The Decadent Worker

Zen Koan Solved By Conspiracy Buff

Why did Bodhidharma come from the West? A conspiracy of Indian tea growers financed his voyage. You don’t think all the tea in China got their by coincidence?*

Yesterday, tea; today, Coca Cola. As Walter Cronkite once explained, current history can be seen as a global war between Coke and Pepsi. In Russia there is a Pepsico franchise whereas Coke’s got China. In the Middle East I think it is Coke in Israel and Pepsi in the Arab nations — and Cronkite said PLO types have been known to shoot up billboards for the Israel brand, so high do feelings run.

Soft drink companies have astronomical amounts of money to throw around, so the temptation to become involved in conspiracy politics finds them irresistable.

Remember Andrew Young, Carter’s outspoken Black Ambassador to the United Nations? Within a week of the Martin Luther King Holiday this year, he was over in Africa — taking a break in his duties as Mayor of Atlanta to plead the case for Coca Cola. “Find out what Coca Cola wants before you ask them to leave,” he as, in effect, telling Third World heads of state.

A KKK-type newspaper called The National Chronicle (Vol. 19, No. 22, 11 June 1970) carried an item warning: “Any White Christian would have to be ignorant of the facts to even consider drinking a violent poison like Coca Cola or Pepsi Cola in the first place. In some respects it is easier for the naturopath to treat a morphine addict than a Coca Cola or Pepsi Cola addict. If the White Christian set would be sure to survive to inherit this country they would help the Pepsi Cola and Coca Cola companies spread propaganda to the blacks. But I know no White Christian would stoop this low.”

Reference is made to a then-recent article in Fact: Magazine which I remember reading at the time wherein more than one doctor is cited who recommends giving children beer before allowing them to imbibe the cola drinks. Of course the historic home and corporate headquarters of Coke is Andrew Young’s Atlanta and, of course, what Coke wants for Africa is exactly what The National Chronicle wished upon Blacks everywhere, if not for exactly the same reasons (I guess).

A Yin and a Yang could be designed to look like a globe, with a Pepsi cap for the dot of Yin in the Yang and a Coke cap for the dot of Yang in the Yin — and that would about sum it up. Nixon was in Dallas the morning of John Kennedy’s assassination as a corporate attorney for Pepsi. When the shots were fired he was safely elsewhere — flying east in a private plane owned and piloted by Don Kendall, a high-ranking Pepsi executive. Kendall credits Nixon with once saving his job, by manipulating Kruschev into posing for photos with a bottle of Pepsi in hand during the famous Kitchen Debate. Kendall actually said that in public and was quoted by journalists.

Joan Crawford was married to another Pepsico executive and it was from a party at her home that Sharon Tate and Roman Polanski drove Robert Kennedy to the Ambassador Hotel the night he was assassinated. So whoever finds out whether the Manson Family drinks Coke or Pepsi can probably unravel the whole thing.

* Actually tea originated in China and, besides, the answers of Zen koans are seldom if ever quite exactly logical — for that reason.

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