NO, I don't like McDonald's. Of all the exports from America, it is the oddest and the most perplexing, and an infuriating proof of how the Americans know our own hearts better than we do ourselves.
After I have eaten a McDonald's hamburger and I do trust I have eaten my last I always feel as if I have just consumed a compost heap. It sits in my stomach and growls at me for hours, which is not as long as the question which began to form in my mind the very minute I began to eat the wretched thing tends to last.
And the question is why? Why do millions of people all over the world buy McDonald's every day? Why did McDonald's have got things right, somehow or other, and I don't understand what it is.
That thing called a Big Mac, a gooey confection of mayonnaise and tomato ketchup and meat ground so finely that it feels like wet bread, in theory should have the consumer appeal of fried eyelids yet it, along with the fries which have almost seen off our dear old friend, the old potato chip, is the most successful food invention in the history of the world.
And the word comes back, sounding over and over and over again why?
Why not Kebab?
Or conversely, for other foodstuffs, why not? Why did the Turkish kebab to my mind infinitely superior not become the world's favourite fist food? Why not the German sausage or the French baguette or the English sandwich or the Chinese noodle or the Italian pizza?
It is not just a question of marketing the ploys of the marketeer only go so far before popular taste rebels against his stratagems.
People really do want the mixture of sauces, bread, pickle, onion, fried potato and hiccups which rest at the heart of the Big Mac experience. I bow before popular taste and, baffled, withdraw in good grace.
Accordingly, I will permit McDonald's to do anything except, that is, tolerate them trying to trademark the Gaelic prefix mac have in several McDonald's countries attempted to prevent food outlets other than their own from using the prefix Mac, as if they had invented it. We do not need to dwell on the absurdity of such colonial verbal arrogance seizing the property of others and claiming it as your own is not new.
But it is surely new in the history of litigation that a familial word, resting at the core of a language, should so be appropriated by an outsider and blithely made off with in its corporate carpetbag, to be enclosed and fenced off by all sorts of aggressive litigation.
And no doubt it is part of the New Imperialism of Pax Americana that McDonald's should now say (as they do) that countries which contain their restaurants do not go to war with one another. Mmm.
A Small Problem
Nice one and it sounds persuasive the theory being that countries with the stability to invite McDonald's in and, just as importantly, for McDonald's to accept the invitation, have reached a level of economic maturity which inclines its middle class not to go to war.
Good. But there is a small problem here. American regional interventions, which in other countries would be called wars, within the vocabulary of Pax Americana are seen as police actions.
Did Panama City have no McDonald's when the Americans invaded and overthrew a government they disliked? Did I invent the memory of having seen McDonald's there 10 years ago? And Grenada? Did it have no McDonald's?
The real point surely is that McDonald's, at 40 years old, is simply too young for it to be an index of anything other than the widespread human desire to eat the odd combination of slimy blandness of a Big Mac. Between 1815 and 1854, no two possessors of steam warships went to war with one another. So what?
And anyway, we are still in the early stages of post communist Pax Americana. The bipolar world is only just over we have not had time to invent new forms of conflict.
Generally speaking, the prosperity which permits the presence of a McDonald's is not the guarantor of no war. What causes no war normally speaking is the behaviour of countries which are run as democracies.
For no democracies have ever gone to war with one another, with the semi-exception of Ireland and Britain between 1919 and 1921, and Russia and Chechnya more recently, and one further exception, which we'll come to in a minute.
In both the first two cases secessionists wanted independence faster than the old imperial government understood how to grant it. In both cases, the wars were immensely un-popular and were, relative to other conflicts, brought to a swift conclusion.
But all other wars have been fought by dictatorships or militaristic oligarchies or monarchies against one another, or against democracies.
Democracies seek conflict resolution with other democracies without war. Democracies do not invade other democracies but they do go to war with undemocratic countries.
Vanishing Virtue
There is, for whatever reason, a willingness amongst the middle class of democracies to stomach a "virtuous" war, though its virtue invariably vanishes on the first day the first conscript meets his end.
This will probably remain the case no two democracies will go to war with one another, though we should assume democracy is a permanent condition which does not evolve, or collapse, into something more dreadful.
Does the name Weimar ring any bells?
And modern non democratic regimes, though tiortha na mBig Macanna such as those in Singapore, Indonesia, China, Indonesia and an increasing number in the Middle East, are certainly capable of finding themselves in a war which could involve another McCountry.
The central flaw of the McDonald's thesis is its typically American McOptimism. As it happens, there has been only one whole hearted war between two democracies in history. It was the American War Between the States, the first modern war, but not, I fear, the last.
The day will surely come that the combatants on both sides of a war are fortified by Big Macs before battle, as once they were fortified by that other and somewhat earlier guarantor of peace, Men of the Cloth.
We are sons of Cain and that, son hood, alas, is enduringly more powerful and more creative than the spurious sonhood of McPeace can imagine.