An espresso machine is a machine for men. Women may use it—millions do—but that does mean they are men. Nor does it mean the same women want to be men. It does, however, mean we have a shortage of men who look the part, who have the skills to know and the strength to do their part: to operate a machine of many parts; to handle a machine that requires precision; to take the heat—in and outside the kitchen—as they stand before that hulk of copper and brass, with its pumps and pistons and its gears and temperature gauges, so they may drink not the fruit of their labor but the fuel that moves them. They drink it in shots (or doubles or triples), while they dress like executives and act like factory workers. They work like tradesmen, but they do not ply their trade at Starbucks.
In contrast, Howard Schultz sells coffee and wears an apron.
Unless we want to emasculate the presidency by electing a man with such a decaffeinated personality, whose outfit is more feminine than
any skirt or pantsuit, Schultz should continue to take orders and not try to give them.
He should stay where he is: on his knees, in that scene from “Rebel Without a Cause,” where, domesticated and neutered, he wears his wife’s apron—a flowery slip tied around his waist—as he crawls beside a food tray and cowers when his son asks, “What can you do when you have to be a man?”
Unable to be one, the father is unable to answer as one.
Howard Schultz needs to lose the apron.