I was ambling aimlessly about Jerusalem when a ten foot high yellow letter M appeared suddenly in the street in front of me. It stood garishly out of place in the dusty mishmash of Middle-Eastern architectural history that makes up the centre of the western part of the city. I gaped and blinked, but the M didn't go away. Yet again, Jerusalem had floored me.
Eventually it sank in. McDonald's has come. They have opened their first restaurant in the holy city. They are not the first burger chain to do so, and given the Israeli love affair with North American culture, they are not likely to be the last. However, this is not just any McDonald's. This is the McDonald's in Jerusalem. It is not about fast food, so much as a teleport for home-sick tourists and escapist Israelis. Its existence is an event of cosmic proportions.
Here I must make a confession. I have been boycotting McDonald's, for personal reasons, since I was eleven years old. For the last few years, this boycott has been strengthened by my growing awareness of the great evil that the McDonald's corporation represents on the ecological, economic and cultural levels. I'm glad they're being sued, and I hope they lose.
My confession? Guess. I was hungry and I was there - I went up to the counter and ordered a Big Mac, with fries and a soft drink. I sat down with my tray in some shock, wishing I was Catholic so I could go and confess my sin. I took a sip of Coke, and winced, remembering that I was supposed to be boycotting that too. It was unreal. I was really doing this.
I got my next shock when I tackled the Big Mac. It wasn't just edible. It had been prepared in exactly the way that you would imagine it to be if it were served to you by a top McDonald's marketing executive at a business conference. The lettuce was fresh. So was the bun. The burger wasn't soggy. It looked like the picture on the menu.
A friend of mine who used to work in a London McDonald's explained to me once about the fries. They're made of totally reconstituted potato material pressed into shape, and aren't supposed to be anything other than a cheap way of making the customer feel slightly less full than they expected and ordering something else. This was perhaps the most occult thing of all. These fries were reasonably good.
Edible McDonald's food? Perhaps it was just because the place was new, and everyone working in the kitchens was still keen, but I think there is more to it than that. It may seem irrational and unnecessarily apocalyptic to suggest that I had experienced something of cosmic significance, but I believe that my position is entirely defensible.
There is no escaping the fact that in Jerusalem everything has spiritual significance for somebody. Whatever your religious orientation, whether you are Christian, Jewish, Moslem, Hindu, Buddhist, Atheist, Deist, or Militant Agnostic, there is no escaping the weight of spirituality in a city that has held the religious focus of such a proportion of the world's population for so long.
In Western culture, a great deal of people's religious focus is displaced by the product worship inducing techniques of mass media marketing. Mass marketing consists of selling your ideas to as many people as possible with a view to getting them to think and behave in a way that you want them to, whether those ideas are about a product, a political campaign, or a religion. Ask the average ten year old about McDonald's or Coke if you don't believe me.
Originally, religion had a virtual monopoly on mass marketing techniques, often with rather more aggressive campaign strategies than those employed in today's less violent markets. These techniques have been secularised and refined with the advent of capitalism, with the result that a large proportion of the world is now devoted to the secular if somewhat satanic religion of consumerism.
With McDonald's in Jerusalem the inevitable symbolic clash has come to pass. It's open seven days a week, and the meat is neither Kosher nor Halal. It's open on the Sabbath, and that's true no matter whose Sabbath you mean. It will probably be open on Yom Kippur, Christmas Day and all through Ramadan as well. That's the point.
While the pious Orthodox were praying in their mosques, synagogues and churches, I was sacrificing my taste-buds and nutrition on the shiny plastic disposable altars of the McDonald's temple. The symbols, the logo, the slogans, the patter and the ritual were as familiar to me as those of my parents' synagogue. It was spiritual slow torture.
In Jerusalem, there was no need to go checking up obscure references in Daniel or Revelations to understand why this McDonald's was different, on a cosmic scale. As I walked out through the huge yellow M, blinking in the dust and the hot summer sun, I just knew. I had this feeling in the pit of my stomach...