LIQUID ATTENTION SPAN

So now the Internet professorial types are fulminating about the kind of beverages you need to get through a hard day at the brain factory. The esteemed James Joyner sticks up for coffee:

Coffee is the far better alternative in a variety of ways:

* The caffeine level is infinitely variable rather than predetermined by an evil apparatchik in Atlanta
* Ground coffee–or even beans and a grinder–take up decidedly less space than a commensurately caffeinated batch of soda
* Coffee–even good coffee–is far cheaper by volume, let alone caffeine unit–than soda
* Coffee has that wonderful coffee aroma and flavor, which soft drinks ordinarily do not

Q.E.D. coffee is better.

But James notes that other academicians have differing opinions, preferring the less cardioactive nature of soft drinks, particularly of the diet variety.

We clergy are nonacademic types, as the academicians will be quick to assert. Never mind that most of us have master’s degrees and are fluent in at least four languages. Never mind that we’ve got to produce between 20 and 45 minutes of polished rhetoric every week. But we can live with that. “Blessed are you when they persecute you for my name’s sake,” and all that.

However.

No one, and I mean NO ONE, knows more about the proper stimulant beverages than we do. And six out of five Protestant clergy will tell you that the most dangerous place in the world is between them and the coffee pot.

Anybody who’s ever been to a gathering of clergy can testify to this. I’ve been to my share of 3-day pastor’s conferences where 30 pastors drank as much joe in those 3 days as an army platoon drinks in a week. I’ve seen riots break out when hopelessly-naive convention center managers attempted to enforce a “no food or beverage on the arena floor” policy during synod assemblies. I’ve seen the kind of carnage that a group of grumpy theologians can cause when the caterers tear down the coffee service at the brutishly early hour of 8:30 pm.

We’ll drink our coffee any way we can get it–Starbucks is good, but we’re not above restaurant coffee. Heck, we’re not above gas-station coffee. (Given the amount of time we spend in our cars, how could we be?) When a guy’s daily grind (HAW!) is a pot and a half of church-basement Butter-Nut with a generous helping of non-dairy creamer that gives every sign of having been manufactured during the Carter administration, you know the coffee jones is strong in that person.

I mean, diet soda? DIET SODA? Diet soda is for people who’ve never had to read anything by Thomas Altizer. Diet soda is for people who haven’t gone to lectures discussing all three volumes of Paul Tillich’s Systematic Theology and therefore don’t understand the joke about the prayer that starts off “O Great Working Hypothesis.” Diet soda is for people who don’t have the Athanasian Creed committed to memory.

A 7-ounce cup of coffee has anywhere from twice to three times the caffeine of a can of Diet Mountain Dew . . . and I don’t know a pastor who will even bother with a cup less than 20 ounces. Crimony, when I was in seminary, I drank three or four of those 20-ounce cups a day.

Please, people, listen to what I am saying. Diet soda is for pretenders.