Howard Schultz: America's New Banality Supervillain
By Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone
31 January 19
Will the former Starbucks CEO and author of a stunningly boring corporate
memoir help re-elect Donald Trump?
Scientists may someday find the edge of the universe, but there is no end to
the delusional self-regard of Americas one-percenters, as former Starbucks
CEO Howard Schultz proved this week.
Sunday night on 60 Minutes, Schultz announced he was considering a run for
president as an independent. The Twitter reaction was like something out of
28 Days Later: mobs of Trump-exhausted Americans sprinting to bite his face
off. At a bookstore appearance for his new memoir, a heckler shouted Go
back to Davos!
Why the severe reaction? Schultz openly declared his decision to run as an
Independent was based on the idea that hed have to lean left to win the
Democratic nomination. This is rich-speak for I obviously couldnt win the
nomination if I had to compete honestly.
His plan therefore is to skip the grueling Democratic primary and buy his
way past one tier of certain electoral failure, jumping straight to the
general. Once there, hell spend just enough of his personal fortune to
split the anti-Trump vote and re-elect the dumber version of himself
currently in the White House.
Schultz timed his announcement to coincide with his ghostwriter Joanne
Gordons new work, the aforementioned memoir entitled, From the Ground Up: A
Journey to Reimagine the Promise of America, released Tuesday.
From the Ground Up belongs to the Fuck You: How I Became a Billionaire and
You Didnt genre that has an oddly persistent market in America.
Because its also designed to double as an extended stump speech, its a
particularly difficult read the boring and insincere autobiography of a
pretentious oligarch who probably hasnt been told to his face hes full of
shit since the first Bush administration.
The Starbucks origin story is a Freudian horror flick, though Schultz
doesnt tell it that way. He describes growing up in subsidized housing in
the Canarsie section of Brooklyn in constant loathing of father Fred, who
spends so much time on the couch that Schultzs mother nicknames him Mr.
Horizontal.
The future deficit hawk Howard acidly describes Dad as a dead-ender who had
a lack of a work ethic and spent beyond his means hed buy used tires
then treat himself to a manicure and a pricey haircut.
Dad worked jobs that were humiliating to young Howard, including driving a
diaper delivery truck. He would come home complaining of the odor, and
Schultz would get a whiff of what he was talking about.
To get away from the smell of his malaise, young Schultz would sneak to
the top of the building stairwell and imagine a less loser-y future. This
becomes the operating metaphor of the book, about what informed the life I
led once I got out of the stairwell.
At one point, teen Howard curses his mother out (hurling a certain
four-letter curse word followed by off). Then just before dinner, he
blithely goes to take a shower, not hearing his father come home. Dad bursts
into the shower and punches Howard.
Howard leaves Canarsie, meets a girl in the Hamptons, gets married, then
moves to Seattle to work for a coffee company called Starbucks. He goes on a
trip to Italy, visits a café in Milan, and has the Eureka moment about
opening espresso bars in America.
He leaves Starbucks to branch out on his own, and his first espresso bar,
called Il Giornale, goes under construction in 1986. He flies his father
Fred out to take a look.
I took him to see the original Il Giornale store that was under
construction, he writes. I proudly described my plans to create hundreds
of places where people could come sit, visit, and be served Italian-style
beverages.
The reader guesses well in advance that this vision might not excite his
cash-strapped Jewish laborer father from Canarsie. But to Schultz, his
fathers puzzlement over the little Italian coffees is a bitter insult.
I dont think my Dad got it, he said. All he saw was a store. And for
him, coffee came in a can and should be brewed in a tin percolator. Why all
the fuss with the fancy Italian names?
Howards father dies shortly after, and any chance of mending our
relationship died as well. This seems to have been a defining moment for
Schultz. With this campaign for president, too, he seems determined to make
us all admit how grateful we are to have so many places in which to consume
pretentiously-named beverages.
After his father passes, Schultz ends up buying out his old firm, Starbucks,
with the aid of some felicitous connections like Bill Gates, Sr. Under that
brand name, his vision of ubiquitous espresso bars becomes reality.
Coffee from there took on a mystical importance. Starbucks, he realized, was
not just something that exists between four walls, but a mindset. It was
not home, not work, but a third place that is a way to exist in the
world. He went on to banish small, medium and large from Americas coffee
vocabulary, replacing them with tall, short, and grande.
Schultz at one point becomes the last principal owner of the Seattle
Supersonics, and when taxpayers wont help him finance an arena, he sells
out to an investment group from Oklahoma. His thinking:
Someone from outside Seattle, I thought, might have a better chance of
negotiating a new arena deal because the threat of losing the team could
push city officials to come to the table with more favorable terms.
Schultz claims he only sold the team on a promise that the new group would
spend a year working in good faith with the city (read: attempt to
emotionally blackmail taxpayers) to get a new arena deal.
To believe this, youd have to believe sports-crazed Oklahoma City investors
would buy an NBA team with no lease obligations in order to keep it in
Seattle.
Of course the Sonics left town, and instead of getting to watch a generation
of players like Kevin Durant, Russell Westbrook and James Harden dominating
basketball from the Pacific Northwest, Seattle fans whom the ever-cloying
Schultz calls his most precious stakeholders got to suck eggs every
winter.
Meanwhile Schultz became a mega-billionaire on his way to offering more
than 170,000 variations of Starbucks beverages.
Once you get past the somewhat interesting avenging my loser Dad portions,
the rest of the book is just collections of clichés lifted variously from
the campaign-lit and CEO-bio genres. Schultzs mind is a giant T-shirt.
He goes to Gettysburg and learns Experience
is the clay of wisdom.
Entrepreneurship is like raising a child.(Forbes alone has done that
headline at least twice.)
Magic, he writes, is not reserved for selling pie and coffee. It can
extend to any endeavor like trying to create jobs.
368 pages of this!
Politically, Schultz belongs to the Opportunity Democrat species that
began popping up in the mid-Eighties. That was when Third Way/New Democrat
types replaced lunch pail labor slogans with the tall, grande and venti of
political themes: Accountability, responsibility, opportunity.
Heres his obligatory paean to opportunity:
One way to describe the American Dream is as a promisea promise of life,
liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Inherent to that pursuit, I believe,
is having access to opportunities like education and good jobs
Opportunity
shows up as luck, but is also embedded into our social, governmental, and
corporate constructs
What else? Schultz has disdain for the political class, but he viewed
Senator McCain as an exception. He was sort of against the Vietnam War as a
youth, but didnt protest because he was more focused on trying to get out
of Canarsie than trying to get the country out of a conflict half a world
away.
He spends a lot of time talking about the various social campaigns started
by Starbucks, including plans to offer jobs to immigrants or to raise
capital for small entrepreneurs by selling $5 bracelets that read
INDIVISIBLE.
Which is fine, and frankly, unless youre the kind of person for whom
triteness is a felony, Schultz is more of a bore than a monster. On that
last point, though, From the Ground Up is exceptionally dull, so completely
devoid of ideas that its almost interesting. Schultz makes the Romney
family cookbook read like Dantes Inferno.
Which wouldnt be a problem America is used to douchey CEOs except
Schultz just injected himself into the 2020 election season in the most
negative conceivable way, virtually guaranteeing four more Trump years if he
spends enough money tilting at the national popularity windmill.
Hes running for the same dumb reason thats inspired various Wall Street
leaders to whisper concerns about 2020 to reporters of late: they fear and
despise wealth-tax-proposing liberals like Bernie Sanders or even Elizabeth
Warren more than they disapprove of the Trump presidency, and are too stupid
to keep that evil thought to themselves.
If Schultz runs and Trump wins, people around the globe will pelt him with
batteries and cat turds for all eternity. Hell wish he long ago died and
went to share a hell-cauldron full of Sonics fans. Is anything in the world
more dangerous than a bored billionaire?
Email This Page
e-max.it: your social media marketing partner