This weekend I told to someone caffeine was a recent vice. It was subsequently suggested my recent obsession with America’s Favorite Stimulant was less vice and more love at first sip.

What, doesn’t everyone plan their daily menu around each item’s relative stimulating effect?

History teachers would have you believe the pilgrims came to the new land for religious freedom, but could they be wrong? Is there margin for error in the historical consensus? Here’s my modest (and somewhat ridiculous) proposal: they came to the new land seeking something with a little more kick than tea. The Brits are famous for their drinking habits, aren’t they? Maybe the pilgrims were just tired of drinking the yard waste.

While I’m revising history, let us turn our attention to the Boston Tea Party. It has been said the Boston Tea Party was about taxes and choice, but maybe we’ve had the choice part just a little bit wrong all this time. Maybe they just didn’t want tea. We’ve been told our founding fathers were a savvy lot. I’ve also heard that, while they thought democracy was groovy, their trust in the unwashed masses to make good decisions was not terribly high. (How else do you explain the Electoral College?) Maybe they knew coffee was the superior caffeine delivery device, but they didn’t trust the public to make the right choice. Maybe, just maybe, the Boston Tea Party was a clandestine effort to manufacture a little more market for coffee. With Boston’s supply of tea flavoring the already polluted harbor (and making it worse), the people would have to look elsewhere for their fix; nudging them all in the right direction, so that we all might be as enlightened as our Founding Fathers.

“Give me coffee or give me death!”