Pour myself a cup of ambition
If you held out hope that that whole Coffee Party thing might, really and truly, turn out not to be such a bad parallel development to the Tea Parties, it’s disillusionment time (via Ann Althouse)!
In one chair sits a rural retiree, his financial security shot in the slump, a humble Southerner who’s never thought much about politics. In another seat is a born Northerner, an inner-city native, a relative of a civil rights giant. And nearby, circling a table [like vultures…or maybe just sitting around it?—SRK], are an economist, an artist, a onetime John McCain supporter and a long-haired guy who’s rich in Woodstock memories.
Meet these members of the Coffee Party Movement, an organically grown, freshly brewed push [BARF!—SRK] that’s marking its official kickoff Saturday. Across the country, even around the globe, they and other Americans in at least several hundred communities are expected to gather in coffeehouses to raise their mugs of java to something new.
They’re professionals, musicians and housewives. They’re frustrated liberal activists, disheartened conservatives and political newborns. They’re young and old, rich and poor, black, white and all shades of other.
Flamin’ Norah, lady, we get it, already: the Coffee Party is DIVERSE and INCLUSIVE. Point made.
Of course, it seems to consist entirely of people you’d dive under the hors d’oeuvres table to get away from if you met them at an actual party. Check out this guy:
The 27-year-old social entrepreneur and nonprofit consultant works in sustainability.
Answers on a postcard, please.
The other interviewees are all given catchy little distinguishing demographic labels, as if they were the Village People or the Spice Girls. They express a lot of soulful concern about obstructionism—which is, of course, one of the only actual good things happening in Washington these days.
I realize that a lot of the inanity here is attributable to the reporter, who throws in racism and class-warfare angles that leave a pleasantly hazy impression of broad-mindedness but explicate exactly nothing about what policies the Coffee Party people favor. I don’t want to seem to undervalue civilized debate, but no matter how nice and respectful we all are to one another, our disagreements on principle and policy won’t just go away.
I think I’d rather be tea-bagging.
The truly insidious horror is that these coffee people think they are going to make me go back to tea, which I like best with cream, sugar, and a cake.
That’s how I learned to like coffee too.
What I later learned is that I’d rather do without both than give up my freedom to think I had to decide on either.
Wake me when there’s a whisky party
Coffee party is disingenuous, it should be the Starbucks Party.
Donna B, yeah, we do need a new Whiskey Rebellion. The cake part would be nice, too, though I’m pretty sure the Coffee people would want it paid for by a tax and distributed by a federal Cake Agency.
Veeshir, that strikes me as an insult to Starbucks, which lots of people don’t like but which found a real market and serves it well.
Maybe the Chicory Party?
Oh, I meant it because of the stereotypical Starbucks customer.
Chicory works better, it gets the flavor across.
*smack*
sorry.
Ah, now I get it…sorry. I just read you wrong. And yeah, at least here in NY, the kinds of people who are likely to get all excited over the Coffee Party are also the kind who can go off on you for an hour about what an evil chain Starbucks is, how it’s imperative that we support small, local coffee houses, and such.