Coffee or Die

Flat white lies and America's long black truth

Check out my video postcard from the rugby last weekend! A 90-second travel show, shot on a perfect autumn day. I had a blast making it. More film to come.

My workshop How to Write a Newsletter is May 22 here in Greytown. Thinking about starting one? I’ll tell you all I know. Great conversation, bevvies, and a fancy notebook included.

the afterlife / st mark’s, carterton

Flat whites lie. A little white lie, white as milk. But a lie nonetheless.

“Any coffee with milk can be manipulated,” my friend Marvin the coffee man explained on the train to Wellington the other day. “But the long black can tell you something about the coffee itself.”

Americans know flat whites, kinda. What’s a long black? It’s a small, plain, honest, and strong cup of very black coffee. A double shot and a splash of water, same as you’d add to open up a mid-range whiskey. No pumps, no drizzle, no cream.

Marvin Guerrero is the Wairarapa’s patron saint of good coffee, a genial man-about-the-valley with Jedi-level facial recall and a world’s worth of hospitality wisdom. He grew up on his grandfather’s family coffee plantation in Honduras. He’s worked on Disney cruises, he’s worked for Coca Cola (“like working for God.”) He studied coffee under the masters in Italy. His Gracias Coffee is the best roast I’ve tasted in New Zealand, bar none. (Marvin, you can pay me in long blacks.)

marvin at his masterton HQ

I don’t mean to bag on the flat white. It’s NZ’s national default: a double shot with steamed milk, served in one of those heavy cup-and-saucer sets you can buy at Moore Wilson’s in feijoa green. Five ounces, minimal foam, flat like a flat soda. It’s lovely.

But Marvin’s notion of the milk as a manipulation, a screen, a step between you and the thing itself—this sticks with me. Kiwis do love their dairy. We Americans love manipulated anything.

This week

David Farrier

, a Kiwi journalist in America who does the great Flightless Bird podcast and writes Webworm here on Substack, saw a dead deer on his suburban California street. A grisly sight, but not an uncommon one in the deer-plagued US. He took a photo and posted it to Instagram, sparking howls of betrayal among his followers. “Hard unfollow,” wrote one. The howls and unfollows, David notes, were nearly all American. He wrote about the whole weird exchange (now paywalled):

I don’t know why — but Americans have this propensity to shy away from death in a way I haven’t really experienced before. And I’d take it a step further: I think that deep in their bones they’re very good at turning away from reality.

There’s an issue of scale here, of course; there are many, many more Americans than Kiwis, so naturally more to unfollow. But I trust David to have a good read on his binational audience, and anyhow he’s landed on a familiar critique. Pick your flavor: The Air-Conditioned Nightmare, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, White Noise, and oceans more where that came from. In Between the World and Me Ta-Nehisi Coates calls us “a country lost in the Dream” and by book’s end has quit even trying to wake us.

So David’s right. But it gets weirder.

Let’s do this in coffee. Here’s a coffee menu in Greytown, New Zealand:

Here’s a gas station on the interstate outside Grand Island, Nebraska:

We were driving across the Plains. The coffee-like substance I wanted had run out. I watched the dude open up the machine and swap out the bag inside.

Marvin calls this “Cheesecake Factory Brain.” Keep cranking up the portion size, the list of choices, the luxury add-ons, the sugar count. Keep the dream alive at all costs.

“I don’t think Kiwis like to be upsold,” Marvin told me. “Americans, they like to be upsold. ‘I get the promotion, I get this and this and this.’ Hook, line, and sinker, man.”

Farrier’s own example is a creepy Disney-themed housing development out in the California desert. Two-million-dollar homes with Disney shit pre-plastered on the walls. This, he writes, is our American Dream:

Death is far, far away. Yours, theirs, ours.

Kiwis themselves are not much for dreaming. Realism is the thing here. Plain, good coffee. Ketchup everywhere—even that’s too poetic, here it’s just tomato sauce. Kiwi coffee shops are rarely chains but somehow all have the same menu. Out in the regions most bridges have just one lane.

It’s all very grounding, until it’s suffocating. New Zealand is of late spiralling into a deep, anti-dreaming funk. The government is determined to buy new ferries the same exact size as the current ones, because why imagine your country might grow? Cancel the new Dunedin hospital. Shrink the school lunches to Victorian slop. New development projects wholly unremarkable in real cities the world over are pipe dreams here: a new office block on Auckland’s Karangahape Road was denied because it would “dominate” the street more than the current vacant lot, and new apartments in Wellington’s Mount Victoria are driving protests from dead-eyed Kiwi Boomers pulling up the housing ladder behind them. Local character, goes the refrain. Local character is the complete absence of a dream.

Bernard Hickey

’s broad retort to the whole pinched-face lot of ‘em: “Where will your kids raise your grandkids?”

This American in Aotearoa wishes we could find an average of the two. Some Kiwi pragmatism and love of the simple things, with a dash of the ol’ American moonshot.

My native land, though, has gone too deep into the sleep meds. We dream too much now. Once the dreams were big and world-changing—that iPhone you’re holding—but now they’re cheap manipulations and deepfakes. Ice cream made to taste like Skyline Chili. Vegas built a movie screen as big as the eyeball of God. Trump is traveling this week with his own trailer of McDonald’s. We’ve got NZ’s same bitter housing crisis, downward mobility, and dimming sense of the future, but we’re trying to dream our way out. It’s not working. Ain’t worked for years. We don’t even know what our local character is anymore. And now some of us are dreaming of death.

That’s Black Rifle Coffee Company, the explicitly right-wing roaster now commanding the Walmart coffee aisle. Their logo is a gunsight. Their lightest blend is Silencer Smooth, their darkest is Murdered Out. They’ve got franchise shops in ten states now. The don’t sell flat whites, they sell a Betsy Ross White Mocha. It’s patriotic camp to support veterans and own the libs, get it? But bodies real and wished for keep piling up. One blend is branded with Fat Boy, the bomb that killed some 80,000 people in Nagasaki. Another’s got Revolutionary War heroes as zombie skeletons. Their CEO records his podcast seated before a skull stabbed through with a dagger. The company magazine is Coffee or Die. Maybe the or should be an and.

The Black Rifle boys would love a dead deer. But only if they’d pulled the trigger.

The American Dream is not to push death away. Our dream is to master death so that we can upsell its terror and beauty ourselves. Buy a subscription, lest you be the target: this is the menu we face as we stand alone in the Walmart aisle, afraid of the deer and dreaming of blood.

Marvin—apologies, hermano. This got darker than I thought.

But Marvin can roll with it, I think. Marvin understands. That morning on the train we barreled on into the long, dark tunnel through the Remutakas, talking coffee and politics and America.

On 9/11, he told me, he was working a Disney cruise out in the Caribbean.

“They didn’t stop,” he told me. “They put their heads down and kept on cruising.” //