Does Your Burger Match The Picture?

One of the things that has entertained me since coming to Indonesia is looking at the American fast food chains and how they've reinvented themselves over here.

The 7-11 chains in Jakarta are like mini-grocery stores combined with deco diners.  They are usually two-stories tall, with the food court on the ground floor and a slick chrome and formica dining area upstairs.  They are popular hang-outs for the late teen set, who load up on hotdogs and Slurpies, or even a beer or two, and then sit around in cliques for several hours at a time.

The only people hanging out at 7-11s in the states are panhandlers roughing up customers for loose change.

Pizza Hut is really quite a shocker.  You'd be hard-pressed to find a Pizza Hut dine-in joint back home, but here they have hostesses and menus and a whole range of unique designer pizzas

The Wendy's, McDonald's and Burger King are pretty much like home, except you can buy rice balls and get hot sauce instead of ketchup with your fries.  The big difference here is that your food looks just like the pictures.  It is perfectly assembled and packaged with care and a bit of artistry.  The staff are friendly and helpful, and will bring the food to your table if you have to stand more than 30 seconds.

It makes me flash back to all the slopped together rubbish and the surly staff at most of the fast food joints I ever went to in the states.  None of it every looked like the photos.  The staff always give you the impression that they hate their job, and you too, and that it is a tremendous imposition on them to serve you.

I guess what it all boils down to is that America, at least in my lifetime, has been a place of vacuous promises with no real substance.  When you watch TeeVee, none of it resembles real life except that the characters look somewhat human, though far more quaffed than any of us real folk.

Service industries promise 'service', or at least we are led to believe that by the name of the industry.  Yet, the actual experience is far below what I would call 'service'.  You either get gum-smacking gansta wanna-bes, or overly cloy prepsters who are constantly auditioning for the next M-TeeVee 'reality' show.

Even American politics are hollowed out carnivals with endless haggling over a 'party platform' that is summarily trashed within 30 seconds after the oath of office has been read by rote.

About the only think one can think of that America has promised and actually delivered is the "American Dream".  It is, in every sense of the word, a dream, and just as tangible and real as a dream.  It's the "land of the free" with armed drones buzzing overhead.  It's the "home of the brave", where the populace is cowed by roving thugs with spiffy uniforms.  It's the defender of freedom and 'democracy', even if it means an offensive strike that contravenes all international law and convention to set up puppet dictators by fiat.

America is that great 'land of opportunity' where fully half the population takes some sort of government largess.  It is the place where Mom and Pop can't run their shop anymore because they have been regulated out of business.  The license fees, taxes, regulatory burdens, and mandatory insurance has complete gutted the meager profit they were able to eek out after the mega-box-stores rampaged through their market share and turned all their customers into wage slaves who can't afford to shop with Mom and Pop anymore.

We were told in school that in America, anyone could be president.  I suppose I missed all the footnotes about having to be a CIA spook or a bankster crook first.

We were told that America's greatness lay in the pages of her magnificent Constitution, yet even mentioning that document in a court of law will get you thrown in jail for criminal contempt (believe me I know).

I have to admit, though, that the man who promised 'hope' and 'change' delivered on his promises in spades. Now everyone 'hopes' he'll get thrown out of office and we can 'change' the administration.  Not that it matters much.  Obamney is the same thing with a pile of elephant dung behind him, rather than donkey.

Come to think of it, I have to believe the current occupant's new promise, as well.  "I'm not done yet," he says.  And indeed, there are still some tattered bits of the old Republic left to be discarded.  But again, even the promise of a premature Nobel Peace prize was a hollow and vaporous symbol, notable only for the magnificent sky show on the eve of the award ceremony.

Even the promise of 'we the people', for all its symbolism of a united citizenry striving together to perfect their union, is a fantasy.  When 'we the people' aren't at each other's throats over profound idealistic differences, we are being targeting and herded by the very federal offices created to protect our Natural Rights, which are now called civil rights and can be amended any time the 'civil authorities' feel threatened.

So it comes down to a choice, if one can abuse that great word thusly, between the current party in power that endorsed slavery, created the welfare state, bruought us the Federal Reserve and income tax, and gave us unlimited bloody human sacrifice (otherwise known as abortion), or the other party controlled by the oligarchs and corporatists whose only redeeming quality is that they would subdue the world for profit rather than club us to death with heart-bleeding idealism.

Once, America was the envy of the world.  It had government that at least had the veneer of lawful operation.  It's middle class lived lifestyles that were, in some cases, even beyond those of the rich in other parts of the world.  It promised endless upward mobility and ever increasing consumption.  It's technology and innovation were far beyond the capabilities of all but a handful of countries.
Now America's government is awash in blatant corruption, not unlike your favorite third-world dictatorship.  The world's middle classes are quickly catching up to that mythical suburban lifestyle, with most families able to afford breeder buses and full refrigerators and the latest electronic gee-gaws.  Even countries that were just a decade ago celebrating indoor plumbing are now sending folks into space and probes to other planets.

Is there nothing left for America to promise?  Or is its new promise to the world a war of endless carnage and remote-operated death machines?

It is times like these when nations serious about survival should turn to the deepest form of self-critical thinking.  But America seems intent on cataclysmic self-immolation instead.

The Spirit of 1776 is just that, another in a long line of fantasies and phantasms that bear little relevance to current reality.  The worst part about great dreams is that one must always wake up from them.  It's time to make the burger match the picture again.

Slippery Slopes Of Dreams

I had a very strange dream just now.  That it was strange is not unusual.  That I had a dream is unusual.  I've never been much of a spontaneous dreamer.  When I need inspiration, I focus on the problem before I go to sleep, and the answer typically comes to me in a dream.

This one was strange because it involved Lee Harvey Oswald, and because my dad was in it.  The latter almost never happens.

At any rate, I was part of a select press tour to view the remains of Oswald, so as to finally put to rest a bunch of conspiracy theories over the years.

We were taken to a place that looked kind of like Arlington National Cemetary.  If you've never been there, it's a rather stark monument to sheer number of its own people an Empire is willing to sacrifice.  Near the center, there is a building for holding ceremonies and such.  We were taken there by an older man who had a sour look on his face and kept trying to debunk all the conspiracies.

Among the group were politicians and newsfolk I've known over my life.  Molly Ivins was one who did her usual quipping with perfectly timed, acerbic remarks.  Most of them were writers.  I don't recall any TeeVee people.

There seemed to be an interminable build-up.  I've already forgotten the exact focus of this exercise, but the host kept droning on about how this event would finally put to rest all the theories and speculation that had built up around Oswald.  Folks milled around outside the building waiting for showtime.  As was typical of the old time, hard-core news writers, everyone was smoking and standing around in groups pontificating on various aspects of the story at hand, each being an expert in some aspect of it.

Finally, we were led into the main hall where the casket sat open at the front of the room.  I couldn't see inside, as my view was either blocked by someone else, or was at an oblique angle.  We all queued up to file past.  I was near the end of the group.  When I finally made it to the box, it was a very strange sight.

Oswald looked as if he had died 10 minutes before.  He had a strange sort of Napoleon hair-cut with the top brushed forward.  He was heavily made up and wearing a 60s-style brown suit.  It was more strange for the position he was in.  His head was tilted slightly to the right, his legs were drawn up and his arms were splayed out to the sides.  As I recall, the box was quite a bit larger than normal.  The body plainly looked like Oswald, though.

After the viewing, the folks broke up into small groups and were gathered in various places around the interior and outside.  Everyone seemed quite happy with the results...except me.  I kept walking around, waiting for an opportune moment, and then asking, "When did they move him to Washington?"

For the most part, I was ignored.  The few who acknowledged my question simply dismissed it as an unimportant detail.  I kept trying to make the point that Oswald was buried in Dallas, and we were in Virginia, and supposedly our hosts had just disinterred the body for our little junket.  No one seemed to care about the minor detail.

At this point, I sat down and lo and behold!  There's my dad sitting the row in front of me.  When it came to history, Dad always had all the answers.  It was one of those things were I hated to ask a question, because I knew what was coming.  Every answer was an hour-long lecture on the swirl of events that led up to, and then away from any crux in the flow of history.

What I dreaded was not that he knew incredible details about historical events, it was that none of it was in my text book and wouldn't help answer the question on the test, or at least so it seemed...  The other part I dreaded was that every one of those hour-long lectures ended with some kind of Catholic guilt moral.  It always came back to the people involved being unrepentant sinners and if they had only gone to communion, the whole world would be right today, blah blah blah.

Usually by that point, I was trying to exeunt stage left to go finish my report.

Anyway, I asked him when Oswald had been moved to Washington.  Well, that set off an hour-long lecture about how some guy had bought the final remains out of pity for some strange convoluted reason.  It involved a swirl of events and people, each with competing motivations.  It was an intricate dance of details, as all my dad's answers were.  Fascinating in the weaving...always.  I could listen to him for hours (and often did).  I just had to make an escape when it became a Catholic morality play, in which I was Everyman watching the sinful foibles of the other characters, hoping to take away some deep, spiritual meaning from all of it.

The dream wrapped up with my dad saying, "Sad, lonely man.  Didn't make his final confession."  The last scene was the Zapruder film clicking by in frame-by-frame detail, only it was if I was standing there.  The images were sharp and clear and didn't shake like the camera.

Then I woke up.

I'm not sure what the point of all this is.  Is it my refusal to be satisfied with pat answers?  Was it just to remember that little detail about my dad and his long-winded tales of Catholic guilt?  Or was it my compulsion to see connections where others don't?  Certainly, I was honored to be included in that company of folks.  They were all writers that I admire, though I was getting rather annoyed at their refusal to ask the obvious question.

Or maybe the whole point was that I shouldn't eat spicy food before bedtime.

Dreams are odd creatures.  They are highly symbolic, which is one reason I enjoy them so much.  The act of interpreting and deciphering is a fun treasure hunt.  My dreams are often prophetic, in that I am able to see the outcome of highly complex events.  Actually, I think the more appropriate word is 'feel' the outcome, because the dreams are rarely explicit.

Not many people pay a lot of attention to their dreams.  I learned to use them for inspiration on my various projects.  Usually, the more vivid and express the dream, the more awards I won for the project.  They are a great source of inspiration and insight, even though they seldom seem on topic, or even vaguely related to the task at hand.  Usually what happens, is some part of the dream will rise up like cream on fresh milk, then I just scrape it off and enjoy, if the evil neighborhood raven doesn't come and steal it first.

Some people try to direct their dreams, to take control of them and manipulate events.  I prefer to let them unfold in their own way.  It's typical of folks to want to control Nature and spoil the the simple message She is sending.  Just let it be.

In the end, it was probably just my wife's spicy sapi rendang, hold the rice.  Need to tell her to tone down the chili peppers before bed.