Steyn on Thanksgiving and Coffee

Mark Steyn is a fantastic columnist who hails from Canada. I first discovered him while working on a lengthy project in Calgary. Since then, I've followed him online, primarily via National Review Online.

His most recent article is on our American Thanksgiving. The whole article is thoughtful and certainly worth reading. I bring it to your attention, however, primarily because of its hilarious second paragraph. Being a coffee lover (a grande-white-chocolate-mocha lover, at that), I laughed out loud.

Well, Americans have a lot to be thankful for. Europeans think of this country as “the New World” in part because it has an eternal newness which is noisy and distracting. Who would ever have thought you could have ready-to-eat pizza faxed directly to your iPod? And just when you think you’re on top of the
general trend of novelty, it veers off in an entirely different direction: Continentals who grew up on Hollywood movies where the guy tells the waitress “Gimme a cuppa joe” and slides over a nickel return to New York a year or two later and find the coffee now costs $5.75, takes 25 minutes and requires an agonizing choice between the cinnamon-gingerbread-persimmon latte with coxcomb sprinkles and the decaf venti pepperoni-Eurasian-milfoil macchiato. Who would have foreseen that the nation that inflicted fast food and drive-thru restaurants on the planet would then take the fastest menu item of all and turn it into a kabuki-paced performance art? What mad genius!

Genius indeed!