In Praise of John Updike, William Penn, & @Starbucks

I was forced to read John Updike's Centaur in high school and wasn't inspired to read any of his other works voluntarily. However, after a thumbnail sketch bio by Peter Collier in the 7-8 July Wall Street Journal, I feel guilty since it seems that Updike was one of the few American literati who didn't assume knee-jerk anti-Americanism during the Vietnam War. He still sounds like a self absorbed heathen:

he discusses growing up in Shillington, Pa., as a solitary boy striving somewhat pathetically for acceptance but always aware that he was "a literary spy within average, public-school, supermarket America" and later as a young adult in Ipswich, Mass., where he was "a stag of sorts in our herd of housewife-does . . . greedy for my quota of life's pleasures, a distracted, mediocre father and worse husband."

but at least he wasn't a Bolshevik.


In the same issue, Updike's original homestate, the hippy would be utopia of Penn's Woods:

William Penn, the Quaker founder -- way in the background, landing in Pennsylvania

seems to be honored with an oblique homage in a new children's book, The World's Greatest Lion. In the review:

Zamba struggled to safety and, in this picture-book version of events, led all the other lost and confused animals to the refuge of an enormous tree. "Animals that in nature would have been predator and prey now walked side by side, all finding shelter," we read. The lion doesn't quite lie down with the lamb here, but he does have a rest with ostriches and giraffes."

Similarly to having lions lay down with lambs, Starbucks seems to desire elephants hanging out with donkeys in their new Indivisible campaign.  At first, I thought that it was simply some Left/RINO/No-Labels sabotage effort to defang the Tea Parties.  Indeed, Indivisible's tumbler page seems to validate this assumption. However, after perusing the #stoprush hash tag on twitter, I ran across irate Lefties lobbying Starbucks to boycott Limbaugh's show.  Hence, Starbucks' could simply be acting out of capitalistic self-interest, which makes me esteem them all that much more & greatly increases the probability that I'll fork over some of my hard earned dough for a cup of their jo.