God Bless Starbucks

I'd like to bring up something that has been nagging at me for a while. No, it isn't the continued proliferation of second tier MTV celebrities on the airwaves. While this is still an alarming trend, I have a dish now so it's easier for me to avoid them. No, I'm talking about America's embrace of mediocrity and out and out rejection of excellence. That's right, I'm talking about Starbucks. OK, OK, stop shaking your head like that, you are going to hurt yourself. I will, in due course, explain what I am talking about so that everyone can follow along.

America used to love the winner, the best in their field, the folks that strove for and achieved excellence. It was, in many ways, our national character, if you weren't going to be the best at something then why do it at all. Second place wasn't good enough, couldn't be good enough. We weren't all winners and you didn't get a ribbon just for trying. In short, we measured results and if the results weren't there it didn't matter how nice a guy you were, you were a loser. It was the driving force behind manifest destiny and our drive to become a super power. It was this love of winners that made the American Empire.

Then a weird thing happened, we got beat by a second rate, third world nation, that by all rights we should have pounded to dust. On top of that, every four years at the Olympics, a bunch of steroid freaks from the Eastern Bloc would clean our clocks (and the Soviet men's squads were pretty good too). Add to that the fact that our industries couldn't keep up with the very countries whose tails we'd whomped during World War II just thirty years ago. Suddenly we weren't winning all of the time. In fact, we were getting our asses kicked on a pretty regular basis. Not only were we no longer number one, in some stuff we'd dropped out of the top ten. It was a troubling time.