Christmas, Whose Christmas?

So my news feed the past few days has been full of people who are throwing tantrums over the tantrums thrown by a few fundamentalist Christians over Starbuck's seasonal cups, and someone is like "Have people lost it all completely?" Talking about the fundamentalists, mind you, not the people who are upset about them.  What I don't get is the notion that religion is supposed to be all peace 'n' love 'n' shit. A look at religious history indicates otherwise.

It also looks like all the liberals I know have become really obsessed with this nonsense, posting every silly thing they can find about Starbucks and the reaction to their cups. It's not just a few fundamentalists who are getting overwrought. I'm no fan of Jesus -- I don't like hellfire-and-brimstone preachers and other religious nuts -- but he did say something about plucking the log out of your own eye before you fuss about the speck in your brother's eye. And I see many faux-Buddha quotations, often from the same people, about how you have to find your own peace within yourself rather than getting it from other people; yet they're having hissyfits about the War on Christmas team's hissyfits over Starbucks cups. Um, practice what you preach?

The person whose post inspired these notes answered that it was time to fight absurdity with absurdity.  I don't see any absurdity in his high dudgeon, but it's his mind.  He's one of the self-styled Buddhists I referred to, by the way, but fighting absurdity with absurdity isn't a teaching of the Buddha (or of Jesus) as far as I know.  This is, however:

"He insulted me, hit me, beat me, robbed me" — for those who brood on this, hostility isn't stilled. "He insulted me, hit me, beat me, robbed me" — for those who don't brood on this, hostility is stilled. 

The Dhammapada, verses 3-5.  And you know, the Christians who were pissed off by Starbucks' Christmas cups didn't actually insult, or hit, or beat, or rob my Buddhist friend, or any of the other liberals.  Nor have they hurt Starbucks.  Whatever my liberal friends are fuming about, it's not because they or anyone else has been hurt.  They're just outraged that someone somewhere is expressing beliefs and attitudes they find unacceptable -- just like the War on Christmas crowd.  They can't stop brooding on it, so their hostility isn't stilled.  Is this true spirituality?  Are these hissyfits what I'm missing by being an atheist?  (Though of course, some atheists are also doubtless having hissyfits over the disrespecting of Starbucks.)  I don't see that I'm missing anything.

Hi! I'm a CEO, and I'm Here to Help

When I log out of my Netscape e-mail account, it redirects me to the AOL "news" page.  Tonight the first item I saw announced: "Starbuck's founder and CEO Howard Schultz has organized a petition for Americans to let the people at the Capitol know they are fed up with partisan bickering, and to tell lawmakers to do their jobs."

For a moment I was pissed off at Schultz for the words "partisan bickering," which are an integral part of corporate media's vocabulary for reducing politics to personalities and sports-style standoffs: the false-equivalence narrative. It's also, of course, part of President Obama's vocabulary, since at least 2008: The American people, he said at a press conference that November, "don’t want ideology; they don’t want bickering; they don’t want sniping. They want action, and they want effectiveness." The blogger Whatever It Is I'm Against It responded: "Really? Action and effectiveness are all very well, but I actually want some ideology, some sniping and especially some bickering or, as I like to call it, democratic debate."

At any rate, it occurred to me that, in the absence of a direct quotation, I shouldn't hold Howard Schultz responsible for those fightin' words, so I clicked through.  And indeed, it turned out that Schulz had said something slightly different:

In an interview with Howard Fineman of the The Huffington Post, Schultz said Republicans are more to blame for the current stalemate between the two parties. 'The parties are unequal in how the problem has been created,' he told The Huffington Post, adding, 'but both are equally responsible for trying to come up with a solution.'

But he couldn't stop there, alas.

Earlier this week, Schultz pledged the coffee chain would give a free cup of coffee to any customer in the US who buys another person a beverage at Starbucks as a way of setting an example to elected officials of how people can come together.

Well, we know how effective that is.  The Congressional gym, as we all know by now, is still open during the shutdown, and that's where elected officials come together to sweat, grunt, and peek at each other's peckers.  It doesn't seem to have prevented the shutdown.  And President Obama plays golf with Speaker Boehner, despite the latter's anxiety about the former's package.  Also not very effective in preventing the shutdown.

Besides, I'm not wild about this behind-the-scenes dealing.  I know that some of it is unavoidable in the real world, but I don't want our elected officials to come together over coffee and realize that they're really not that different from each other.  I want them to put the discussion on the public record, where everyone can see it and evaluate it.  Of course I'm being too generous to my fellow citizens there.  So many of them, Republican and Democrats alike, have happily accepted the false equivalence line; maybe they all got together over coffee and decided that it made sense.

If You Chain a Dozen Right-Wing Writers to Typewriters ...

... how long will it take them to come up with Atlas Shrugged?

RWA1 just endorsed the Thanks to Starbucks campaign, an online petition supporting the Evil Scorched Caffeine Empire's support for same-sex marriage in the face of a campaign by the Christian Right. I added my name to the petition myself after a moment's equivocation, because it's a single-issue petition that doesn't do anything but give Starbucks a pat on the back for doing the right thing. It doesn't mean I like Starbucks, or would ever spend money in one; I don't drink coffee anyway, but if I did I would support independent cafes rather than an international corporate franchise. (I was about to add "with dubious ethics," but that would be a tautology.)

But here's why I mention RWA1: he commented "Thank Starbucks for resisting bigotry," but he was furious when the Susan Komen Foundation took heat for defunding Planned Parenthood, calling the reaction "the most brutal enforcement of liberal orthodoxy i have seen in fifty years." (No doubt because "I have queasy feelings about the subject of abortion".) Soon afterward he commented on the Catholic birth-control controversy that "Obama's message is that women's (and everyone's) bodies belong to the state, and there will never be an end to their intrusions on private decisions, if only to care for their "property" and to mitigate the costs of taking care of it." This indicates that he bought into the deranged right-wing meme that the contraception mandate would force women to use birth control whether they wanted to or not; of course the opposition came from ultra-conservative males whose message was that women's bodies belong to the Church. And not longer after that he commented on a state-level controversy that "The Girl Scouts have become a little PC, but this is outrageous. Bible-thumping zealots are getting too assertive in the legislature." But what about the Children, being brainwashed into Planned Parenthood Obamacare robots by the feminazis?

Oddly, though, RWA1 doesn't care about the brutal enforcement of liberal orthodoxy where same-sex marriage is concerned, even though it's exactly the same kind of issue: a virulent right-wing minority is claiming that this government action will force them to conform to liberal values. That's probably more true of same-sex marriage, in fact, than of the contraception mandate. No one will have to use birth control just because their insurance covers it, and no one will have to gay-marry if they don't want to. But it is true that the legalization of same-sex marriage will change the public face of civil marriage, and the churches will have to grapple with the issue even if they ultimately reject it. Bigots will have to explain to their kids why men are married to men and women are married to women. In principle this should be no more of a problem than explaining to them why not all Christians share their particular version of the faith, but it will be one more burden on their shoulders.

I'm not sure why RWA1 is willing to see gay marriage forced down the throats of the same people whose throats he wants to protect against birth control pills and recreational abortion. It looks like he wants there to be one issue he can appear to be liberal on (especially as he vibrates with the white racist background radiation that has been on the rise lately); this makes a person "unpredictable", which is widely considered a virtue in our debased political culture.

Does Starbucks Have a Right to Exist?

The leaves in Bloomington -- at least outside my door -- began turning color and falling last week. Fall isn't officially here yet, but it's beginning.

Naomi Klein was on Democracy Now! this morning, and the segment contained a delicious moment courtesy of the BBC. They played a clip of Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman Yigal Palmor complaining that the Durban Declaration blamed all bad things on Israel. Julian Marshall of the BBC commented that the Declaration didn't seem to contain any such material. Here's the exchange:

AMY GOODMAN: And Naomi Klein, in your article in Harper’s, you quote the Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesperson Yigal Palmor. One day before the conference opened, he was interviewed by the BBC Radio. During the interview, he was questioned for asserting that the Durban conference declaration singled out Israel.

YIGAL PALMOR: Look, in the previous conference, Israel was singled out as the most racist state on earth, probably almost the only racist state. And all the problems that we were facing here in the Middle East were not historical or political or military or geographic or anything else; they were all attributable to one unique factor: Israel’s innate racism.


JULIAN MARSHALL: And this was speakers—


YIGAL PALMOR: [inaudible] this is absurd enough—


JULIAN MARSHALL: This was speakers, was it, at the Durban conference, rather than any final declaration?


YIGAL PALMOR: No, it was also included in the final declaration.


JULIAN MARSHALL: Because I’ve been looking at that final declaration, and I can see nothing that comes anywhere near to what you are saying.


YIGAL PALMOR: I don’t have the text in front of me, but in all the—


JULIAN MARSHALL: Well, I do have the text in front of me, and I can see nothing that comes close to what you are saying. I can see a final declaration that speaks out against anti-Semitism, that says we will never forget the Holocaust, that says we are concerned about the plight of the Palestinian people, but nonetheless recognize the right to security for all states in the region, including Israel, and call upon states to support the peace process and bring it to an early conclusion.


YIGAL PALMOR: [inaudible] we talk about the same conference.


JULIAN MARSHALL: That is a mention of Israel in the final declaration.


YIGAL PALMOR: Right. I’m not sure we’re talking about the same conference, because even though I don’t have the text in front of me, I remember quite precisely some quotes that were completely contrary to those that you’ve just quoted. So we must be speaking about two different documents.

One reason this tickled me, aside from its inherent neatness, is that many Americans use a similar line about left critics of the US: they blame America for everything that goes wrong in the world. The best response is to ask such people for specific examples as Marshall asked Palmor, and let them squirm and try to lie their way out, because I don't know of any people who make such criticisms. It would be nice to know who they are, so I can criticize them too. I and the people I read and listen to are all very specific about what the US does wrong. ("But Mom! All the other murderous imperialist states are doing it!" isn't an acceptable excuse either, no matter how popular it is. It's interesting how easily the US and Israel go from being beacons of enlightenment and moral perfection to guys who are no worse than their enemies, as the necessities of debate require.)

Speaking of Naomi Klein, I have had Starbucks on my better-to-avoid list for years, ever since I read Klein's No Logo. The photo above is indicative: it's the Starbucks in Insadong, an artists' district in Seoul. According to my Korean friends, this is the only Starbucks in the world whose sign is in the local language -- company policy collided with Insadong's cultural protection policy which required the local language, and Starbucks capitulated. Avoiding Starbucks is easier since I don't drink coffee, but coffee places have their uses, especially for free wifi. In Bloomington we have numerous non-Starbucks coffee shops that I rely on for Internet connectivity and pastry, from the venerable Runcible Spoon to the relatively new Pourhouse Cafe. (I most often use the latter, despite its church connections, because the atmosphere isn't oppressively religious -- quite the contrary, it's comfortably secular -- and because it's nearby.) Jim Hightower renewed my distaste for the chain with the commentary I heard this morning, with an up-to-date list of the chain's offenses against humanity.

The corporation calls its workers "partners," but pays them only $15,000 to $20,000 a year for full-time work. Then there's the "optimal scheduling " policy, which means you never know when or for how long you'll be called in to work. Health care? Starbucks insures a lower percentage of its employees than Wal-mart does. And don't even think of talking union – you'll get harassed and possibly fired for that. Indeed, Starbucks is a leader in a corporate lobbying blitz to sidetrack the Employee Free Choice Act, which would give workers who want to form a union a way to stop the bullying, union-busting tactics of corporate bosses.

As I said, I'm not a coffee drinker, but everyone I've heard express an opinion agrees that Starbucks' coffee tastes burnt. So what's the appeal? Hightower went on to tout an online campaign called "Stop Starbucks!" which probably deserves support, but stopping Starbucks seems, I don't know, a little extreme, y'know? I'd think some harsh restraint would suffice.