Mug's Game

National Review, December 6, 1998

“Ohhh,” Monica e-mailed her boyfriend (no, not that one), "how i long for the time when we can just spend a day together ... starting w/ coffee at Starbucks . . ." Starbucks. It's where an intern bought a mug to give a President, and it's where Nicole Simpson first met Ron Goldman. I go there, and so, probably, do you. By the year 2000, the chain, which started with a single store in Seattle, will have two thousand outlets. We spend $1 billion a year there. When future historians try to conjure up the atmosphere of the Clinton years, they will have to include the faint smell of roasting coffee, preferably a variety— Ethiopia Yergacheffe, perhaps?—from some really Third World part of the Third World.

At first glance this may seem a welcome development in a country once famous for the horror of its coffee. Still, if we are what we eat, then we should also be what we drink. The flight from Folgers must mean that we have changed.

Well, the country is richer. Hardscrabble is so over. So we reject that older Robusta America in favor of a mall-chic coffee where the person behind the counter is a "barista" and the smallest serving is a "tall." Starbucks has become a symbol, a sign of class and a certain refinement. Its coffee is an object of desire at $3 (or more) a shot. Aficionados are "cuppers," bean geeks able to discuss the "tanginess" of a Costa Rica Tres Rios without bursting into laughter.

We shouldn't mock this. Aspiration is the engine that drives America. Yet there is something wrong: consider the music of Starbucks, the CDs lined up for sale by the register.

Not the jazz. That their stores play and sell jazz is no surprise. Starbucks is marketing its coffee as a grown-up pleasure and to many, jazz has always been sophistication’s soundtrack. No, the company's taste in contemporary music hints at the problem. Starbucks urges upon us pop of the most improving, didactic kind. Songs of the Siren, a 1996 "tribute to women's voices," was one finger-tapping choice. Naturally, the feminist rockers of Lilith Fair have not been overlooked. The company is a "proud sponsor" of the tour, in a "perfect blend of coffee, community, and music."

Now take a look at the books on sale amid the Frappuccini. Naturally, an Arabian Mocha Sanani drinker does not Hunt for Red October with Tom Clancy. But Marion Wright Edelman? That's much more like it. One of her offerings is on display at my local Starbucks, near the Van Gogh mugs and that timeless childhood classic. Girls Who Rocked the World: Heroines from Sacagawea to Sheryl Swoopes.

You may also find a recent memoir by Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz, Pour Your Heart Into It. Starbucks is a great American success story and a triumph for Mr. Schultz, a kid from Brooklyn's post-war projects. But the world view revealed in this lugubrious volume (printed, in case you were worried, "on totally chlorine-free paper") sometimes seems more Alger Hiss than Horatio Alger.

Mr. Schultz downplays his formidable business skills, but makes sure to mention his health-care kaffeeklatsch with Bill Clinton. The rest of this drearily "progressive" recital includes some over-excited environmentalism (who could forget the epic struggle over "double cupping," the now-abandoned practice of putting one paper cup into another to protect tender fingers from hot coffee) and cloying reminders that the Starbucks CEO wants "diversity in our management team."

And surely a strong bottom line. As Mr. Schultz is doubtless aware, political correctness sells. In the eyes of pious Boomers, all the NPR-ishness only burnishes the coffee chain's upmarket image.

It's a piety that Starbucks exploits brilliantly, which would be fine, so long as everybody else were not expected to play along.

But they are. And as the success of Starbucks shows, they do. The Boomers may have had the party, but the whole country has to live through the hangover. A generation that never could say no to itself is proving very eager to say it to the younger folk. Like grumpy older neighbors, they want the stereo turned down and the strong drinks put away. As Howard Schultz explains, he is trying to offer a place where students can meet "free from the heavy influence of alcohol."

The only heavy influence around is that of the paternalistic Mr. Schultz. He is the perfect spokesman for an era when "decaf latte" has entered the upper-middle-class lexicon as shorthand for a little self-indulgence.

Indulgence?  Once we knew the true meaning of that word. Indulgences should be decadent, degenerate, altogether de trop. They should not be decaffeinated.

The 1890s swept cheerfully by on a torrent of absinthe, champagne, and opium. Today, smoking is out, sex is "inappropriate," and a few beers will get you branded a "binge drinker" by Harvard's School of Public Health. Which leaves coffee. It's allowed, and pathetically the country is grateful, even excited. Too FDA'd out for real, unvarnished bad-for-you fun, America has defined delight down.

Like the English were once said to do, Starbucks drinkers "take their pleasures sadly." Even the modest pleasure of a little Java has to "mean" something. These days, it's the coffee that has to make us "good to the last drop." So Starbucks steps in with the sip that sanctifies.

Suddenly I want a Maxwell House. Double-cupped.