Posted on 11/26/2008 5:46:48 AM PST by joeystoy
Just saw a CNBC interview with Michael Gates Gill the author of How Starbucks Saved My Life: A Son of Privilege Learns to Live Like Everyone Else.
What a pantload!
Son of privilege is right.
Son of Brendan Gill, New Yorker critic and columnist, he grew up in a Bronxville mansion with regular guests like John and Jackie Kennedy, Ernest Hemingway, John Updike and Brendan Behan showing up for tea and crumpets and Chivas Regal. His life story is a prototype blueprint illustrating how birth privilege provides a safety net for all manner of irresponsible behavior.
Drop out of college... not a problem when your frat buddy can get you a job at his Daddy's Madison Avenue advertising agency.
Marry, divorce... have an affair... marry, divorce again... have an affair... father more children... Hey, just brush it off with trust-funds, inherited money and a six-figure salary from advertising giant J. Walter Thompson.
Then, when you run out of great ideas like "Plop, plop. Fizz, fizz." and they toss you out on your butt, just use friends and family to fund a vanity consulting business. Go bust? Well, it wasn't your money anyway.
Then what? No more money, nobody left to borrow from, no job prospects and no wife.
Now that his whining memoir has become a best seller his advice for America is simplify your life, reduce your overhead and live the life of a modern-day Thoreau.
Great idea, Einstein.
Why didn't the rest of us think of that?
When you live in a 25-room Westchester mansion reducing your overhead is simple.
(Excerpt) Read more at give-n-go.blogspot.com ...
Funny, I am very aware of the book, (which had a brief vogue of actually being sold in Starbucks), but was never
aware of the seedier side of Michael Gill’s biography.
The reviews glossed over most of what this post detailed.
I’m not normally one of those You’ve Got Mail, anti-chain types, but I loathe Starbucks and everything it stands for - crappy, overpriced products, unhealthy drinks, limousine liberalism, sitting around a cookie-cutter “coffe shop” yakking about life instead of living. Like you can make a corporatized environment to imitate the real character of an authentic hole in the wall.
It’s unintentionally hilarious this guy thinks he’s parachuting into the real world dropping into a SBux. Oh, I also forgot to mention the highly suggestive logo.
A bunch of my friends in grad school would go to SBux in the afternoon as some kind of reward for, I guess, getting through the day. Because life is so tough when you’re getting paid to go to school.
A spoiled rich brat swallows a small dose of reality and thinks he’s discovered some profound truths about the human condition.
What he needs is a real kick in the ass from life. But I doubt he’d learn humility from it.
Thanks for the read, CaptainK.
BTW: You’re not the only Republican woman in the Empire State. My wife is a NYC teacher and she has to speak with like-minded colleagues in code.
Picked up this book because I’m in the coffee shop business and thought it was a bunch of liberal guilt trip crap. It was a combination of Sally Fields “They really like me!!” and the guilty white liberals perspective that the young minority workers are sooo much more capable. Bullocks. Don’t feel sorry for adulterers reaping what they sow and looking for sympathy.
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