Starbucks and Globalization — and Why I’d Never, Ever, Shake Jim Baker’s Hand

I had a nice machiatto this evening at the Starbucks near the hotel where I’m staying in Beirut. I like diversity a lot, but I also like seeing well managed stores with a cosmopolitan message of universal peace and happiness. That’s Starbucks. (Granted, I hated seeing it in Vienna, where I used to live, but the locals told me it was the only place you could get a coffee to go, and the locals had to adapt. An afternoon in my old Stammcafe, the “Cafe Zartl” near the Hundertwasserhaus, was better than an afternoon in a Starbucks, but I’m still going to get coffee tomorrow morning at the cosmopolitan Starbucks [which has better coffee than my hotel] before my appointments with Lebanese book publishers and newspapers.)

On another note, I’m very sad (and very angry) about what seems likely to happen here, namely that the inimitably evil James Baker is going to hand the Lebanese over to the Syrian president to do with them as he and his allies among the Iranian mullahs and Hezbollah want. If it is what happens, it would be the second time that that evil and utterly disgusting and sorry excuse for a man would hand over the Lebanese to the Syrian government in exchange for concessions regarding U.S. policy toward Iraq. The Syrian interior minister remarked yesteray on television, in a remarkable display of a police-state mentality, that if Syria still were occupying the country, the (pro-Syrian) demonstrations would have been dealt with “in 30 minutes.” God help the good people of Lebanon if Jim Baker stabs them in the back for the second time.