If you don’t watch out, the thing that disturbs you as different might one day swallow you up and you are that thing.  There is such a thing as the Muslim version of Coca- or Pepsi- Cola called “Mecca-Cola “.  Did you know that?  The idea is to boycott American products because they are different from the homegrown kind and smack of the DEVIL.  Everybody over there knows that.  The idea is to boycott American products but imitate them because they are so devilishly good.  You may imitate them but give them a different homegrown name and then you will be able to accept them.  It is something like “kosher bacon”, an impossibility where you get the taste but not the product, which is proscribed.  There is an implicit collision of cultures and need for separation by changing the formula a bit and changing the name.  This Mecca-Cola is one way to handle it.

Throughout history, there is the story of the rise of little known people seemingly from out of nowhere.  They become, for a time, very important, swallow up other peoples, then go into a decline and disappear.  They leave markers of their passage - things that we have adopted. There is a cyclical quality to this in the rise and fall of civilization.  There is a similar cycle in the rise and fall of culture.  We still use the Hebrew Bible as a guide for living and know its stories by heart.  We use Greek art, call it “classical” and the Roman alphabet and law, and call them ours.  We use Chinese gunpowder, silk and pasta by way of Italy. The dynamite of a Swede gave us the power to level mountains and a peace prize to celebrate builders of a western civilization.

I don’t have a problem with Mecca-Cola.  I say, if it makes them happy they should go for it. I think if its formulation is better than the copies we have here in Pepsi, Royal Crown, Diet Rite, Wall mart’s version and so on – I would like to imbibe but not to reward the underlying message of “Hate America” that comes along with it.

Now, I have tried other drinks.  There was one that I suppose is the Peruvian Coca-Cola I tried in Mi Peru, a “Gran Restaurant”.  It tasted awful, but I suppose there are Peruvians who dislike the taste of Coca-Cola. Other cultures cultivate tastes that are foreign to foreigners and I guess foreigners reciprocate. Coca-Cola has an interesting history.  When it was introduced, it contained a formulation of the drug cocaine that varied for a time in its strength.  When goody, goody Americans found out they liked the “coke” in Coca-Cola, the Coca-Cola Company reversed its policy and brought out the “original” drugless version we now call “Classic”.  There is trial and error and dropping what does not work and then trying out something else that might.

I suggest that Mecca-Cola be given a chance.  Who knows? It might start a trend where we get swallowed up by the good things they think up to keep us apart.