Back when the film Red Dawn came out one of the promotional pictures for it featured a group of Soviet troops and a BMP APC parked in front of the Golden Arches. It was an effective way to summarize the invasion of the USA in one picture.

But a few years later in the Pentagon I opened a copy of Defense News and found a two page spread inside. It was again a picture of Soviet troops in front of a McDonalds’s. But it was the McDonald’s in Moscow. American fast food had invaded the USSR – and shortly thereafter the hammer and sickle was hauled down from the flagpole over the Kremlin for the last time.

And ironically, I later read that the last abortive attempt at salvaging the USSR, the August 1991 coup attempt, was planned by men who used that same McDonald’s for their meetings. That choice of meeting place should have told those conspirators something, right there.

I read that the director of the Australian film commission said that a country that could make a film like Star Wars deserved to rule the world. The Russians might say the same thing about the Big Mac.

P.S. Try the country fried steak special at KFC on Tuesdays. It ain’t bad for the price.