Why I Hate The Intellectually Bankrupt American Left, Vol. LCCXCVII

Oh. My. God.

So I was just on the phone with an old college buddy of mine. Just talkin' about everything. Catching up. That kinda thing. We were talking about Selling Out. That, of course, was very much a concern for us when we were back in college. I opined that when we're pushing forty, the point is pretty much moot. Regardless of how you live or what you do, you are The Establishment.

And then, we got on the subject of Starbucks. My friend mentioned that he objected to Starbucks because of the way they collaborated with the Taliban in Afganistan.


Excuse me?

Yup, he claimed. When Starbucks opened up in Afganistan, they bought in to the mores there and had a separate room for men and women. Unfortunatly, the room for the women had no place to sit down, and it was dirty and not kept up very well.

I said, Are you telling me that Starbucks opened up a store in Kabul during the reign of the Taliban.

That's exactly what I was being told.

The source? My friend had taken a graduate course. There was a Women's Studies major who was in the course and she brought in an article about evil Starbucks evil collaboration with the Taliban at their store in Kabul.

I mean, there's so much wrong with this.

For one thing, I've never been to Kabul, but I have been to Moscow. And there was no Starbucks in Moscow. (I know. I looked.) So is it likely that Starbucks HQ would decide, "Yeah! Let's open up in this terrifically distressed area! We'll make a killing!" Like, there are Afganis who could slap down $3.50 for a cup of coffee? A web search turns up no evidence that Staburcks has ever had operations in Afganistan. I will eat my Wesco's if it can be demonstrated to me that this is not true.

So what's going on here?

Well, the anti-globalization folks hate Starbucks. They hated the Taliban (until U.S. forces toppled the Taliban, then the Taliban became victims of U.S. imperialism, I guess). So of course what they wanted to do was link those two great satans. Thus, this whole issue was fabricated, and anti-globilization wackos could smash the windows of Starbucks with a clear conscience because in doing so they were standing up for the rights of oppressed women in Afganistan.

Now, whenever I hear someone going on about what the Bush administration--or Haliburton, or that corporation that they all sit on the Board of Directors of, or John Ashcroft, or whatever--is really doing, I don't believe a blessed word of it.

Does this stuff come out of the American Right? Yeah. I mean, there's the Secret Gay Agenda (world domination, bay-beee!!!), Hilary practicing witchcraft, welfare queens, ,etc. But what you probably don't see a lot of is an entire class of a graduate seminar at a university outside of Philadelphia turned over to discussing this stuff as if it's fact, when the source was an article in a newspaper written by the Revolutionary Communist Youth Brigade or something.

I mean, it was taken for truth. Unquestioned. There was nobody there who was saying, "Now, that doesn't make any sense at all."

Too, this is another reason why my decision not to go to grad school was a really good one.

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