Joy Wright Abbott
Make Cheeseburgers Great Again
Judging by Ted Genoway’s recent New York Times opinion piece and the fake “Juice Burger” ad in Joseph Gordon-Levitt and the Gregory Brothers’ video send-up of the second 2024 Presidential Debate , also commissioned by NYT Opinion, it appears that cheeseburgers are having a serious moment in our political discourse. And with an affirming sigh I say, “Finally, something we can sink our teeth into.” In a fit of angst on Election Day 2020 and the tenuous aftermath, I penned the following essay which appeals for our Electorate to meet me at our lowest common point on the political high road, making cheeseburgers great again.
[Tuesday, November 3, 2020]
All I wanted was a cheeseburger. A double cheeseburger, from McDonald’s, with a small fry and a small diet Coke. All from the dollar menu, four dollars and change.
It’s not that I am a huge McDonald’s fan. I only go there a handful of times in a year, sometimes by necessity (nothing else is open on the Turnpike late at night), sometimes by choice (someone else’s) and sometimes for inexplicable cravings. It might be Fillet o’ Fish that lures me there, or a small fry snack. If I’m really down in the dumps, I might spring for a Big Mac. Usually, though, a double cheeseburger is my jam. It’s nothing fancy – just bun, meat/cheese, meat/cheese, factory pickle, metered condiments, bun. It’s a singularly North American creation that, for me, has just the right proportion of toothiness and goo. It doesn’t break the calorie bank quite as badly as other items on the menu, either.
I’m not entirely sure why it had to be McDonald’s on that particular outing, but it was Election Day 2020. We were eight months into the COVID-19 pandemic. It may have also had something to do with growing up a country kid, before strip malls, farm implement dealers and flea markets gobbled up our family’s beef and poultry farm on the outskirts of Springdale, Arkansas. The first McDonald’s in our area arrived in the nearby college town of Fayetteville when I was deep into elementary school in the early 1970s. McDonald’s was a big treat back then –a birthday or a good report card treat.
Springdale landed its own set of golden arches in 1976, with all the Bicentennial hoopla a town of twenty-five thousand people could muster. Even the Formica tabletops were done in red, white and blue stripes. Wendy’s followed in High School, with its wondrous square patties, but it never rose to the same status as Mickey-D’s.
Maybe I don’t have to say it, but there wasn’t an awful lot to do on Saturday nights besides drive around. “The Loop” for most kids at the time consisted of the Fayetteville McDonald’s at the southern end, and our McDonald’s on the northern pole along U.S. Highway 71, an early 20th Century main drag that was bypassed shortly after I left town just after graduation. Between one set of arches and the other, my friends and I made stops at the drive-through liquor store and Sonic drive-in for straws and mixers for sloe gin or Boone’s Farm Strawberry Hill.
I don’t condone this behavior of course, no matter how limited one’s cultural opportunities might have been back then or are now. But it was the early 1980s, and this is how we scoped our prospects, and stroked our hopes of meeting someone cute who might marry us some day, or at least take us to the prom. Cruising was how I learned what might lie beyond The Loop that would warrant doing well enough in school to land a good job and hightail it out of there. If you’d told me I would have landed in a northern industrial city back then, I would have laughed you out of town, but here I am in Pittsburgh, PA, in 2020, with a foot on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line, in the place that could very well determine who our next President will be.
On Election Day 2020, I was running critical errands (pharmacy, bank, gasoline) in my week-old car, which had a sunroof and a three-month free trial of XM Radio. The “Five Things You Should Hoard Before the Polls Close” scrolled into mind from a morning talk show, but it was sunny and seventy degrees, a November windfall in the climate apocalypse, so I drove onward. I had several more hours to kill before the ballots started ticking in. I got hungry. I was out of the house for the first time in way too long, and I wanted to stay that way for just a little longer. I wanted a double cheeseburger, dammit, and fries, with extra salt and ketchup – sticky, tangy Pittsburgh-sweet Heinz Ketchup.
McDonald’s was out of the way, but not that out of the way. It was 12:30 pm, peak lunch hour, but it’s a pandemic, baby. How bad could the drive-through be?
Not bad, I discovered, as I pulled into the nearest McDonald’s just across the High Level Bridge from my East End neighborhood, where the city’s “Eds and Meds Elites” are said to reside. The “Waterfront” shopping center sits smack-dab in the middle of Carnegie Steel’s former Homestead Works, which once spanned three municipalities until the industry collapsed in the early 1980s.
Homestead is infamous for a bloody four-month labor insurrection in 1892 involving ten thousand striking steel workers versus three-hundred Pinkerton private security agents and eight-thousand PA State Militiamen mustered by public and private interests to usher into the steel works strike-breaking “scabs,” a high percentage of whom were new foreign immigrants and displaced Black Americans from the south. Except for a dozen ten-story smokestacks, a transplant like me would never guess this flat spot along the Monongahela River had ever been anything but a bustling shopping center.
That day, the Waterfront McDonald’s lot was strangely quiet, though. Yellow caution tape fluttered on ‘unscalable’ fence panels. I circled the building in search of the drive-through entrance, but with no other traffic, and the lights dimmed inside, I soon concluded this location was merely closed for upgrades, not preparing for the post-election riots foretold by various media outlets.
My stomach rumbled on. Sweet sticky ketchup. Salt crust. Goo.
I recalled a second location a few miles up-river in the next inner ring suburb of Duquesne (pronounced Du-KAYN). This franchise sits across from Kennywood, an historic nineteenth-century amusement park built to attract harried workers and leisure class ridership to the end of the trolley line on weekends. The same family who built the park had owned it until a Spanish conglomerate bought it a few years back. It’s a gem, and highly recommended for any coaster lover. I especially love the Jack Rabbit, one of the oldest and largest remaining wooden coasters in the world. It’s a treasured family spot where time and tradition stand firmly in the hub of a perpetually dizzying world.
Across the Monongahela River in the borough of Braddock, U.S. Steel’s Edgar Thomson Works churns out one-quarter of U.S. output. The plant is both a marvel of domestic might and a rank reminder to squealing children and their parents that they’re at play in the steam and sulfurous shadow of what made our nation great, if industry were all that mattered. The Economy-Environment conflict is written all over the landscape and culture here. Everywhere you look, there’s beauty and pain, and work to be done.
_ _ _ _
It’s 12:45 p.m. on Election Day 2020. It’s a pandemic, baby, how bad could the drive-through be?
Pretty bad, it turns out. Cars wrapped the McDonald’s on the Duquesne side of Hoffman Boulevard, where one-third of the population lives in poverty. I got in line behind a shiny black four-wheel-drive Ford pick-up truck whose back bumper stood at even height with the hood of my compact SUV.
Three cars pulled in behind me. I could have maneuvered a right-hand U-turn to get out of the lot. I could have. But I wanted that cheeseburger. I wanted comfort, I think - predictability. I wanted free range, not to be cooped up at home any more than the pandemic required. I stayed put. I rolled down the windows. I pressed the sunroof deeper in its track.
With nothing but time at my disposal, I took in my surroundings: the flapping vinyl siding at the roofline, dry-rotted timbers underneath. Super-discount-family-value stores and rehab-dialysis-weight loss businesses beckoned from across the street.
I noted the stickers on the back of the pick-up truck. “God, guns and guts. Trump 2020” complete with crisscrossed semi-automatic rifles. I contemplated how Trump might possibly be connected with any one of those three Gs:
- Guns – has Trump ever fired one?
- Guts - well, I’d say he’s got a lot of nerve. But,
- God? This ‘G’ will forever stump me.
The license plate frame showed the driver ahead was an Iraq War Veteran. I imagined myself hunkered in a desert dust storm, praying to God for deliverance, for comfort, predictability - all the same abstract concepts that drew and kept me in the McDonald’s drive-through that day. I practiced feeling gratitude for my imaginary weapon and the guts it would take to wield it for the benefit of others’ freedoms. I guess the Three-Gs make some sense in that context. But here in line at McDonald’s, I could not shake my overwhelming sense of foreboding, of danger to myself and to the republic for which we all are supposed to stand.
On its beefy lift kit, the truck dwarfed my little orange Honda. I was and am a middle-aged, middle-class, unarmed mite compared to the stubble-headed driver and his chrome domed sidekick riding shotgun, yet despite our obvious differences, we were all on a similar quest.
I grew up with guns in my Ozark childhood. I don’t like them, but they weren’t something I ever really feared. My dad and generations before his were hunters and farmers raised on field and forest kill. They farmed so others could have their frozen patties, their crispy McNuggets, their Campbell’s Chicken Soup. And, yes, they killed to eat. But never did they celebrate their firepower in the way some do today, and it’s unthinkable that they would have turned a weapon of any kind on perfect strangers in a house of worship, as one local gunman did at the Tree of Life Synagogue in my Squirrel Hill neighborhood two years and one week ago from that very day. Unthinkable.
In the rearview, the drive-through line had doubled. Young white faces bobbed over handheld phones, like a string of river buoys, while three Black workers scurried inside to feed them. Someone’s sub-woofer engulfed us all in a gut-pulsing, brain-churning net of noise that only added to my feeling of being trapped in a cauldron of sound and fury, captive to my self-defeating desire for four-hundred-fifty calories and half a daily dose of sat-fat.
I interrogated myself: Why am I risking my life in this pandemic for a sub-par, burger-like food, when I could be helping people vote, like my plucky friend in Mid-town Manhattan; or the mother of my son’s Kennywood coaster buddy, and thousands of other patriots much godlier and gutsier and substantive than I?
It’s 1:00 pm. I’ve placed my order. I’ve rounded the back of the building. Every membrane in my body is saturated with bass. The driver of the black truck pays cash at the first window. I’m still a good ten minutes shy of deliverance, but eventually the accordion window parts for me. The cashier, a woman about my age, cranes to see where all the bass is coming from. She voices the question that’s been drumming against my brain case for the last thirty minutes, “Who wants to listen to that?”
We exchanged wizened looks above our masks as her male counterpart left his post at the soda fountain to peer over her shoulder. “I just don’t understand it,” he said, in a cherished patch of common ground.
I received my blessed harvest, with a handful of ketchup and coins. I could have eaten at home, but I didn’t want my fries to get cold. I backed into a parking spot, still unnerved by the rearview camera feature, and set the brake. I shingled my lap and the pristine seats with napkins, and tucked into my fool’s errand.
The fries were cold as cardboard on a winter street, but I could choke them down with enough ketchup, my fingers, sticky like blood. The diet Coke was thankfully fizzy, with just the right amount of ice, and the burger? Exactly like I pictured it.
Was it the greatest burger I’ve ever had? Not even close. But it was familiar and predictable. At a time when every single thing we thought we could count on is upended by a global pandemic, economic turmoil, a burning, churning planet and the most contentious Presidential election in living memory (and that’s saying something) - at a time when everything seems bass-ackwards, shape-shift crazy, predictable sounds pretty damn goo.
It’s 2:00 p.m., and I’m back at home. I texted my sister, Bobbi, who lives in New York City.
JOY: Election Day check-in, here. Do you have a support system tonite?
BOBBI: Yes. It’s called chocolate and Shiraz.
JOY: Ah, yes. The ultimate throuple.
BOBBI: I’m dreading it. PTSD from 2016.
She shared the night’s stress-baking menu – Cornbread, Chex Party Mix (from scratch) and “Italian” Goulash, a deep ham-and-cabbage dive into our family’s Great Depression recipe file. I was hungry for comfort all over again.
I had something easy planned, myself – buffalo chicken salad. I wanted dessert, of course, but lacked the motivation. In the end, my sweet tooth was as persistent as my cheeseburger tooth. I settled on five-ingredient No-Bake Cookies (stick of butter, oats, sugar, cocoa powder, peanut butter). Ten minutes, a little heat, and bam! Photos of glossy chocolate clusters cooling on wax paper appeared.
Throughout the evening, Bobbi and I exchanged the latest ominous vote counts. She sent me a link for an “Emotional Support Canadian (ESC).” As it happened, I was at that very moment answering a text from my friend, Meagan, who had reached out from Toronto with a pic of a 2016 Westcott Vineyards Pinot.
MEA: Omg thinking of you tonight as we watch.
JOY: OMG I have been a shivering mess. Stress eating all day. Agghh! Let’s hope 2016 was a better year for Pinot than it was for politics!
MEA: Lol. We also baked a Brie and now we are moving on to chips. We are eating our pain.
I texted her my chocolate cookie pic.
MEA: Those look very election appropriate.
JOY: Not too horrible. Gluten free. High fiber. Right? Right?
MEA: We are not so wholesome. It’s like a State Fair eating contest over here.
JOY: Bring on the corn dogs! Food on sticks. That’s what I need. A wiener on a stick! I wish they’d talk about the Senate raises.
MEA: What’s that? Whatever it is, it sounds terrible.
JOY: Senate races – auto correct. Dems need to flip three seats to have a majority, four if Trump wins.
MEA: I’m watching CBN coverage so I appreciate this explanation. We are like ‘there is a state called Pennsylvania and . . . blah blah blah’. It’s much less nuanced.
JOY: They are parsing it down to the county level here. Zooming in and out with their touch screens. Dizzying.
MEA: Awesome. Now CBN is explaining the Electoral College.
I sent her a photo of a Chicago area Latinx-owned microbrew called “Chinga du Pelo” (in Spanish, ‘fuck your hair’). Its label featured Trump’s hair-like cranial appendage. A British friend who lives in Mexico, had posted it earlier that day.
JOY: Both our national neighbors are pulling for us. Have you seen this post for ‘Emotional Support Canadians’? My sister’s Polish friend sent it.
MEA: We can be your emotional support Canadians. Lol.
The whole world was watching.
Just after 2:00 a.m., I burrowed under the covers, snugged against my sleeping husband and let the tears slip onto my pillow.
_ _ _ _
[Wednesday, November 4, 2020, 10:31 a.m.]
JOY: I think my cheeseburger gave me the runs. Or maybe it was the butter in the buffalo sauce and/or the butter and raw oats in the cookies and/or the fall of our Democracy. I hope my system clears faster than the vote count. So far---on track.
BOBBI: Hahaha. It’s all going to the shitter.
In reality, Biden was leading in Arizona, Nevada, Michigan and Wisconsin. Pennsylvania’s then Secretary of State, the unflappable Kathy Boockvar, reported Trump’s lead of a half-million votes was slipping, thanks to mail-in votes that were tipping 75% in Biden’s favor. Life in a swing state steel town had never been more -- well, riveting.
_ _ _ _
[Saturday, November 7, 2020, 10:30 a.m.]
My husband is having his morning joe with MSNBC’s Morning Joe. A familiar Pittsburgh brogue drew me from the kitchen where I was fetching my own cuppa-cuppa. It was the voice of then Allegheny County Executive Rich Fitzgerald, who has since left office due to term limits. He was standing in the Great Allegheny Passage (GAP) bike trail opposite the Edgar Thomson Steel Works which huffed and chuffed in the background.
Instead of Fitzgerald’s usual suit, tie and great head of russet hair, he was sporting a Pitt baseball cap, a Carnegie Mellon University sweatshirt (his alma mater, he explained), and a rumpled white windbreaker. In order to capture the quintessential Old Pittsburgh steel town photo op, he had staked himself in a tight spot between Kennywood’s razor-topped fence and the Mighty Monongahela River far below. I know this, because I’m a frequent rider on the GAP trail. This stretch can be an eerie place to ride in the off-season without the bustle, the coaster screams, and laughter. On one side there are the cadaverous underbellies of mothballed thrill rides, while across the river, Edgar Thomson emits boiling clouds of silver-lined steam (or bottom-lined, lead-lined, or velvet-lined, depending where one rests on the economics-to-environment spectrum).
The camera is angled from below in a fish-eyed way that accentuates the belching factory in the distance and the size of Rich Fitzgerald’s nostrils. I said to my husband, “If I didn’t live here, I’d be thinking, ‘Who is this ya-hoo?’”
In that very moment, less than a football field away from the spot where, four days earlier, I’d consumed two freedom patties with fries, that ‘yahoo’ was the guy who held the fate of our country (if not the whole planet’s) in his hands. “Why did he have to choose that particular backdrop?” I lamented, when City Planners like me, our local NGOs, and even Fitzgerald himself have fought so hard to move our economy in cleaner, greener, more diverse and equitable directions? It even seemed like he amped up his Pittsburghese, a regional dialect that spawns dictionaries and joke books people give each other during the holidays.
He explained that with 95% of the votes cahnted (counted) in Allegheny Cahnty (County), 75% of mail-in ballots were still breaking for Biden. Similar splits were fahnd (found) in a handful of Philly metro precincts. He speculated that Pennsylvania’s twenty electoral votes would be declared in Biden’s column very soon.
Later footage showed Fitzgerald shuttling white corrugated bins in a cavernous cahnting (counting) room dahntahn (downtown). In this clip, he is decked out in cargo shorts, saggy tube socks and loafers in addition to his previous Pitt-CMU ensemble. It finally struck me that “this yahoo” had been up all night, in a long a string of nights, tending my vote. A tinge of admiration flickered to life. Rich Fitzgerald could have been mistaken for any Pittsburgh dad padding down any one of the city’s impossibly steep driveways in his bathrobe to fetch the morning news. This guy, this career politician, I could relate to.
I finished my coffee and went upstairs to wash, dress and make the bed. When I went downstairs twenty minutes later, my husband announced that Allegheny County and the last of the Philly precincts had just declared Biden the winner, and with them went Pennsylvania’s twenty electoral votes. After four days of non-stop, nail-biting coverage, Biden was suddenly the whole country’s President Elect.
Living at the electoral epicenter, I felt as though I’d given birth to the first day of the rest of our nation’s life. My nerves, my hopes, the import of my one little vote had never felt so palpable. Filling in those little circles, walking half a block to the mailbox, opening the hatch, all assuring our collective pursuit of life, liberty, health and happiness -- these simple acts have never felt more profound.
But even with the taste of sweet gooey victory still fresh on the tongue, I can’t ignore the corollary aftermath – the shizzlin’ drit reality that seventy-million customers still lined up to serve the Orange Julius Caesar.
Even with Trump out of office, Biden alone cannot bulldoze enough rubble from the last four years to fill the divides we face. How will we ever dismantle the walls, repair the bridges, mend the gaps, when the only thing we can agree on is how far from perfect our Union has become. Where in the world do we meet? How on earth do we even start?
I don’t claim to be an expert. I’ve got more than my share of gaps to mind, but I can’t help but think there are small moves we could make, with mass appeal, that are low on the controversy totem but meaty enough to sink our collective teeth into. I’m thinking something familiar, that’s singularly and universally American, that bridges farm and factory, crosses geopolitical lines, and sustains us in times of stress and celebration alike. What is this object - this objective - that has the power and reach to deliver us from the clutches of hunger and despair? What is the one thing we can all get in line behind? What if we make cheeseburgers great again?
I can see the memes, the tee-shirts and front yard placards now:
Let Freedom Ring Gluten and Dairy Free!
In Veg We Trust!
NOPE.
Why is it that the things that are good for us seem the hardest to swallow? How will we know what the body politic needs if we don’t start mixing up the menu?
Whether it’s charcuterie or Shake-n-Bake, Hot Pockets or haute cuisine, share what you have. Loosen the belts, be they rusty, sunny or Bible-buckled. Reach across a border – any border – from town to country, from south to north, turn a new leaf at the holiday table. Whether your thrills are found in a full-bodied Pinot or high up on Strawberry Hill, raise your glass, prepare your toast. Let us all dare to shout, “I’ll try what they’re having.” It’s more than worth four dollars and change.
_ _ _ _
From those tremulous days in the aftermath of the 2020 election, to now, a few weeks out from Election 2024, so much has changed and yet, so little. This time around we are fighting less for change than we are for survival, for a recognizable present, and a future that will move us toward not just a fighting chance at equity, but a peaceful one. But I’ll leave the riots, the dogs and cats, the abdication, invasions and convictions to other writers more serious and capable than I. I’ll stick to the local meat and buns.
When the 2020 Census came out, Pennsylvania lost a Congressional seat along with one campaign-winning vote on the Electoral College. Allegheny County Executive, Rich Fitzgerald has since left his post thanks to term limits. His successor, Sara Innamorato is a new generation former State Representative who crested with a wave of other local Progressive candidates in recent years, including U. S. Representative Summer Lee, U. S. Senator John Fetterman and Pittsburgh Mayor Ed Gainey, who ousted Bill Peduto, himself a self-styled Progressive, who ran afoul of protestors responding to the George Floyd murder by Minneapolis police.
Poverty in Duquesne has decreased by double digits. McDonald’s has vowed to raise the minimum wage at its corporate-owned locations to $15 by the end of 2024, while the meal I spent forty-five minutes waiting on costs 150% more than it did four years ago.
Are you better off now than 2020? It’s a question both parties like to pose. A better one, I would argue, is How did we end up here again? And I don’t mean just in the last four years.
Like the Pinkertons against the striking Homestead steel workers, we still fight like cats and dogs over corporate interests and worker’s rights, for an economy and an environment that feeds us all, including the millions of immigrants without whom very little would get done or made.
The struggle is awful sometimes. It’s been awful for a very long time – since the very dawn of our Republic, it would seem – but thankfully, our system was set up to help us regain equilibrium when we teeter, if only for a time. Checks and balances, we call them, the old time-tested ‘Three-legged Stool’ of Executive, Legislative and Judicial prudence. And I use this word, ‘prudence’ with great care and precision (with a cursory internet search, to validate my choice). Thomas Aquinas broke the term down into three easy steps: 1) to take counsel; 2) to judge soundly; 3) to act. Merriam Webster expands the definition by adding, “. . . the ability to govern and discipline oneself by the use of reason; wisdom; skill and good judgment in the use of resources.” How’s that for a Vision?
We’ve seen, and history adds its own examples, when one of the three legs becomes compromised. But what happens when all three legs are weakened, or when one grows longer than the others? (Pinocchio springs to mind).
So far, this campaign season has seemed like a referendum on just what kind of stool we’re talking about. There’s a clear choice now: the down-in-the-gutter kind of stool, or the three-legged, uphold-the-Constitution, lift-up-our-Republic-so-we-all-can-stand kind. If most of us don’t choose the latter, we may all end up in the shitter.
1. “Trump Said Democrats Will Take Away Your Hamburgers. He’s the One Who Might,” [September 2, 2024]https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/02/opinion/trump-immigration-border-meat-food-crisis.html
2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nmzgOJjARdw
3. https://data.census.gov/table/ACSST5Y2020.S1701?g=060XX00US4200320432
4. https://data.census.gov/table/ACSST5Y2022.S1701?g=060XX00US4200320432
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