Can I get equality?

We proud citizens of the world's preeminent democracy take profound satisfaction in the stubborn belief that our society is characterized by a condition of equality.  Fondly and in spite of evidence, we regard our social structure as a "level playing field," not a stratified hierarchy like the rigid British model from which our ancestors heroically disaffiliated themselves (and us).  Equality is a congenital American conceit, so ingrained in our cultural DNA that we're not always aware of how we express it in quotidian behavior and speech patterns.

One such pattern that seems almost trivial is ordering food.  When you are standing at the counter of a cafe or ordering a meal in a restaurant, how do you deal with the person who is standing in front of you and providing you with service?  What do you say?

Strangely but with remarkable consistency, what I nearly always hear in this circumstance is :

"Can I get a ... ?"

(coffee, cheeseburger, doughnut, whatever...)

It's an odd form of request, a strangely convoluted way to order something.  Note that the "I" is the active agent in the request.  The customer is the one who is getting the burger or the doughnut while the waiter's function in providing it is not acknowledged, which to my mind amounts to an outrageously offensive denial of the role of the waiter, who is the real active agent, the one who is actually doing something.

Idioms are murky things, but sophisticated semiotic analysis is not required to see that the reason for this denial is probably the customer's discomfort with the waiter's role as servant, as someone who is not regarded as an equal.  Since this particular expression is so utterly predominant in this very common scenario of ordering food, it looks as though a profound misgiving about inequality transforms a simple transaction into something that sounds more like a request for permission or a plea for forgiveness, and maybe it's just my contrarian perversity, but I prefer to say something like:

"Would you please get me a cheeseburger?"

because in the world I know, equality is a myth.  We actually live in a highly stratified society with a powerful class of wealthy people sitting at the top of a flattening pyramid with a pauperized middle that's sliding into penury and a permanent underclass that can't escape grim conditions.  Anyone from the nether regions who feels a twinge of discomfort when serviced by paupers is experiencing the more benign effects of a malignant structure of enduring inequality, and I don't eat cheeseburgers because the FDA is not protecting us from mad cow disease.

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