Cows in the Mist

The “Weekly Review” section of today’s Seattle Times bears witness to a crushing photographic juxtaposition. In one shot, NASA space shuttle Endeavour floats tranquilly above the earth as it prepares to dock with the heaven-high International Space Station. In another, a four-year-old Haitian girl, emaciated with hunger, hangs from a sling scale as she is being weighed at a Doctors Without Borders clinic on the storm-devastated island. The first hearkens back to a time of American supremacy and leadership, the second is the face of our world’s future, should we fail to restore ourselves.

Earlier this week, I read in the New York Times about the continuing deterioration of the “humanitarian situation” in the Congo. While government and rebel factions have pledged to avoid fighting in areas where there are mountain gorillas, both sides continue to murder and rape their fellow human beings, with tens of thousands of women brutalized every year. Beginning with the Rwandan genocide in 1994, countless hundreds of thousands have died in unconscionable violence in central Africa.

Here at home we are rightly and justifiably concerned about our jobs, our economy, our retirement savings, the price of gas, the price of milk, the health of the cattle we slaughter for meat, the millions of tons of carbon we vomit into the atmosphere every year, whether the Big Three will be with us after January comes and goes, and how high unemployment might rise in this economic crisis. But this is a narrow view.

The global impact of our economic and identity crisis is in the face of a starving Haitian girl, in our failure to replace a space shuttle fleet about to be mothballed, in the anguished wails of raped women in Congo, in the chaos of Iraq and Afghanistan, in the looming specter of Islamist fundamentalism in Somalia, in the collapse of global markets that need our leadership, and in the ever-accelerating environmental desecration of the only home we have. If we, America, can no longer stand tall, having given up our role as a beacon of hope and right, who will fill that vacuum? The aid we have provided over the decades, the international direction and support for humanitarian efforts around the world, is in jeopardy. We have spent too many years eroding our political power, and now our economic power is slipping away, and we risk taking most of the world down with us into darkness unlike any my generation can imagine.

We can no longer set the direction of the world while wealth, knowledge, and influence are deserting our shores. No nation today can stand on its own, but we remain the linchpin of hope. We must begin by building here, by reinvigorating what has always been our strength — our innate optimism, ingenuity, and powerful capacity for change. We must marshal ourselves before we can muster the world. We have to lead again, and we must be strong in order to do so. If we can stand up, if we reach out, other nations will rise with us. There is fear in us all, but there is also opportunity for our nation. If we stride boldly and compassionately forward at this crossroads, we can bring the world with us. We owe it to ourselves, to the promise of Liberty, and to the generations before us who made the world safe once, to shine again, to come out of our darkness, and to offer to the world the hope and comfort that only this great nation can.

When does a local business enterprise, lauded for being unique, different, and — because of being local — inherently good become a chain? Two stores? Four? A dozen? At what point does a business, lauded for bringing a unique experience to the masses, become vilified for the sameness and blandness of the experience, which remains the very experience we asked it to provide all along?

There are many out there, I know, who denigrate Starbucks’ coffee — let alone “the Starbucks experience” — but let’s face facts. Before Starbucks raised the bar, there simply was no significant market for gourmet coffee. In making and taking advantage of this market, they have opened the way for thousands of coffee roasters and small local shops to do business. In fact, one might argue that the cheapening of the Starbucks experience presents an excellent opportunity for another renewal in the market. I’m not talking McDonald’s, either. It will be an unseen renewal, noted perhaps only by whatever small industry groups represent the independent coffee shop. Here again, though, is a fine line to walk. How much of the ease of the Starbucks experience will we give up in order to feel fully actualized in our coffee habits again? Will we wait patiently for a better cup of coffee? Nobody makes it faster than the guys in green. Will we enjoy a more complex roast? One of Starbucks’ advantages is that it will be the same every time. Will we spend time searching for coffee shops near our hotels, instead of just asking where the nearest Starbucks is? Will we frequent the copycats (Tullys, Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf, Caribou Coffee) with the vain hope that this other experience will be more unique, by virtue of being available in fewer places and to fewer people, than the other?

Do the very patterns that enable success doom the large coffee chain to mediocrity? I’m sure these are the questions that Howard Schultz asks himself every day as he attempts to revive and revitalize his company’s brand and mission.

Well isn’t this just the best of all worlds?

I woke this morning in San Diego, California, in a small hotel in the Gas Lamp quarter, and now I’m sitting at a sidewalk table outside a small cafe sipping iced organic Mexican coffee.

Vicky is here for a conference, so I’ve been left to myself the first half of the day. I wandered a bit, mostly just spending as much time as possible outside. April in San Diego is — how can I put it? — somewhat different from April in Seattle. A bit of a shock, really, to go from a hopeful 60-degree high to weather that hit the low 70s by 9:00 AM!

Pannikin Coffee Tea and Spices’ Blue Planet blend, like many Mexican coffees, is a bright, light coffee with a hint of cinnamon. As I type, the portable propane roaster beside me is busily torching to perfection some other artisinal bean, likely one I will enjoy tomorrow morning.

Pannikin is more than a coffee bar. In addition to selling brewed coffee and tea, there look to be about four dozen or more loose-leaf teas, and a range of whole-bean coffees suitable for any taste preference. In addition, the store stocks a wide variety of colorful south-of-the-border candies and knick-knacks, including a make-at-home Día de los Muertos candy skull mold.

Pannikin is a local chain that, by all accounts, strives for a unique experience in each of its locations. Certainly the ambiance of this G-street spot would be difficult to reproduce in any quantity, which leads me to suspect each store likely has some individuality to it.

This location, according to one staff member, has been in operation since 1977, making it only 6 years younger than the first Starbucks store. Clearly, the owners took a different path here. It is very different from Starbucks, and very much like those other Seattle greats, Zoka, Victrola, and Caffe Vita. With Starbucks, the size and layout of the stores is usually different, but the in-store experience is as similar from place to place as — dare I say it? — McDonald’s. While Zoka and Victrola have expanded only relatively recently to more than one location, Caffe Vita has been brewing at multiple sites for nearly a decade — in addition to their Seattle stores, there is a Vita at the old Dancing Goats location in Olympia (I admit, I do miss Dancing Goats).

Naturally, that leads me to another topic. When does an enterprise cease to be thought of as a “local” business and take on the dreaded “chain” designation?

What’s in a buyout? that which we call Bear-Stearns
By any other name would smell as sweet;
So a bail-out would, were it not bail-out call’d,
Retain that dear perfection which it owes
Without that title: — bail-out, doff thy name;
And for that name, which is no part of thee,
Come to my discount window.

With apologies to Bill…

There are some words that I have trouble spelling. When I was a child, corral gave me problems. I always wanted to double the L instead of the R. As an adult, there remain a few standard words that seem to require much more thought than they deserve — vacuum, for example. Every time I write it, I want to double the C. I double the U without thought, but always pause on the C. Perhaps it’s because I use the word (and its object) so infrequently (about once a month — I’m a neat and tidy guy, and don’t get my carpet very dirty). Whatever the reason, vacuum remains one of that strange handful of words that, despite having spent about 30 years writing in English, still gives me problems. There was a punch line in here somewhere, but it seems to have been sucked up by the vacuum between my ears.

I listen to NPR. Not only that, but I count myself an annual victim of their pledge drive. If the coffee cup, fleece, jeans, and old running shoes costume didn’t already give it away, it should now be as clear as a North Cascades free-stone stream — I am a liberal Seattleite.

All other tangents aside, on my commute this morning while listening to NPR, I was amused to hear the sponsorship pitch (it’s not a commercial; this is commercial-free radio) from Chevy, promoting the Volt, which is billed as a battery-powered vehicle with “an on-board, range-extending power source” (i.e., a gasoline engine). Seriously. Who are the marketeers who thought to disguise the gas engine in the mostly battery-powered car as “an on-board, range-extending power source?”

I stopped by my local Starbucks this morning on my way to work — a treat I generally have denied myself of late, since the $1.70 for twelve ounces of drip coffee (which I rarely finish) is too much. You probably know, if you are one of the millions of people who go to Starbucks every day, that when you order coffee in one of the busier locations, the cashier “calls” the drink to the barista, who then “calls” it back for confirmation (eerily similar to the call and response used in many religious services, no?).

Today marks a watershed moment not only for Starbucks, but also in the development of the English language, for I will swear by anything you ask me to that I heard the cashier call this drink: iced, tall, non-fat, no-ice — milk.