C8H10N4O2: The Last Legal High

Being perfect is invariably a lonely calling, stranded here as I am among so many imperfect opposed-thumb primates of supposedly ‘highly evolved’ status, but I don’t mind sharing a few of my perfect thoughts with the ordinary world of high-grade Chimpanzees on occasion.

I am in one such a generous and sharing mood this morning, so let’s reflect on some of the perfect things that amuse or endow me, shall we? One of the most perfect, in my humbly perfect opinion, is a chemical substance I religiously employ to sustain my perfect awarenesses atop the lofty heights of my perfectly personal Mount Olympus (I am a legend in my own mind, you see, but then…you knew that, didn’t you? It really isn’t at all difficult to be a God, when you also comprise your own band of disciples, prophets, and the entire flock of faithful followers, too!).

The substance I refer to is an arcane chemical compound so potent, so powerful, yet so profoundly enabling, that I chose not to refer to my fondness for it as ‘abuse’ or ‘dependence’, but rather as ‘well considered reliance’. This stuff is so magickal, so potent, and so omniscient in its abilities to open paths of clear understanding through the mists of ordinary ignorance that I often hesitate to think about the possible effects upon an unsuspecting world, should it come into common possession of the pedestrian masses (fortunately, the weak liquid most  often confused for this ambrosial life-source of the gods is more like brown horse piss).

Please! Take your hand off the 911 button and stay your concerns as I continue, and no, I am not talking about 4-methyl-2, 5-dimethoxyamphetamine here. I refer instead to that thirst-quencher of the gods known as 1,3,7-trimethylxanthine (also known by its chemical formulary designation C8H10N4O2). I am given to understand, by a few of my more aware supra-primate acquaintances, that there is also a slang name that it is commonly referred to by in the street, as well: ‘Coffee’.

OK, I’ll drop the grandiose delusions of omnipotence and continue on a less prosaic level. This wonderful distillation is made from the bean of Coffea arabica (or Coffea robustica) and in reality, in our modern world it today fuels the entire industrial powerhouse that is Western Civilisation (and most of the rest of post-industrial civilization, as well). To say that coffee is virtually a 'sacred' elixir is not just a euphemistic ascriptive underscoring of its importance to American industrial dynamism (and the value I personally place upon it), but the factual reiteration of an awareness that has been in increasing circulation since the source plant was first discovered in Ethiopia in about the 6th century AD.

One of the problems attendant to (my) use of this substance is the fact that the very sustenance of my personal muse (she sometimes goes by the name ‘Caffeine’) that sparks my periodic literary rants also tends to spin them out on far-flung tangents. The downside of such strung-out discourses is, naturally enough, that we frequently end up on a remote and unidentifiable side spur of reflection that lies far off the beaten path or organized, focused, and centered thought.

Be that as it may, I have no difficulty at all in admitting that I have been a dedicated devotee of the Coffea arabica cult since my early and impressionable years as a young Zen bikkhu in Berkeley, in the late 60s. (It is interesting to note that while the effects of coffee have heretofore never been conclusively shown to be factually and categorically deleterious in a precisely specific context, no matter how much the PC anti-caffeine forces howl, very recent medical studies do suggest that too much caffeine may hasten wrinkling and other peripheral human aging processes! Alas, alack for those of us who cannot afford periodic collagen infusions, or Botox injections!

In a recent read-through of Mark Prendergast's excellent, informative, and entertaining 550 page opus on the subject (UNCOMMON GROUNDS, Basic Books/Persius Books Group, 1999, ISBN 0-465-03631-7), I was fascinated to learn more of the pioneering part Coffee Godfather Alfred Peet played in the modern renaissance of coffee (60s) with his institution of Peet's Coffee & Tea (now Peet's Coffee, Tea, & Spices) on Walnut Square in Berkeley (established on April Fool's Day, 1966). I say fascinating because in 1968 I had returned from the Vietnam War to Berkeley and found myself living on Spruce Street, just a few blocks upstream of Walnut Square.

Having been a wannabe Beatnik ever since first learning of the Beat 'movement', I was immediately attracted to Peet's like a flower fancier to Oriental Poppies. Peet's of that early anti-war era was an epicenter for a wide range of Berkeley people that included Max Scherer (of The Berkeley Tribe), most of the UC Berkeley grad students, almost all of the UC Berkeley faculty, a motley consortium of Telegraph Avenue 'street people', and counterculture folks of just about every political and ethnic shade in the spectrum.

To say it was a heady and intellectually stimulating place is not doing it sufficient justice. And it was there that I first learned to worship, honor, and obey the aroma, taste, and neuron-triggering effects of Peet's espresso. My memories of early weekend mornings spent huddled over a Doppio Espresso against the chill tendrils of SF Bay fog, while some respected UCB philosophy department professor held forth on his own personal Weltanschauung to the assembled regulars (mostly grad students), are among my most cherished of that brilliantly hope-filled and invigorating period of my life.

Real coffee was a new game for many people at the time, after the conditioning that decades of weak, washed-out American commercial coffee had instilled in most people (read: Juan Valdez’s adventures getting Mrs. Olsen, along with Joe DiMaggio in a commercial ménage a trois, high in the flavor zone). At about the same time (actually a little earlier, in the 50s) Cafe Trieste in San Francisco's North Beach community had established an espresso presence that helped channel the creative bohemian undercurrents fomented by the 'Beat movement'.

In Berkeley, across the San Francisco Bay, it took only slightly longer for the true European style coffee renaissance to take hold, given the utility that caffeine has for sleep-deprived grad-students and frat brothers. At any rate, by the start of the 1970s, several other players were in the local East Bay coffee selling game, including an enterprising group of Sun Myong Moon's religious cultists (remember the 'Moonies'? They’re still out there, just more covert in their activities), who ran a coffee business (selling retail beans) on College Avenue. The latter group ostensibly sold the prized and ultra-rare Jamaica Blue Mountain bean by the pound, although it was later found that their JBM beans were a sham and not genuine JBM (even in those early 70s days it was hard to find, since about 90% of the world’s available JBM crop went to Japan at near-stratospheric prices). 'Moonies', it seemed, were apparently not above unconscionable bilking of others, despite their proselytizing zeal for having a monopoly on 'the truth'. Genuine JBM beans were at that time already nearly US$ 20 per pound, which was for that period (the 70s) quite an extravagance (now, by comparison, even ordinary Brazilian beans sometimes sell for prices by the pound in that vicinity).

Starbucks (identifiable now among those commercial groups known as 'the corporate enemy', rather than the kindred folksy coffee provider it was when first started by ex-college students Baldwin, Bowker, and Siegle, in Seattle) opened their first store in March of 1971, after the former individual spent some time as an employee with Alfred Peet in Berkeley, observing his practices and business approach more or less at his knee.

From that time of simple and honest beginnings to the present, Starbucks has regrettably transmogrified itself into just another monstrously uncaring ogre of a corporate enterprise (regardless of the intense efforts of their multi-million dollar PR people to appear as a philanthropic, earth-friendly entity. Consequently, and I hope others also feel similarly, I would not myself today set foot inside one of their establishments, out of sheer disdain for what they have become.

The sight of yet another Starbucks franchised coffee outlet opening up in the neighborhood is now anathema of the very worst sort (at least from my perspective as a perfect person, gazing down from the lofty heights of my personal Weltanschauung’s philosophical fortress), despite the fact that the average (politically insensitive) person probably loves their products. Unfortunately, a preponderance of today's older coffee drinkers have long since lost their sharp political edges and many who are under the age of 30 undoubtedly do not know anything at all of the truly profound political or cultural history of coffee, either at the present time or throughout the long and sad past decades of coffee's exploitative and grossly negative impact on global commerce and economy.

And speaking of Starbucks, as an amusing example of how they have sold out to establishment môres, Starbuck's first logo, which featured a bare-breasted mermaid of the type typically characteristic of vintage Nantucket whaling days, has now been modestly 'sanitised' into a stylised, asexual merperson, thereby undoubtedly making all the myriad tribes of savage political correctness cadres absolutely ecstatic. More recently inspired cartoonist Ken Dwyer got himself involved with the Starbucks legal beagles by penning a clever parody of that now widely recognised symbol of capitalist overkill (see image appended above).

Prendergast's book UNCOMMON GROUNDS is a wonderful education in itself, not just for all of the fascinating information presented therein about the complex history of the coffee bean, but for the attendant and consequent education it provides about political economies, American corporate and commercial meddling in other nations' affairs, and the sorry results of the international obsessive fixation on the stimulating brew that so many of us regard as the world's last 'legal high.' In fact the story of coffee's introduction to the United States and the development of its marketing and distribution is a sort of all-encompassing and self-encapsulated history of the American advertising industry.

It was the introduction of commercial coffee and its marketing that later 'happily' coincided with the dawn of radio and television advertising--two mediums that have had stunning impact on us all in terms of their enabling the development of ordinary 'local' business entities to become monstrously greedy, world-wide corporate powers that threaten to strangle us all in their lovingly exhaustive consumer embrace.

Very few today reflect upon the fact, for instance, that the CIA engineered overthrow of Salvadore Allende's socialist regime in El Salvador was not the first instance of an intricately contrived political plot purposefully orchestrated by the United States to depose heads of state unfavorably disposed towards American business interests. Sadly, such Machiavellian schemes were virtually standard US foreign policy in the late 1800s and early 1900s, with regard to our relations with Central and South American producers of coffee.

Further, our policies and business practices--both official and unofficial (see 'unofficial', read 'all but overtly criminal')--regarding Brazil, Guatemala, Colombia, and other nations in the South American hemisphere are directly responsible for the general destruction of the social economies of those countries. With their continual, immense, and virtually unpayable national indebtedness to the World Bank (formerly headed by Iraq War fostering, Neocon wonk Paul Wolfowitz), and the unrelenting widespread destruction of the Brazilian rain forests which the development of new shadeless coffee tree strains have encouraged, widespread economic chaos in South America continues unchecked.

Equally few are those who understand the part that the cultivation of coffee has played in the historic genocidal war between Burundi's ruling Tutsi tribe and the enslaved Hutus in Africa--a recurrent mutual slaughter that has to date claimed perhaps upwards of a million Africans since that rabid mutual tribal hatred began. Most people should be shamefully aware, hopefully, of the fact that due to the complete absence of any high-priority US strategic interest in most of Africa (i.e. no vast reserves of high-grade oil resources or other vital strategically important natural resources), the United States has repeatedly stepped back from what would otherwise be entirely justifiable and appropriate support of the democratic peace process in that bitterly impoverished and savagely neglected region.

If, on the other hand, there were oil at stake, there isn't a shadow of a doubt that America would be embroiled in this African socioeconomic chaos up to its neck (viz. such as we are in the Middle East, Afghanistan, etc.). Hence, the tragic and ongoing situations in Darfur, Ethiopia, Sudan, Nigeria, Kenya…just about any nation you can name on the African continent.

Aside from the gross political and economic ignorance of the average American with regard to the dirty little secrets underlying the world's insatiable demand for coffee, the social and cultural history of Coffea arabica provides many hours of stimulating reading. After absorbing all of the half thousand pages of history that Prendergast's book explores in no small detail, it should be virtually impossible for anyone who hoists a cup of coffee to their mouth to do so completely devoid of thoughts about this amazing bean and the earth shattering effects its cultivation has produced all around the world. After such a fascinating read, each gulp of the brown, life-giving elixir that coffee essentially constitutes for so many becomes essentially a small, self-contained political act in itself.

In mulling over all of the sometimes disturbing information assembled in UNCOMMON GROUNDS, many consequent awarenesses come swimming through the murk of the state of vapid normal mindlessness that Caffeine helps cut asunder. One of these relates to the frequently reiterated and oft repeated admonishment that extreme right-wing, jingoistic superpatriots hurl at social critics who pointedly bring up deficits in our nation's makeup and the conduct of its affairs: namely, "If you hate this country so much, why don't you go live in one of them poor (banana republic) nations, full of starvation, poverty, political instability, and social chaos?"

After reading Prendergast's book, one realises the FULL irony of that sort of ignorant put-down, for after all, it was and is the same continuing economic depredations of cut-throat American business and commercial practices that have created (or at least substantially abetted) such abject misery in those less fortunate nations these jingoists impugn! Most sublimely ignorant right-wing 'superpatriots' haven't an inkling of these facts, naturally, and even if they were made mindful of the historical veracity of these revelations, they would reject such 'alleged' heresies out of hand as totally false.

Seen in the uncomfortable illumination of such unsparing and exhaustively researched work as Prendergast has undertaken in his book, the supreme hypocrisy of many of our standing domestic and foreign policies (or complete lack thereof, more properly stated) stands out as painfully exposed as would be escaping convicts frozen in a searchlight's probing glare (Uh-oh, I smell a tangential reflective bypass looming ahead!). Thus, for a number of reasons, UNCOMMON GROUNDS bears reading by anyone interested not just in the history of the wonderful coffee bean so many of us are hooked on, but in the broadest cultural, economic, and political nuances of our mighty superpower of a nation.

And speaking of coffee, anyone who is a dedicated caf-fiend of the first water owes it to him/her self to tune into the brilliantly whimsical world of Shannon Wheeler’s TOO MUCH COFFEE, MAN!, an idiosyncratic strip that started out as a cartoon series about a little coffee-cup character embodied with the essential hyper-angst and mania of the substance, but which has now grown into a cult magazine dedicated to the worship of coffee and all that it relates to. The website, which is a good site for getting tuned into what Coffeeman is all about, is found at: http://www.tmcm.com/. Back issues, TMCM T-shirts, and much more are to be found there, among a variety of creative items. Dial it up and prepare to enjoy a steaming immersion in a cup of alternate caffeinated reality! TMCM is the brainchild of talented artist and social raconteur Shannon Wheeler and as with most successful cartoon enterprises, it has the social acuity of a well-aimed cultural magnifying glass.

As for myself, the role of coffee in the development and stimulation of intellectual thought and reflective awareness has always been for me as supremely important as anything else imparted in the ritual public imbibing of the black brew. Coffeehouses have long been a source of thought, enlightenment, radical vision, social awareness, and kindred communality for centuries--both abroad and in the USA. Anyone fully acquainted with the historical ingress of coffee to the Western World is well aware of the intellectual coffeehouses of Vienna on the Ringstrasse, the wickedly Bohemian cafes of Paris' Rive Gauche, the Beat hangouts of San Francisco's North Beach and New York's Greenwich Village.

During the Vietnam War, for example, a series of gathering plaqces known as 'G.I. Coffeehouses' sprang up around major US military installations, wherein the uniformed anti-war resistance (that's me, Ma...) took root and grew to rise in fierce opposition to the ongoing lunacy that was America's war in Vietnam. Even in far-flung and perpetually frigid North Dakota, where I wintered with the Air Force (in a SAC B-52 nuclear alert wing at Minot AFB), we initiated a coffeehouse of this overtly political type right there in the enemy's midst (the basement of the local USO)! In that haven of wise reflectiveness and among the more enlightened fellow Air Force protestors, our own particular form of anti-war resistance sprang to life and flourished. It was a formative period in my own life and those long, cold, and deep-frozen North Dakota winter nights were made all the more tolerable by virtue of plenty of Av-Gas strength coffee, I can assure you, as we orchestrated our own journalistic contributions to the ongoing 'peace-war' effort (considering the fierceness of those multi-week-long minus 20 degree nights found in North Dakota, that truly WAS a 'Winter Soldier Movement').

That was then however, and today all my pikes, slingshot rocks, and urine-filled water balloon protest implements are all stacked quietly in an allegorical armory (see the irony in this choice of terms?) and doubtless long-lost by now, somewhere along the path of life I have followed. Having long since realised that the entire world is mad, always has been mad, and always will be mad, I am content to retreat from all that repetitive cyclical insanity to the perfectly harmonious pseudo-reality that surrounds me on this perch, high up on that same lofty tower that sits on the summit of my personal Mount Olympus.

I am content to have my perfect beaches, a sturdy longboard to ride, gorgeous sunsets, a library of stimulating reading material, and lots of room to reflect amidst the sort of naturally magnificent scenery that only a small and remote island (Molokai) far removed from the economic juggernaut that is the American mainland may provide.

One last aspect of this perfectly heavenly retreat from the nastiness of mainstream American reality is a plentiful supply of Molokai-grown coffee. Coffee and Molokai have a mutual history that goes back quite a ways, surprisingly enough.

By most reckonings, Arabian coffee existed on Hawaii before 30 December 1817, having been planted by Don Francisco de Paula Marin on that day, according to the historical record. Regrettably, these early plants soon died, but coffee was planted anew about 8 years later by John Wilkerson, who had gathered the plants in Rio de Janeiro, Brasil, and installed them on Governor Boki’s plantation in Manoa (Oahu) in 1825.

Most histories of the islands seem to agree that coffee has been home to some very high quality coffees for at least 175 years, even if you tend to disregard the accounts of Don Francisco’s independent pioneering efforts in Hawaii. What is clear is that the inspiration for the sustained rootings of Coffea arabica came not by virtue of haole malahinis (foreigners) who wanted to cultivate it, but by request of the early Hawaiian kings, who commissioned Wilkerson to obtain and introduce the wondrous stuff to the islands. The king’s coffee trees arrived on the British warship HMS Blonde (obviously an early Royal Navy accession to the ubiquitous 'blonde jokes' of the late 20th Century, heh-heh) and before long the seedlings produced were taken to the Big Island, where they would find favorable growing conditions high up on the rich slopes of volcanic soil. Several smaller plantations dedicated to coffee were started on the Kona Coast (where the soil, temperature, and sunlight conditions are near perfectly balanced) and the rest, as they say, is history.

The history of Molokai coffee began at the request of Kamehameha V in 1865, who asked an immigrant living on the island named Rudolph Meyer to bring coffee trees over from Kona (Kona is, by the way, the generic Hawaiian word for ‘south’ or ‘southwest’, which is the dryer, leeward side of most of the islands). Since Kamehameha V kept a royal residence on Molokai, he chose to establish a private coffee plantation there for his personal use. The royal coffee plantation was situated in the central volcanic heights region of Molokai and was cultivated and picked with great care for over two generations, before falling into disrepair and going wild upon the fall of the Hawaiian monarchy at the turn of the century. Today, the remnants of that original Molokai coffee plantation may still be seen in that area, not far from the modern coffee plantation established nearby in the early 1980s.

In 1980 plant scientists and coffee growers from South America ‘rediscovered’ Molokai’s ideal growing environment for coffee cultivation and reintroduced coffee to Molokai by planting a new and specially developed coffee plant (a hybrid, but much admired Red Catuai variety of Arabica) that was perfectly attuned to the conditions found only near the small village of Kualapu’u, about 850 feet up the slopes of Mt. Kalae. With predictably steady amounts of misty rainfall, uniquely enriched volcanic soils, and just the right combination of sun and dryness, the founders of this new Molokai coffee plantation arranged the plants in a pattern that would allow scientific management of the crop.  The original Molokai coffee plantation is today the largest private coffee farm in the Northern Hemisphere and yields a limited harvest of very special beans annually. Using both the wet process and the natural dry process, two distinctly different green coffees result. The beans are roasted fresh on site and in small batches, ensuring freshness and true gourmet quality for those who possess the secret of its existence.

A few years ago, (2003) the Molokai coffee operations (known as Coffees of Hawaii, dba The Molokai Coffee Plantation) went into Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceedings, due to an aggregation of debts amounting to some $10 MM dollars. Despite the listed liabilities, the filing was actually initiated due to a single bill for a measly $82,000.00 that the company owed its CEO.

After much wrangling in court and a period of protracted judiciary confusion, attended by passage of time, the terms of the settlement allowed Coffees of Molokai to continue operations on a limited scale, while the entire business was reorganized.

The resulting Coffees of Molokai was originated in the early 80s by its founder John Hays, after the decline in pineapple and sugar industries threatened to adversely impact Molokai’s always tenuous economy. With backing from the Bank of Hawaii, Hays developed the business around his concept of a scientifically operated and mechanized coffee operation turning out a potentially high-markup product. The first crop was harvested in 1989, since it takes a number of years for the trees to reach optimal production status.

Since the 2003 restructuring, stocks of previously harvested beans have been sold, but only this year in 2006, has the newly invigorated Coffees of Hawaii operation finally produced a new crop of beans (they are being harvested now). The new initial crop promises to be as good as, or better than previous harvests, which means that the deliciously tasteful ‘Molokai Muleskinner’ brand will once again reappear on shelves where select coffees are sold. The impetus behind this resurrection lies with the purchase of the operation by a Californian named Mike Atherton, who along with a small group of like-minded business investors, saw the potential in bringing the 500 acre Molokai operation back to full bloom. Although you may have never heard of the ‘Muleskinner’ line yourself, it shouldn’t surprise you to know that the brand has a world-wide rep and has been enthusiastically bought for resale by coffee bars and cafes in both Italy and Japan (to cite just a few).

Molokai Coffees may be purchased on line, if anyone among you is interested in seeing what real character in Hawaiian grown coffee is all about. While the new crop is still in limited supply, packs of the earlier bean harvest are available and do not disappoint, by any stretch of the imagination. Simply visit the websites found at http://www.coffeesofhawaii.net/ and another that may be found at http://www.molokaicoffee.com/cart/shopcore/?db_name=molokai, to order.

And now, it’s time for another cup of Molokai Island Espresso, brahs and wahines, which is my favorite jingle juice, brain-fertilizer of choice at muse-feeding time, before heading out to swallow salt-water. Be well, be fair, be creative, and it you should run into Betty Jo Bioloski, Audrey Farber, Mildred Weenfinkle, or Meloney-Sue Hayburn, please tell them that I have 4 currently empty slots in my hareem (applications presently being taken). Otherwise I may have to hire back Rosy Palme and her five sisters as interim substitutes (not the happiest alternative to genuine vaginal squeeze effect, unfortunately).