Went back to Philz the other day after my boycott, which was due to their homophobia. I guess the CEO, Mahesh Sadarangani, realized what a dolt he’d been, because he recently apologized to the gay community and retracted his anti-gay rule. Of course, that was only after customers began shunning the chain, which threatened to bankrupt Philz.
What will it take for people to realize that anti-gay hatred is no longer tolerated in America? Yes, we still have the shmucks on the religious right, but according to the Gallup Poll, nearly 70 percent of Americans support gay marriage. So much for homophobic faux-christians such as Franklin Graham, whose family has gotten rich by pilfering money from credulous, Bible thumping rednecks. It’s not gay people who are out of step with the times, it’s freaks like Graham and his fellow MAGAts.
The funny thing about Philz is that so many of their employees are on the LGBTQ spectrum. Did Mahesh not realize that? How out of touch can a boss be? Did he not understand that his action was a slap in the face to the very people he needs to stay in business, his baristas? Did Mahesh not have senior advisors who warned him not to do it?
I like Philz okay, but to be perfectly honest, I don’t know why they’re so espresso-phobic. They refuse to include espresso drinks, which are the ones I like: cappuccino, Americano, latte. I asked the Philz barista I know best why Mahesh seems to have a prejudice against expresso and he didn’t know. It’s odd, because less than a block away, Peet’s, which does make espresso, is constantly mobbed, so much that I frequently can’t find a place to sit. Even before Mahesh’s dumb move, Philz was usually half empty. I wish some capitalist would explain to me why a company would deliberately drive away 75% of their potential customers due to some weird ideology about coffee!
But that’s the thing about ideology: it’s not rational. The word itself, “ideology,” is probably one we should scrap, because no one can really define it. The closest I can come is “prejudice.” If you’re ideological about something, you’re against everything else, which makes you irrational. We see ideology at its most pernicious here in Oakland with our electeds, from the mayor on down, who are obsessed with racial “equity” and base all their decisions on it. There’s no such thing as “equity” in real life. There are different outcomes, in that people have widely variant incomes, abilities, genetic qualities and so on, but when the Left blathers on about “equity” they imply that there’s something nefarious in these variations. There’s not. Life, as JFK famously reminded us, is not fair.
I know that some people are born with silver spoons in their mouths: George W. Bush is the classic example of a not-too-intelligent man who rose to the top only because of who his daddy was. But you can’t legislate outcomes. If you try, you’re putting your finger on the scale for one particular group, which is unfair to everybody else, and is in the end self-defeating. Republicans complain that Democrats put their finger on the scale for racial and other minorities, but Republicans put their finger on the scale for conservative Christians and White men of immense wealth. Which is worse? Look, if Republicans want Democrats to keep their fingers off the scale, they should practice what they preach. And besides, we have a Constitution that prohibits the establishment of a formal, government-approved religion, which is what Trump, Vance, Alito and that whole crowd want.
The surest way to rip this country apart is to try and christianize it. But that may be exactly what the MAGAs want: a civil war. After all, as Trump once bragged, he has “the cops, the military and the gun owners” on his side. By that, he means he has the weapons, and that he’s willing, if not eager, to slaughter anyone and everyone who stands against his dictatorship. I tell you, his bestial supporters would like nothing more than to invade places like Oakland and start shooting. While I earnestly desire the complete overthrow of the Oakland government, I don’t want that accomplished by violence, but by the will of the voters.
Steve Heimoff