By Serhiy VASYLIEV, The Day
I often happen to hear complaints from solid gentlemen encumbered with
official posts, education, and memory that there is no state ideology or
clearly-expressed national idea.
Meanwhile, I have always thought it absolutely easy to spell out one.
For ideology is concretely embodied in ourselves, our customs, mores, behavioral
standards, and life stereotypes.
Last night, guided by a natural feeling of hunger and hiding from the
damp weather, I dropped in at the gaudy McDonald's on Khreshchatyk. In
there, I came across two friends, as cold and homeless as I, who were gulping
down their international Big Macs. We were sipping coffee and babbling
unhurriedly about things with what amounts to delight, as if we were somewhere
in Paris, the more so that each of us had already had the misfortune to
taste the discreet charm of European life. By the way, one of the advantages
of the latter is that you never stand in the way of somebody else, especially
in a place where you pay.
But in our McDonald's, where parents take their children on Sundays
as if it were an excursion, our cozy idyll was upset by an energetic girl
who got down to feverishly mopping the floor around our feet exactly the
way furious old women did in Soviet-era cafes. Of course, she was clad
in a uniform rather than battered overalls, and looked undoubtedly better
than those unforgettable charwomen.
When this McDonald's was still under construction, a friend of mine
let out a high-blown utterance to the effect that the opening of this snack-bar
would drive the last nail into the coffin of Soviet ways, meaning that
from now on we are going to stick to the Western life-style irreversibly.
What also inspired hope was the fact that McDonald's exclusively employed
young people uninfected to the fingertips by the Soviet habits. And it
may be true that these outrageously expensive and bland sandwiches with
a thin slice of ground beef inside were treated almost like a bulwark of
democracy. Something deep in my heart prompts: this bulwark has tumbled
down, too. Incidentally, my enthusiastic friend, a champion of Western
values, recently diddled me out of a handsome amount of money in a most
swinish way without batting an eye.
But, given our ideology, you might not bat an eye, either.






