Dying for a cup of coffee

In a darkened hut, on a dirt floor, a young woman stirs beans as they roast on a skillet. She then breaks the brown beans in a bowel with a wooden pestle. She brews the coffee and pours in through a long-stemmed pot into wide cups sitting on a crate. The members of the family gathered around the coffee each take a cup and drink, themselves sitting on their own crates or squatting.

Somewhere else, a man wakes up before sunrise, walks downstairs through the dining room to the kitchen and turns on the light overhead. From the freezer he picks a Kenya dark roast, fills the electric grinder, and presses the button for 20 seconds. After filling the basket of the drip coffee maker, he pours distilled water it into the coffee maker. He presses the "on" button and 5 minutes later drinks a cup at the kitchen table as he takes in the morning news on the radio or internet.

These two parties are linked by coffee. But they are at different ends of its chain. The first is in Ethiopia, where coffee originated and where it is still a major export crop. The other is in the US and represents the biggest consumer of coffee in the world. One is dirt poor and getting poorer. The other is richer than ever. One is brown or black. The other is white.

The documentary Black Gold tells the story of coffee, where it comes from, where it goes and how the money flows. In the coffee market, much like other commodities, the farmers don't make the money. The traders, processors and marketers do. Coffee contracts in 2005 totaled $140 billion dollars. Starbucks alone has over 13,000 outlets. But, according the movie, every $3 cup of coffee earns a farmer only 3¢.

So, what is the morality of a cup of joe?

In the next few entries, I want to look at coffee and our relationship with it and its producers as people in the West and as Christians. I hope to illuminate its role in our lives and work and our role as believers in changing the lives of others.

What Enron taught us (and how we all managed to miss class that day)

I've seen it before, but I saw it again tonight and my dander is up once more.

Independent Lens showed Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room tonight. Oh sure, it's fun to watch the giant fall, to see the pedestal of Ozymandias:

"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

(Thanks, P.B. Shelley [which does not stand for Peanut Butter, by the way]).

O! the glorious irony of it all, or predictability, or whatever.

But how my blood boils to think of how unwittingly we watched California endure Enron's shadow passing over it with its rolling blackouts. We are suckers, waiting for our PT Barnum. We are those pheasants on Dick Cheney's hunting ranch, waiting to be released for our cursory last flight. We are easy pickings. All of us.

The worst part: we actually still believe what we hear and see, "believing old men's lies," as Pound says in "Mauberley."

Gas prices keep going up and up and up. Iraq is frying in our very hot war over there. We've got one political scandal after another rocking this administration.

This isn't a matter of the emperor having no clothes. "In fact, here he comes down the runway in a piece that's perfect for any occasion. This year's hottest fashion: the American flag wrap. You'll always fit in with these bold stripes and plucky stars. Just the thing to show you love your country. No critic would dare touch you with this little number on. Body armor meets Teflon with a freedom of movement inspired by Freedom itself. And the best is, it's made in China." Disclaimer: The American flag does not guarantee any protection against attacks either of a verbal or physical nature and cannot be relied on for medical care for families of servicemen following their discharge from the US armed forces. Any references to "Freedom" in the particular or abstract are purely theoretical except in the case of administration officials, its operatives and proxies, and are not transferable to any citizen not directly under the administration's employ.

It's time to stop accepting lies and excuses. We all know that life has gotten worse under Bush's time on the throne. (In case we forgot, Enron was one of GWB's biggest contributors in 2000, and Ken Lay lent his sagacity to the Cheney Energy Task Force. But, thankfully, neither of those two actions have had any repercussions in the present. Whew! Dodged a bullet there.)

How many other "black boxes" of information are we willing to believe? Are we always to play the swooning audience to the melodrama of greedy corporate misinformation meets sinister government propaganda who decide to seduce the wallflower media?

So many days I want to just turn off the radio, stop listening and read some poetry or fiction (particularly having just learned that Gilbert Sorrentino died last year. Made me take down Mulligan Stew yet again and leaf through its hilarious pages. One of my favorite tidbits of downright silliness meets literary criticism in a metafictional land: "You can always tell a good poem if your hair stands up while you cut yourself shaving."). But somehow I keep thinking, "You can't just look away. The world will never change unless you help even a little."

In the words of Mario Savio:
"There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part; you can't even passively take part, and you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop. And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!"

I don't know how do this. But I know that I feel this way. I wonder how many of us feel this way. "Stop the Bush train. We want to get off . . . and close down the line for good . . . and sell the engines for scrap . . . and reclaim the last 6 years of our lives."

And find out the truth at some point.