it purred. It was very thin beneath the fur. I carry it up eleven floor of stairs, and I say, ‘Ça va, ma petite chatte? Mignonne friponne.’ I knew nothing about cats except they like milk, so I pour it milk and then I go to sleep, very tired. And when I wake up, when I wake up, the stupide fuckeeng cat has piss on my floor.”
“So what did you do with it?”
She stopped to look at a church, circling it with her eyes. “You know why it is like this, this city? Emil Hácha surrender Tchècoslovaquie to the Nazis so these buildings would not be destroyed.” She heeled 360 degrees, put a cigarette to her mouth, and mimed for the lighter. “Why did you come here?”
“Why did I come to Prague?” I said, lighting her cigarette. “I was at a football match in Germany.”
“You have gone to Germany to watch a football match?”
“Aye. My mate Spocky said I should come here.”
“Why?”
“It was the UEFA Cup.”
“No, stupide, why does he say you are to come here?”
“You ken, for the demonstration and that.”
She started to walk again. “Spocky? You have a friend who is called Spocky?”
“It’s kind of like a nickname. We work together, in the fast food industry, Benny’s—”
“Benny’s Burgers?”
“We ken it’s a shite job, that’s why we’ve—”
“Lentement.”
“What?”
“Slow, slow.”
“Sorry. Ken means know.”
“I like your accent.”
“Aye? Barry means good. If you had a friend called Ken you could say ‘D’you ken Ken? He’s barry, eh? Radge means—’”
“You are working at Benny’s Burgers?”
“Aye. We’ve started this group, like a trade union.”
“Ah. This is in Scotland?”
“Aye.’
“Glasgow? Édimbourg?”
“Dundule. It’s kind of between the two.”
“Ah. And Spocky, he is also at the football match?” The way she asked these questions made my story sound like an absurd lie.
“No, he doesn’t like football. He came for this.” We passed a boutique with a jagged hole in its window and “NO WB” and “FUCK IMF” sprayed across its walls in red and black.
“And now he is where?”
“Who?”
“Your fuckeeng friend.”
“Oh, Spocky. I Dinnae ke—I don’t know. I lost him in the tear gas.”
“So maybe he is arrested?”
“I dinnae ken. I was looking for him when I met you.”
“Non—when you met me, you were asleep on the railway.” Then we reached Wenceslas Square and girls cobblestoned Mc-Donald’s and skinheads kicked the glass out of Deutsche Bank and local kids threw furniture out of KFC. It was there that she told me King Wenceslas was never a king, that history won’t leave Wenceslas Square alone; she was shouting above the applause of shattering glass. Then the police formed lines in front of the museum and burst the night with gas canisters and firecrackers. We ran forward throwing bottles and cobblestones, and somewhere in the back and forward, between our nervous advances and panicked retreats, I lost her in the crowd.
2
Whenever you question how something came to be the way it is, and especially if you try to change it, someone will tell you, “The world is just that way.” But the world is not just that way; there are reasons why things are the way they are. Take Benny’s Burgers. At Benny’s Burgers there is a procedure for everything—I mean everything. There is a procedure for how you wash your hands; there is a procedure for how you fill a mop bucket; there are procedures stipulating which side of your shirt you wear your name badge on and how you tie your apron. There are prohibitions on certain colours of socks and regulations on how high you can stack boxes (boxes of fries should be piled five high; boxes of fruit pies should only be piled three high). You’re allowed to cook nine hamburgers in a batch but no more than six chicken burgers. Why? Because that’s the procedure. Why? Because it’s just that way.
Wrong. Benny’s Burgers is not just that way; there are reasons why a small chain of Italian ristorantes became a multinational burger conglomerate. Benny’s began life in the Bronx borough of New York City. In those days it was Benito’s: a family place where the pizzas were cooked in a stone oven, the carbonara was recommended, and the seafood was surprisingly good. Sonny Alligarta ate there in 1958 (he had the spaghetti marinara) and he liked everything about it. He liked the precooked sauces and the pre-boiled pasta. He especially liked the teenage girls who served him from a numbered menu. In fact, he liked Benito’s so much, he bought it.
Sonny dreamed of expanding Benito’s across the continent, envisaging a time when basil and red wine would be indispensable to the diet of every American, but in 1963, a snapped fan belt left him stranded and hungry in Codicioso. As far as Sonny could figure, Codicioso only had one eatery. The burger he bought cost fifteen cents and was ready made when he ordered; served on a toasted bun, with a slice of cheese from a packet, it tasted like it had been sitting in a hot cabinet since before the Civil War. They were serving this shit and people were queuing up to buy it—the future, he decided, was burgers.
Sonny didn’t mean to disrespect his Italian heritage but Benito’s? It was a bit… un-American. So he changed the name to Benny’s. He replaced the chefs and waiters with children, college students, single mothers, and first-generation immigrants. He bought the cheapest ingredients and for two years he undercut every greasy spoon in New York. Soon you could get a Benny’s Burger in Chicago, Sydney, Shanghai, Islamabad—even Dundule—and with his fortune, Sonny found celebrity. Like Mc-Donald’s chief Ray Kroc, Sonny was moved to publish his autobiography, but while Kroc’s legacy is illustrated in poetic quotes that capture the Zeitgeist of post-war America, Alligarta’s statements have proved more controversial. Where “We sold them a dream and paid them as little as possible” is attributed to Kroc discussing McDonald’s staff, Alligarta is reported to have said of Benny’s employees, “We worked them like dogs and paid them like monkeys.” Kroc’s autobiography is filled with insights such as “It was not her sex appeal but the obvious relish with which she devoured the hamburger that made my pulse begin to hammer with excitement,” while Alligarta’s memoirs bluntly recollect, “The ketchup dribbled on her considerable cleavage, and it really gave me the horn.”
And yet, by 1998, Benny’s employed over a million people in over a hundred countries and annually spent over two billion dollars beaming Big Benny’s twisted world-view into toddlers’ underdeveloped minds. When we say something is just that way, what we’re really saying is that we don’t know, or can’t be bothered to explain, why it is the way it is. To try to understand McDonaldization (and Benny’s hated the term, preferring to describe McDonald’s as “Bennyized”) we’d need to consider the logic of capitalist production, investors’ demands for profit, and the resultant urge to maximise the extraction of surplus value from labour. We’d also need to consider the genealogies of Fordism and centralised scientific management, how the Fordist method of production was implemented to break the power of the organised working class, how the State turned machine guns on the unemployed during the 1932 Ford Hunger March, and so on.
But these are not the sort of events that corporate historiography records. Every year, Benny’s marks the anniversary of Alligarta’s