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.

But doesn't God live at CHURCH?

I've been reading Carl Jung's essay "Achetypes of the Collective Unconscious," which has got me thinking: do we keep the "Divine" in church (where it can be properly revered, censed and what have you) or do we welcome it in to the rest of our lives (where it can see that we pick our nose and how long it takes us to go to the bathroom)? The question is simply to we pray best when in front of the altar or while on the throne?

I don't really know. I struggle with both, actually. But maybe because I grew up Protestant, it is easier for me to see my failure to comply with bringing God everywhere than with properly observing his divinity while at church (again, though, not great at either).

Why the point about being a Protestant? We were the image breakers, after all, the iconoclasts, who would have no mere objects of wood, dye or metal to which we would bow or pray. Instead, we'd rather go to church all the time. Two times on Sunday, then small-groups on Monday, Bible study on Wednesday, revival Friday night (at which you re-dedicate your life) and Saturday drama practice or Men's Group. You think I'm joking? I am not.

Instead of integrating our faith into the rest of our life, we simply made faith (and a very particularized expression of it) into our lives.

I recall a neighbor who lived on the first floor of the apartment I rented while in college. Every time I left out the side door, I would go past her front door and could hear her singing loudly to praise music that was coming (loudly) from the radio or TV. Then, I would find her little boy outside, either bored or hungry, and usually just hanging around on the stoop.

OK, extreme example. But it seemed to me that she wanted to be in church so bad that she neglected all else.

I've never been like that. I'll leave church all pumped up, excited to read some more of the Bible, which I started doing either because of the sermon or despite it. I'll get home, have lunch, yell at the kids, play with the kids, do some work, clean up my office, and that unstruck iron of my religious fervor is cold to the touch. It is replaced by a sense of guilt that hangs around and gets progressively stronger until it, like a turkey timer, is about to pop on Sunday morning (We have GOT to go to church "for the kids' sake"). By the time the sermon is over, my guilt has been replaced by zeal. I'm on fire again. And so it goes.

Still, I never wanted to be one of those people that said "Praise the Lord" instead of "that's great" upon hearing about the Bears going into the SuperBowl or that Whole Foods had that feta we liked in stock. It also sounded a little fakey, a little too churched for my taste.

But who am I? No one's making me say things. Yes, but I felt bad not saying that as well.

Or "Good luck?" What a can of worms. See, Christians don't believe in luck because all things are ordained by God, not by chance. So, don't ever say "good luck" to someone, say "God bless you," just like George Bush: "God Bless America." And, you can't be lucky or unlucky for the same reason. So . . . we are blessed to have enough money for Thai tonight or we are not blessed and so must put it on the credit card. That doesn't really fit with orthodoxy, either. You see the dilemma.

more on this . . .

Conspiracy of Christianity (part 1)

In the freshly minted earth (imagine steam or mist rising off it as it cools or heats up in the predawn light), God says "Let us make man in our image," the first conspiracy.

We could say that the act of creating the Earth itself is a kind of conspiracy, but consider the root: "conspirare, 'to breath together,' and so 'to combine or unit in some purpose.'" Another meaning used today is "to plot in secret," even as one person.

Still, if God's first conspiracy was to create Man, then conspiracies in themselves are not all bad. Indeed, the way Christians see it, God's own conspiracies, usually involving people of faith, thwart the evil intent of those plotted by Satan. It is a great war between foes with humans as the co-conspirators.

Granted, not all Christians see themselves in this way, but in 2004 I was made aware that a rumor on the Christian internet (a part of the Web with bible quotes cross-stitched and hanging on the walls) that Barack Obama may be the anti-Christ. If he was conspiring to take over government and lead this country into Satan's open arms, plunging the world into Armeggedon, then Christians were going to do something about it. (Of course, given the predominate interpretation Revelation by evangelical Christians, we should have welcomed the anti-Christ, as that would have put the Rapture on the fast-track, right?)

In fact, some folks see satan in every whisp of smoke just as others see angels in every cloud break. But if we stick to the "conspiracy as planning together" model, that doesn't necessarily mean that they are participants in a conspiracy. But you can bet that they think themselves the victims of one.

It is not unlike Thomas Friedman's analysis of the Arab world from The World is Flat: "They have been raised to believe that Islam is the perfect and cmplete expression of God's monthestic mesaage and that the Prophet Muhammed is God's last and most perfect messenger." But "[they] can and do look around and see that the Arab-Muslim world, in too many cases, has fallen behind the rest of the planet."

The reason: conspiracy, one in which the West is trying to keep down the Muslims. So al-Qaeda and its revolutionary kin flourish and conspire to take down the West.

Here in the West, we have our own disaffected groups, namely the working class. More than any other group, they have been the grassroots of the religious right's power, even if some of the green has come from business interests. The working class tends to be more religious and to see their religion has affecting their material circumstance. How do I know this? Well, I've lived it, and continue to live it, so I suppose it's personal and anecdotal, but I'm sure that the folks at the Pew Research Center would probably back me up on this.

The working class in the West has seen its real wages fall over three decades. And we wonder why Christians feel left out of mainstream? Just like those jaded Arab youths who see the West corrupting and controlling the world and flaunting it with the likes of Madonna and Bush, the Christian working class have watched their own power contract while culture goes to hell all around them. It must be some kind of conspiracy. That's the only explanation. God wouldn't let this happen, right?

Christians have consiracy written into their spiritual DNA. It's impossible to extract without killing the subject. But it may not be a bad thing. It helps us see meaning where it may not be apparent. It may provide a filter through which to understand the overload of information coming in from all quarters. It may provide us with a place to stand "as ignorant armies clash by night." But it is exploitable. That's a weakness. And it has been used against us.

Like some Muslims and the caliphate, certain Christians are driven to act in an almost pavlovian response to the description of the US as a "Christian nation." Is there something in the Bible I missed? The only nation with which I remember God having a relationship was Israel, to whom he had made promises, covenants that are referred to specifically in the Bible.

Still, there is nothing inherently wrong with wanting a nation whose leaders and people are dedicated to God's purposes. What is wrong is that we think we can get there by making gay marriage illegal, setting up a monument to the ten commandments or bringing prayer to schools. In these ways, and so many others, Christians have conspired to influence government, and, by extension, the people governed, in order to bring about a more perfect union with God.

Remember "the gay agenda?" As a kid, I heard the reason they try to convert straight people is that they can't breed. CONSPIRACY. And now they want to adopt, so that they can start inculcating them with "gayness" as children? CONSPIRACY. And who will fight our war in the Middle-East if every good-looking boy in America fails the don't ask-don't tell test? OK, sorry. Little over the top there, but you get the picture.

Christians feel that they have somehow been conspired against and are looking for people with whom to conspire in their own favor. It's quite natural, quite human, but probably less Godly than we'd like to think ourselves. It is more about retribution than compassion, more revenge than righteousness.

From the realpolitik, it is hurting us. We often act against our own interests, just because it will get a little of our dignity back. Consider working class people and their falling in with the GOP, often against their own economic interests.

(I know that there's more on this in me, but I'm not sure where yet. I'll get back to you on this.)

Living the Subsidized Life

In recent years, I have concluded that all my professional life has been subsidized. I don't mean that I'm getting paid. I mean that someone or some organization is actually contributing money to what I am doing, and, consequently, to my livelihood. I have worked at seven non-profit organizations since graduating from college. All of these organizations get some money from people who do not necessarily receive any tangible benefit. People, either as individual contributors or through a corporation or foundation, provide funds to make these things function.

So nothing I do really has made something by itself that people find valuable enough to buy for the price. I'm like the clearance endcap at Target, full of discontinued products sold below cost to clear the shelves. But non-profits have raised money this way for a long time, through private wealth. The assumption was that a public good does not always have a public to pay for it or that can pay for it.

Most of these jobs, being non-profit, do not justify very high wages, which is the second level of subsidy in my life, the cash and in-kind donations of parents, mostly my wife's. They will occasionally give us money, not whole lot: $25, $50 or a few times a couple hundred dollars. They also watch the kids when my wife has to go to work, at least once a week. They have us over for dinner, too.

So am I a blood sucker, draining my host dry while not returning anything? I started to think: who is a net producer? A tree.

In junior high science, we learned about producers and consumers. Producers make their own food, i.e. plants making glucose from light, sun and water. Consumers eat the food of others or just eat the others, whatever is easier and tastier. So, then, are any animals actually producers? Do any of us give more than we take?

Consider Apple, a very profitable company these days. Are they subsidized? They have investors, but that's hardly the same, is it? Unless the investment goes south, in which case they were subsidizing it. Ideally, though, the investment dollars are returned to investors plus more, maybe lots more.

Apple makes computers, monitors, iPods and software. How much is extracted from the earth in order to meet the mineral needs of their hardware? How much copper, lead or mercury? Or the plastics? Is there any way to replace it? If not, that's a net loss? And they are hardly a huge user of metals in their products compared to cars or big appliances.

The earth is subsidizing the profitability of Apple, carrying all the materials necessary to create the iPod or MacBook. But the hardware is just the necessary materials. What makes Apple and, essentially, every company unique is what they do with the materials, what approach they take, how they marry idea with medium to create something of value.

My conclusion: we all live a subsidized life. Some of us are better at using the subsidies provided by the earth and sun, others are better and extracting the refined subsidies of wealth from people. They are all gifts. We are all recipients.

To Act is to Risk Failure. To Not Act is to Ensure It.

Perfect love casts out all fear. Does perfect fear cast out all love? Consider, how can you love what you fear?

Actually, I have a relationship like that. I love to write. Only I become afraide every time that I contemplate doing so. I fear that I will have nothing to say; that I whatever I am to say, I won't say well; that I can't finish. I will go out of my way not to write, despite my having held jobs for the past seven years in which writing was a major component. Still, fear creeps in.

Fear came up during a This American Life broadcast this week, which was a clip show of popular segments from old shows. The segment featured a couple zines written by a guy with some kind of mental disability. The zines were about his fears. He detailed his fears in language as ungrammatical as it was effective. In fact, its "outsider" language and word choice made the fears seem all the more real. Some of the fears were funny, "fear of the Rugrats being taking off the air," while others stripped off my ironic amusement, "fear that a friend who travels to other countries might come back not able to understand English" or "fear that if he go into the library and get 7 or 8 books and somehow while reading his voice going from low to high."

My fears are no less byzantine: "fear of my boss disapproving of what I do and telling me of that disapproval whenever I see her;" "fear of not being a good father by neither encouraging my kids to read the Bible nor talking about Jesus enough;" or "fear of not being able to actually follow through on anything I say that I'll do."

Fear paralyzes me, but I know that I'm not alone in this. It's a deer-in-the-headlights sort of reaction. In the face of not knowing what to do, we do nothing. Nothing ventured, nothing at which we have failed. In response to fear, I do something else, something I am sure that I can achieve: send an e-mail, rake the yard, make a phone call, or bake cookies.

The result: I'm so afraid that I might fail that I ensure it by doing nothing or doing something so late (though well) that the end is superceded by the quality of means.

As an antidote, I recently came across a quote by John Henry Newman: "Nothing would be done at all if one waited until one could do it so well that no one could find fault with it."

To act is to risk failure. To not act is to ensure it.

A caveat: I would say that to do nothing IS sometimes the best action to a problem that will most likely work itself out, particularly when my kids are involved. I find that most of their arguments, for instance, are solved without my intervention. The difference is to question whether not acting is out of good judgement or fear. It's easy to rationalize our fears, after all.

Consider terrorism, which has killed people, including Americans. To fear it seems prudent. Out of our fear, we support action to rid us of the threat of terror. But is it not like fearing a deadly storm? It may strike, and probably will, but no one knows when or where, for sure. Do we plan for that or live our lives regardless? Can we do both?

More on this later . . .

From Denial to Action in this Election

I must be in denial about this upcoming election.

We have a good guy, a young, idealistic, fresh-faced fellow running on the Democratic ticket. Jim Esch for Nebraska's 2nd congressional district. I went to Esch's campaign kick off, walked down there with my kids, sat our baby on my shoulders as Esch gave his stump speech. Saw folks I knew. Then, what's he do but set up his office a block from where I work and RIGHT NEXT to the place I get Thai food. A perfect opportunity to volunteer, make calls, stuff envelopes, etc.

I did nothing. I don't even know why. I just never stopped in to volunteer my time or even get a yard sign.

See, I didn't really pay attention, having felt burned in the last two elections, when I tried to get a Green Party congressman in 2002 and a Democrat in 2004. We marched, held signs, made fundraising calls, the whole nine yards.

Of course, it would be this year that the Democrats have a chance take Congress. It would be this year that a pro-life Democrat runs in our district, a good Catholic. And I sit this one out.

Now that I'm unemployed, I should have no problem helping Esch. It may not get him elected, but I will have plugged into the process once more. It's shameful to do less. What will I tell my kids when they ask what I did to make this world better?

OK, I know what I'll do: I'm going down to Jim Esch for Congress today and find out how I can help.

I encourage anyone who has a progressive running in their district to do the same. We have less than three weeks to shape a Congress that looks more like the nation that it does right now. As I'm sure you've heard elsewhere, a state gets the leaders it deserves. Let's be deserving of the best people in the country. Let's work for change.

Bush's Cut and Run Antics in 2004 and What They Mean for Today

Watched Frontline last night: "The Lost Year in Iraq," about the time between the fall of Baghdad and hand-over of "sovereignity" Iraq. It was incredibly damning.

The thing that really stuck out: Bush's cut-and-run tactic for the hand over. And the timetable in which he enacted his tactic.

What became clear is that Bush wanted out of Iraq as soon as possible. It was supposed to be so easy (like The Streets might say), but they flubbed it badly. They let chaos reign, and famously excused it.

They didn't count the cost. They didn't know the country, its people, its character. They made bad decisions and left the governing power over a powder keg in the hands of people walled in from every side by angry citizens which matches lit.

The people I began to feel most sorry for, other than the Iraqis, for whom the word "disillusioned" must be an understatement, is the US military. They are left to be the police in an ungovernable war zone. It's like a guard dog surrounded by wolves in sheep's clothing. Who are we protecting and from whom are we protecting them?

If Bush had been serious about getting Iraq stabilized, he wouldn't have cut and run from his civilian/political responsibilities. He wouldn't have set up what was by most accounts too short a time period in which to create the conditions for a functioning Iraqi government.

For all the talk of Democrats being cowards (which is what the "cut and run" charge is all about), it is the Bush administration that saw the gaping maw of civil violence that Iraq was becoming and decided to take his envoys out on a secret flight and leave the mess for the military to try to clean up.

If I know anything I didn't know before watching Frontline last night, it is that the political and military commands were never in sync and that competence in both were needed to get Iraq back from the chaos that awaited.

We just left it to Rumsfeld and the revolving door of Iraqi leaders. It was a doomed from the moment that this de facto plan was conceived. The people in Iraq and the soldiers have borne the brunt of Bush's cowardice.

Signs of life?

I remember how after the 2004 election I realized that the Christian left was noticeably absent.

The first question, I'm sure, is "the Christian left?"

Right, I know, hardly a term most people are familiar with. What I mean are those who go to church regularly (by most statistics the most accurate predictor of a Republican voter) but do not accept gay marriage, abortion, and tax cuts as our holy trinity. While there may be a lot of us out there, we don't necessarily speak up in church about our views for fear of offending our conservative fell0w-worshippers. We sort of huddle around after or before service in small groups, looking both ways before mentioning the most recent egregious act by the president, his administration, the congress, the courts or even the Church itself.

Where were they in 2004?

That is how I discovered Sojourners and Jim Wallis.