Taking It Black

Helen Highwater rolls her eyes as the house barista insists that only beans from Kuma, a local roaster, may be served at her favorite breakfast counter. Fine by her. She asks:

“No supply chain issues?”

He scowls: “Don’t dangle your euphemisms when you are so much better at dangling your principles. I know you are aware of the climate crisis and its ever-worsening effects on long distance trade.”

“Jack will be happy to hear you read his blog,” my editor tells him, hoping he’ll leave her in peace.

“I’m afraid your boy has barely seen the tip of the iceberg,” he retorts, taking a chair at her table. “And speaking of Titanic characters, did you know that two years ago when the pandemic first took hold, Fauci was asked what actor he wanted to play him when the movie was made?”

Highwater nearly drops her cup: “That’s right!”

The barista’s tone doesn’t lighten one wit when he finally gains her willing attention: “Fauci thought he was joking when he asked for DiCaprio, but the joke became true in Don’t Look Up. Or was it Don’t Look At? Or Around? Or Into? Or At All? Or how about just Don’t Look? What did Jack, or you, call it in that review?”

“Don’t Wake Up,” she exhales, again wishing another customer would come through the door to take his attention off her.

“Well, he needs to wake up. And so do you. All this talk about climate, about supply, but you have yet to mention nutrition. Like everyone else, you’re so caught up in quantity, you’ve overlooked quality.”

Highwater reaches into her handbag, “May I record this?”

The barista ignores the question, which any journalist takes as a yes, and launches into a tirade:

“The nutritional values of all our food will plummet in direct correlation with the C02 in the atmosphere, but who knows how that will affect taste? And the caffeine? Who knows! Shall we talk about inflation now?”

My editor gives him a quizzical look.

The barista laughs for the first time before pointing a finger at her: “You, or your boy, thought you were so incisive with your descriptions of bloated salaries for CEOs. Just 20-times the average worker to 350 in your lifetime. I’ve seen it go from just 40 to 350 in mine, but I could have tied that inequity to the word inflation, which you did not.”

“Another dangling euphemism?”

“Bingo! The term ‘inflation’ has been crafted to impose an illusion of political neutrality.”

Highwater may have mistaken the barista for me when she began filling in editorial clarification: “A word to make us think it is no one’s fault, that there’s nothing we can do about it-“

“As if it’s natural,” the barista cut in. He then called over his shoulder to two customers who wandered in, “Be right with you!”

Turning back to Highwater: “Climate crisis, inflation, and now COVID all have at least one thing in common: Devotion to capitalism paralyzes our governing institutions’ attempts to control them.”

Highwater: “Are all executives just coaches? Joy-riders exploiting the talents of their underlings?”

Barista: “I do not know. Too many layers of illusion, propaganda, and lies. Sometimes I think my thinking can get no closer to ‘critical’ than mere ‘wondering’. Excuse me.”

When my editor sent me the tape, she added a note:

He talks like that on a bad day. On a good day, he waxes on about how there are only two kinds of cherries that really matter. With one, we roast and grind the pit after the fruit has dried away. With the other, we savor the fruit and toss the pits. I never confuse him by mentioning olives and their pits.

This recalls the old song about a bowl of cherries. But there’s still no telling if the bowl is half empty or half full.

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