.
Certain observers would interpret the standardizing influence of the hamburger as a form of latent socialism. After all, the president of the company and the blue-collar worker consume the same sandwich -- the same slab of meat and the same leaf of lettuce all bathed in the same sauce. But while these two very distinct social animals may be eating the same type of sandwich (not the same sandwich as may have been understood from my earlier phrase. These are undoubtedly troubled times but let's not overdo it!), they are decidedly not sharing the same salary, as the amount of money each receives is based on the number of newspapers he manages to read during working hours.
To avoid misperceptions of this sort, it must be clarified that the hamburger is hardly a socializing medium. How could it be when it in fact does not favor fraternity? The hamburger is an agent of autonomy, of self awareness. It is a sort of gastronomic Ego pressed between two pieces of bread with a slice of onion and tomato, such that Descartes’ “I think therefore I am” might as well read “I think therefore I ham”.
In initiating our era of pre-packaged take-away food, the hamburger has granted the individual an extraordinary degree of freedom and mobility. One is released from the standard institutional venues for eating (the restaurant, the dining room, the cafeteria) and thus from the social constraints connected to them. Now you can eat whenever you like and wherever you are. You can eat on the go if you want. The hamburger has heralded a raft of technological revolutions in this respect, starting with the transistor radio, that ingenious invention that made the notion of "portable" music possible for the first time in history. The transistor was followed by other innovations that emulated the hamburger in offering the individual more mobility: the walkman, voicemail, the computer, the mobile phone, to mention a few. I have reached the conclusion that indigestion and other complaints inherent to the consumption of hamburgers are actually the necessary growing pains (growling pains ?) of the technological age.
I have produced these reflections under the influence of two Big Macs. Like the image of the world they reflect, the problem with hamburgers is that they are not always easy to stomach. I must therefore take my leave of this text, compelled as I urgently feel to deposit my thoughts on the new world order elsewhere.
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