Calling beans on a liberal latte stereotype

Someone on Facebook who is of a right-wing bent recently said he enjoyed pissing off “latte liberals,” which made me wonder, “when did drinking a latte make you a liberal?”

And what do conservatives do -- mash their coffee beans with their gun butts and boil the shards? Political correctness is getting weird if that's so. 

Or maybe he was just implying that liberals are fussy about their coffee, while conservatives are more hard-fisted. If this keeps up, liberals and conservatives are going to need a score card to know what sort of coffee they're allowed to have. Do you dare vote for Orrin Hatch but still have cream with your Columbian? What about iced coffee? What does that say about my stand on free trade?

Sadie, down at Grounds for Coffee on Ogden’s 25th Street, would go broke if she only served liberals. I mean, Ogden used to be the Democratic stronghold of Utah, but not lately, and since when is a Democrat in Utah a “liberal,” anyway?

I accused my Facebook friend of being careless with his stereotypes, an all-too-common occurrence these days. 

The term “liberal” itself is really more of a general-purpose curse word than a description of actual political leaning. I live very modestly, am careful with money, charitable to those in need and care about my fellow man -- all things that would have identified me with Eisenhower back in the 50s. Not any more.

Scientists used to be the most conservative folks around -- those guys who thinks with a slide-rule tend to be finicky with their finances, hate waste and wear the same clothes for a month at a time. 

But suddenly someone didn’t like the findings those scientists were coming up with -- climate change! -- and decided they must be liberals. Why? Because it’s easier than sitting down with those findings, going over them and figuring out another explanation for the data, an exercise a couple of famous climate deniers have tried, to their chagrin when the findings turned out to be right.

Sometimes this stuff happens for the silliest reasons. When France declined to take part in the Gulf War, or was it the Iraq war? I forget. Anyway, they didn’t want to play with us about something military, the Simpsons ran an episode in which Homer Simpson called them “cheese eating surrender monkeys,” and suddenly the French were a national scape-goat. 

Remember Freedom fries? And I remember some TV show in which a French military commander, dealing with US soldiers, was portrayed as distinctly light on his feet, if you get my drift.

Never mind the French tried to win World War I through a strategy of “elan!” which essentially meant having all their soldiers charge the other side’s line, ignoring the machine gun bullets cutting into them. Or that they lost hundreds of thousands of men killed in the first six months of World War II, surrendered only after it was tactically impossible to do anything else, and waged successful underground war the rest of the time. D-Day succeeded because French partisans died to get our guys information.

And France lost more men in Vietnam than we did. 

But facts are facts and silly stereotypes are, well, silly. 

I get called a liberal a lot, but I’m no fan of lattes. When I go to Sadie’s I usually have the French Roast, black. 

Not sure what that makes me, but it’s good coffee.