Today is National Coffee Day. Many outlets such as Dunkin' Donuts, Mickey Ds, and others are offering free coffee as a result. And since it is National Coffee Day your humble correspondent, a devout caffeine addict from way back, decided to Google search on all things coffee. What I discovered was something long forgotten by myself and everybody else...assuming they even remembered it in the first place. I am referring to the Coffee Party.
Although the Coffee Party is completely gone with the exception of some strange clingers as we shall see, it was kicked off with tremendous hype in early 2010 as the "progressive" alternative to the Tea Party. Here is an example of such extreme hype from Newsweek back then trying to make folks believe that the Coffee Party was sweeping the nation when it was already dead in the water, never to be revived:
When Annabel Park imagined what it would be like to head a new national political movement, here is what she had in mind: a coming together of engaged, intelligent citizens who had tired of the angry rhetoric and accusations of the Tea Partiers; Americans of all political persuasions joining in a spirit of equanimity to discuss the nation's problems, and maybe even share a laugh. It was this beautiful vision that danced in Park's head on a recent Saturday as she made her way to Busboys and Poets, a cafe in Washington, D.C., for one of nearly 500 Coffee Party meetings taking place nationwide that day.
...All of a sudden Park was a political leader—of what, she didn't quite know—and the target of right-wing fury. Conservative bloggers unearthed—scandal!—that she had once briefly worked for The New York Times and supported Sen. Jim Webb, a moderate Democrat from Virginia. One online commenter accused her of being a "Chinese agent." The notoriety didn't really hurt: the group now has more than 200,000 members, and every status update Park posts gets about a million views.
200,000 members? Really? Most likely not even one percent or even one tenth of one percent of that number ever existed in reality. To get an idea of how laughably insignificant the Coffee Party remains despite the big buildup in the press years ago, check out this video (16 views as of this writing) of a Coffee Party Board of Directors meeting last week in Boulder, Colorado. Interviews were conducted in a shady lounge chair with so much buzz word talk about a meaningless survey that I felt like slurping more coffee just to remain awake while watching it.
Of slightly more interest is this video of the Coffee Party Board of Directors sitting around a kitchen table and revealing their Inner Sedentary Bolshevik with talk of revolution and "cold civil war."
Of course, no Coffee Party board meeting that no one pays attention to is complete without a strong reliance on buzz words. "Synergy" in particular:
We will be teaming up with several organizations to leverage our synergies. Several contacts with several organization were already made by Jeanene in Colorado Springs. Debilyn and Jeanene will be participating in several trans-partisan events in Washington, DC in October.
...The 2014 Coffee Party Board meeting was the most substantive board meeting to date. Our new President Debilyn Molineaux ends with the following prophetic statement that we all intend to make true. “There is something synergistic about having the right people in the right place at the right time that really feels like it is going to propel us into the future. We are going to take off.”
Synergy. Because nothing says nothing so well as "synergy."
So is the Coffee Party doomed to have absolutely no impact on society? No, because the Coffee Party has left us with a jewel of a cultural legacy in the form of perhaps the lamest rap video ever made. It happened at their sparsely attended convention in Louisville, Kentucky in 2010 and will live on forever in the annals of unintended comedic entertainment. So sit back in a lounge chair and laugh away your synergies as Jonny 5 presents "You Can't Stop a Movement."
