C8H10N402 (Caffeine):

The last legal high!

(This session is dedicated to the barrista and other great folks at The Bean Tree in Sacramento, who fuel my double espresso thirst, periodically)

I have long wanted to devote some time and reflection to the subject of coffee, that wonderful distillation made from the bean of Coffea arabica (or Coffea robustica) that today fuels the entire industrial powerhouse that is Western Civilisation. To say that coffee is virtually a 'sacred' brew is not just underscoring its importance to American industrial dynamism and the value I personally place upon it, but reiterating an awareness that has been in circulation since the plant was first discovered in Ethiopia in about the 6th century AD.

One of the problems attendant to this wish is the fact that the very source of my muse (Caffeine) that sparks these periodic rants also tends to spin them out on far-flung tangents, the likes of which was demonstrated in January's MAYDAY comments on children (when coffee was the intended target subject). Be that as it may, I have been a dedicated devotee of the Coffea Arabica cult since my early and impressionable years as a young bhikku in Berkeley in the late 60s. (It is interesting to note that while the effects of coffee have heretofore never been conclusively shown to be deleteriuous, no matter how much the anti-caffeine forces howl, very recent medical studies suggest that too much caffeine hastens wrinkling and other aging processes! Alas, alack!)

(Below: Coffee beans, L- R, Coffea arabica and Coffea robusta)

In a recent read-through of Mark Pendergrast's excellent, informative, and entertaining 550 page opus on the subject (UNCOMMON GROUNDS, Basic Books/Persius Books Group, 1999, ISBN 0-465-03631-7), I was fascinated to learn of the pioneering part Alfred Peet played in the modern renaissance of coffee (60s) with his institution of Peet's Coffee & Tea (now Peet's Coffee, Tea, & Spices) on Walnut Square in Berkeley (on April Fool's Day, 1966). I say fascinating because in 1968 I had returned from the Vietnam War to Berkeley and found myself living on Spruce Street, just a few blocks upstream of Walnut Square. Having been a wannabe Beatnik ever since learning of the Beat 'movement', I was immediately attracted to Peet's like a coolie to opium. Peet's of that early anti-war era was an epicenter for a wide range of Berkeley people that included Max Scherer (of The Berkeley Tribe), most of the UC Berkeley grad students, almost all of the US Berkeley faculty, a motley consortium of 'street people', and counterculture folks of just about every political and ethnic shade in the spectrum. To say it was a heady and intellectually stimulating place is not doing it sufficient justice. And it was there that I first learned to worship, honor, and obey the aroma, taste, and neuron-firing effects of Peet's espresso. My memories of early weekend mornings spent huddled over a Doppio Espresso against the chill tendrils of SF Bay fog, while some respected UCB philosophy department professor held forth on his own personal Weltanschaung to the assembled regulars, are among my most cherished of that brilliantly promising and invigorating period of my life.

(Below: Cross Section of a roasted coffee bean--or a human brain after too much coffee consumption, you choose)

Real coffee was a new game for many people at the time, after the conditioning that decades of weak, washed-out American commercial coffee had instilled in most people. At about the same time (actually a little earlier, in the 50s) Cafe Trieste in San Francisco's North Beach community had established an espresso presence that helped channel the creative bohemian undercurrents fomented by the 'Beat movement'. In Berkeley, across the San Francisco Bay, it took slightly longer for the true European style coffee renaissance to take hold. At any rate, by the start of the 1970s, several other players were in the coffee selling game, including the members of Sun Myong Moon's religious cult (remember the 'Moonies'?), who ran a coffee business (selling retail beans) on College Avenue. The latter group sold the prized and ultra-rare Jamaica Blue Mountain bean by the pound, although it was later found that their JBM beans were a sham and not genuine JBM (even in those early 70s days it was hard to find, since most of the JBM crop went to Japan at premium prices); 'Moonies', it seemed, were apparently not above unconscionable bilking of others, despite their proselytizing zeal for 'the truth'. JBM beans were at that time nearly US$ 20 per pound, which was for that period quite an extravagance (now, by comparison, even ordinary Brazilian beans sell for prices by the pound in that vicinity).

(Below: The 'Brothers Starbuck', circa 1971)

Starbucks (identifiable now as 'the corporate enemy', rather than the kindred coffee provider it was when first started by ex-college students Baldwin, Bowker, and Siegle, in Seattle) opened their first store March of 1971, after spending some time with Alfred Peet in Berkeley observing his practices and business approach. From that time of simple and honest beginnings to the present, Starbucks has regrettably transmogrified itself into just another uncaring monster of a corporate enterprise; consequently, and I hope others also feel similarly, I would not today set foot inside one of their establishments out of disdain for what they have become. The sight of yet another Starbucks franchised coffee outlet opening up in the neighborhood is now anathema of the very worst sort, despite the fact that the average (politically insensitive) person probably loves their products. Unfortunately, a preponderance of today's older coffee drinkers have long since lost their sharp political edges and many who are under the age of 30 undoubtedly do not know anything at all of the truly profound political or cultural history of coffee, either at the present time or throughout the long and sad past decades of coffee's exploitative and grossly negative impact on global commerce and economy. And speaking of Starbucks, as an amusing example of how they have sold out to establishment môres, Starbuck's first logo, which featured a bare-breasted mermaid of the type typically characteristic of vintage Nantucket whaling days, has now been modestly 'sanitised' into a stylised, asexual merperson, thereby undoubtedly making all the political correctness cadres absolutely ecstatic.

(Below: An Arabian 'Dullah'--traditional Bedouin brass coffee pot)

Pendergrast's book UNCOMMON GROUNDS is a wonderful education in itself, not just for all of the fascinating information presented therein about the complex history of the coffee bean, but for the attendant and consequent education it provides about political economies, American corporate and commercial meddling in other nations' affairs, and the sorry results of the international obsessive fixation on the stimulating brew that so many of us regard as the world's last 'legal high.' In fact the story of coffee's introduction to the United States and the development of its marketing and distribution is a sort of all-encompassing and self-encapsulated history of the American advertising industry. It was the introduction of commercial coffee and its marketing that later 'happily' coincided with the dawn of radio and television advertising--two mediums that have had stunning impact on us all in terms of their enabling the development of ordinary business entities into the monsterously greedy, world-wide corporate powers that threaten to strangle us all in their lovingly exhaustive consumer embrace.

Very few are today aware, for instance, that the CIA engineered overthrow of Salvadore Allende's socialist regime in El Salvador was not the first instance of an intricately contrived political plot purposefully orchestrated by the United States to depose heads of state not favorably disposed towards American business interests: sadly, such Machiavellian schemes were virtually standard US foreign policy in the late 1800s and early 1900s, with regard to our relations with Central and South American producers of coffee. Further, our policies and business practices--both official and unofficial (see "unofficial", read "all but overtly criminal")--regarding Brazil, Guatemala, Colombia, and other nations in the South American hemisphere are directly responsible for the general destruction of the social economies of those countries. With their continual, immense, and virtually unpayable national indebtedness to the World Bank, and the unrelenting widespread destruction of the Brazilian rain forests which new shadeless coffee tree strains have encouraged, widespread economic chaos in South America continues unchecked.

Equally few are those who understand the part that the cultivation of coffee has played in the historic genocidal war between Burundi's ruling Tutsi tribe and the enslaved Hutus in Africa--a recurrent mutual slaughter that has to date claimed perhaps upwards of a million Africans since that rabid mutual tribal hatred began. Most people should be shamefully aware, however, of the fact that due to the complete absence of any high-priority US strategic interest in Africa (i.e. no rich oil reserves or other vital natural resources), the United States has repeatedly stepped back from what would otherwise be entirely justifiable and appropriate support of the democratic peace process in that bitterly impoverished and savagely neglected region. If, on the other hand, there were oil at stake, there isn't a shadow of a doubt that America would be embroiled in this African socioeconomic chaos up to its neck (viz. such as we are in the Middle East, Afghanistan, etc.).

(Below: Anatomy of a steam-espresso machine)

Aside from the gross political and economic ignorance of the average American with regard to the dirty little secrets underlying the world's insatiable demand for coffee, the social and cultural history of Coffea arabica provides many hours of stimulating reading. After absorbing all of the half thousand pages of history that Pendergrast's book explores in no small detail, it should be virtually impossible for anyone who hoists a cup of coffee to their mouth to do so completely devoid of thoughts about this amazing bean and the earth shattering effects its cultivation has produced all around the world. After such a fascinating read, each gulp of the brown, life-giving elixir that coffee essentially constitutes for so many becomes essentially a small political act in itself.

In mulling over all of the sometimes disturbing information assembled in UNCOMMON GROUNDS, many consequent awarenesses come swimming through the murk of the vapid normal mindlessness that Caffeine helps cut asunder. One of these relates to the frequently reiterated and oft repeated admonishment that extreme right-wing, jingoistic superpatriots hurl at social critics who pointedly bring up deficits in our nation's makeup and the conduct of its affairs: namely, "If you hate this country so much, why don't you go live in one of them poor (banana republic) nations, full of starvation, poverty, political instability, and social chaos?" After reading Pendergrast's book, one realises the FULL irony of that sort of ignorant put-down, for after all, it was and is the same continuing economic depredations of cut-throat American business and commercial practices that have created such abject misery in those less fortunate nations these jingoists impugn! Ignorant right-wing 'superpatriots' haven't an inkling of these facts, naturally, and even if they were made mindful of the historical veracity of these revelations, they would reject such "alleged" heresies out of hand as totally false.

(Below: A sample of Shannon Wheeler's TOO MUCH COFFEEMAN)

Seen in the uncomfortable illumination of such unsparing and exhaustively researched work as Pendergrast has undertaken in his book, the supreme hypocrisy of many of our standing domestic and foreign policies stands out as painfully exposed as would be escaping convicts frozen in a searchlight's probing glare. Thus, for a number of reasons, UNCOMMON GROUNDS bears reading by anyone interested not just in the history of the wonderful coffee bean so many of us are hooked on, but in the broadest cultural, economic, and political nuances of our mighty superpower of a nation.

And speaking of coffee, anyone who is a dedicated caf-fiend of the first water owes it to him/her self to tune into the the brilliantly insightful world of TOO MUCH COFFEE, MAN!, which started out as a cartoon series about a little coffee-cup character, embodied with the essential hyper-angst and mania of the substance, but which has now grown into a cult magazine dedicated to the worship of coffee and all that it relates to. The website, which is a good site for getting tuned into what Coffeeman is all about, is found at: http://www.TMCM.com . Back issues, TMCM T-shirts, and much more are to be found there, among a variety of creative items. Dial it up and prepare to enjoy a steaming immersion in a cup of alternate caffeinated reality! TMCM is the brainchild of talented artist and social raconteur Shannon Wheeler.

As for myself, the role of coffee in the development and stimulation of intellectual thought and reflective awareness has always been for me as supremely important as anything else imparted in the ritual public imbibing of the black brew. Coffeehouses have long been a source of thought, enlightenment, radical vision, social awareness, and kindred communality for centuries--both abroad and in the USA. Anyone fully acquainted with the historical ingress of coffee to the Western World is well aware of the intellectual coffeehouses of Vienna on the Ringstrasse, the wickedly Bohemian cafes of Paris' Rive Gauche, the Beat hangouts of San Francisco's North Beach and New York's Greenwich Village. During the Vietnam War, for example, a series of coffeehouses known as "G.I. Coffeehouses" sprang up around major US military installations, wherein the uniformed anti-war resistance (that's me, Ma...) took root and grew to rise in fierce opposition to the ongoing lunacy that was America's war in Vietnam. Even in far-flung and perpetually frigid North Dakota, where I wintered with the Air Force (in a SAC B-52 wing at Minot AFB), we initiated a coffeehouse of this overtly political type right there in the basement of the local USO! In that haven and among fellow Air Force protestors, our own particular form of anti-war resistance sprang to life and flourished. It was a formative period in my own life and those long, cold, and deep-frozen North Dakota winter nights were made all the more tolerable by virtue of plenty of Av-Gas strength coffee, I can assure you, as we orchestrated our own journalistic contributions to the ongoing "peace-war" effort.

(Below: L-R, Over-extracted espresso, under-extracted espresso, and a perfectly extracted espresso)

Interestingly, I am reminded by all these reflections and recollections on the Vietnam experience of a very important distinction: the distinction between the terms DEFENSE and WAR. As many of you know, back in the American Civil War era, we had a "War Department", rather than a "Defense Department". Quite a while thereafter (after the Second World War), what has now come to be the norm of euphemistic spin-doctoring was applied to our military forces organisation, and "War Department" became sanitised to "Department of Defense". Despite this superficial cleansing act, however, we have continued to expand the definition of our economic strategic interests so broadly around the world that despite our declared emphasis on "Defense", we continue to periodically conduct belligerent operations all over the planet in support of purely economic objectives.

Defense, of course,  is functionally just that, of course....protective action undertaken to defend against a threat. The word War, on the other hand, carries no such self-limiting constraint in its essential definition.  My own belief is that the Armed Forces of this nation should be and ideally are committed to defending our national borders against the incursion of an unfriendly/hostile foreign power....only. Unfortunately, the definition of what exactly constitutes our 'national borders' has also been so vastly distorted by the capitalistic agendas of American business interests that such flagrantly aggressive intrusions into the sovereign affairs of other nations (as that which took place in Vietnam) have been not only allowed, but wildly supported by a moderately large section of the population (by short-sighted and intellectually myopic idiots, obviously).

(Below: Cartoonist Bill Maulden's famous 'dogface' character "Weary Willie", trying to heat coffee in WWII)

Unhappily, war is fought by young men and ordered and commanded by old men. It is an irony of life that young men, filled with raging Testosterone and terribly vulnerable to the hype and passion of exhortations to wage war, are easily hornswoggled into enlisting in any half-baked military adventure that our corporate rulers have determined are appropriate (read: "in our best interests") and are then sent out to die. By the time they realise what war is really all about, it is too late for many of them. The survivors of these periodic slaughters, not wanting to admit that they were bamboozled into something as colossally stupid as offering their lives for the sake of protecting philistine American economic (read "corporate") profit margins, tend to band together in veterans' fraternal organisations where they thereafter try to fool each other into thinking that such mass stupidity as is war is actually a great and glorious adventure. Far too many also end their days suicidally depressed, disallusioned,or psychotic, when the brutal reality of truth latently settles in on them. To wit:  Once a war is over, no one cares a fig about former brave sacrifices and heroic offerings of self and life for yesterday's 'noble cause'....

Just recently, speaking of this sort of pathologically twisted hawkish logic, our nation's Chief Executive (Dubya) has elected to ignore virtually the entire rest of the world's collective opinion that a pre-emptive strike against Iraq would be unwise, imprudent, and fraught with potential repercussion of the worst sort. He remains insanely adamant in attempting to set plans in motion for what amounts to the same sort of unprecedented attack against Iraq that Pearl Harbor was for us! How stunningly stupid, narrow-minded, and regrettably typical of foreign policy morons like Bush, Chaney, Rumsfeld, and all of their right wing conservative Republican cronies! What is even more apalling is the fact that about half of America thinks this is a swell idea (although perhaps use of the word 'thinks' is too kind in this context....).

[Ironically, there would probably be NO war at all, once and for all, if only one of two conditions obtained: 1) There were no men in the world (only women); or 2) if the strategic ground rules of war stipulated that YOUNG men would order and command battles, while OLD men would have to fight and die. Interesting thought, eh? I'll end this month's rant with that fascinating tidbit to ruminate upon. Peace, baby...]

March/August 2002 -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

(Art Credits: A number of wonderful, very whimsical cartoon images centered on coffee that I had hoped to feature on this page, representing a sampling of the the work of wonderfully witty Jiri Sliva (citizen of Prague in the Czech Republic, who has recently published a collection of his delightful art in a book entitled CAFE FETISH), did not appear thanks to the commercial avarice of Mr. Sliva's agents, who wanted $600 for "one-time-only" permission to use several of those images . This book, published by XXX and Company of New York in 2001, and distributed by XXX Group West, is a marvel; however, thanks to Sliva's American agents, I'll be damned if I'll provide any further information on it that would bring in more bucks to those disdainful and exemplary icons of American Big Business. [Since this was originally written (March 2002), the Peoples' Republic of Berkeley has once again distinguished as one of the last bastions of dissociated free-thought by attempting to make it illegal to buy or sell coffee in the Berkeley city limits that is not certified as natural, organically shade-grown.   While this might at first be seen as simply another bit of evidence that Berkeley exists on a separate plane of reality, the philosophy is sound. If you are unconvinced, read Pendergrast's book and you will more readily understand the arguments underlying this   issue] Other images presented here have been purloined with the hope that the owners of this intellectual property won't mind too much....)

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