Want Fries With Your Malaise?

I spent another fun Sunday with the young one at the Golden Arches on Business Route 1 in Penndel, PA. When you enter the place, there is an enormous fish tank in the lobby, about six feet long by three feet high by two feet deep. In it are fancy guppies, swordfish, koi, angel fish, goldfish, a sponge or two, and I think we even saw a panda cory catfish. My son, however, wanted to see the hermit crab.

Disappointed that he was apparently missing, we stepped up to the counter and ordered the typical fare of salted, grease-fried, shortening-blasted, sugary, artery-clogging sludge we always order the few times we actually patronize this place.

We found a table in the play area and sat down to eat. This usually is impossible on a weekend, but most everyone else actually had the good sense to be outside on this beautiful day instead of holed up in this washed-out, sweltering, beaten-up tub of crumbling gym toys, stepped-on food and cracked floor tiles, awash in violently-designed primary colors and images of demented corporate cartoon characters.

In the midst of all of this, we could view and listen to CNN on a TV in the background. The caucasian male anchor with the salt and pepper hair and blue suit told us:

“President Bush said on Saturday that the U.S. economic expansion was solid, with thriving small business and factory sectors, despite a report showing weak payroll growth.”

Well, if Dubya is actually telling the truth for a change, then this place should be hanging the “Help Wanted” shingle any day now, I thought. Beyond this place, though, I don’t see much activity. Then again, the Home Depot up the road near Oxford Oaks may need somebody to sweep the floors on all shifts.

“Dad, I’m going to go down the slide,” he calls out to me as he climbs the mesh rigging up to the jungle gym, apparently giving up on his cheeseburger. I respond in approval, trying to wash down my McCluck Burger with some previously unknown colored carbonation.

“America’s economy is on the right track,” Bush said in his weekly family address. “Small businesses are flourishing. Factory output is growing. And families are taking home more of what they earn.”

I listen to this nonsense and shake my head while my child stomps overhead in the plastic tube en route to the slide. He is soon joined by other newfound friends, and I talk politely with other parents, each of us happily oblivious to the propaganda oozing out of the tube.

The rest of the visit proceeds, for the most part, uneventfully. The TV anchor changes on CNN to a clean-cut, well-coiffed young woman, again caucasian, with well-styled but barely noticeable “war paint” so as to look attractive but not actually alluring. She repeats the same news item of Bush telling us how rosy everything is, but adds that the Labor Department issued a report on Friday telling us that U.S. employers only added 78,000 workers to their payrolls in May, the weakest job growth in nearly two years.

Gradually, all of us, parents and children in tow, politely say our goodbyes and leave. As we depart, we notice Condolezza Rice on TV making a speech about the importance of democracy in Bolivia, Ecuador, and Haiti (good luck on that last one, I think to myself).

While we leave, my son and I pass the aquarium and notice that the hermit crab has emerged from behind a shipwreck and a piece of coral. As nearly as I could tell, he was glancing up to the TV and noticing Secretary Rice speaking. As he did so, he rubbed his body up against a stone in what could be a suggestive manner, quite possibly trying to diddle himself.