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You’ll probably guess what happened. School, life and some basic tenets of capitalism conspired to kill what could have been the nation’s most hated café. The world would go on to make political decisions without the assistance of a chain of participatory dessert bars. The dream of ChocoPolitics died.

But one decade later, defying all reason and market logic, ChocoPolitics lives again.

Just imagine my delight this month, when my 20-something-self found a soul-mate in the Chief Executive Officer of Starbucks, who has resurrected my vision of ruining everyone’s appetite by mixing second-rate food with longstanding political disputes.

Howard Schultz has just launched “Race Together,” a phrase that hints at both race and togetherness, and that functions as both a Twitter hashtag and something written with a Sharpie on take-away cups. These two words, Schultz says, can “facilitate a conversation” and give customers “a renewed level of understanding and sensitivity about the issue and they themselves would spread that to their own sphere of influence.”

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Shrewder than I, Schultz knows that it’s not wise to withhold grande cappuccinos from under-caffeinated customers until they solve the problem of racial division. Starbucks patrons are merely encouraged to broker lasting resolutions among different ethnic groups; they are not held hostage until they do so. Still, just as ChocoPolitics would have provided coffee-seekers with political reading material, Starbucks now does; just as ChocoPolitics would have made political arbiters of baristas, Starbucks now has; and just as ChocoPolitics would have been subject to vicious and protracted public ridicule, Starbucks now is.