Having just finished Joe Romm’s excellent new book, Language Intelligence: Lessons on Persuasion from Jesus, Shakespeare, Lincoln, and Lady Gaga on the myriad uses of the techniques of rhetoric, I momentarily thought to title this post “Christmas Candy Coal Stocking-Stuffer: Naughty, Not Nice,” but just couldn’t get it past my gag reflex. In any case, I don’t know whether this is a now-classic holiday candy that I just never noticed before, being not inclined these days to frequent that particular supermarket aisle, but the galvanized steel tub brimming with boxes of it right at the check-out line in Trader Joe’s yesterday was impossible to miss.
In fact—as I’ve since learned—if you web search “candy coal” you’ll find a ton of it, from chunky mint chocolate candy coal, to chunky hard licorice candy coal (comes with its own Victorian-style hammer, for the experience of breaking it into yet smaller chunks!), to recipes for how to make your own, and a lot of ads referring to the traditional “If you kids don’t behave you’ll get a lump of coal in your stockings for Christmas, instead of presents!” right before noting how sweet the stuff is when made from dark chocolate instead of compressed carbon. That’ll teach ’em.
At a younger, more naive age, I might’ve gone oh… hmmm… cute, I guess, but whatever. Pardon my rather distinct lack of trust on this, but these days, with our fossil-fuel-driven massively uncontrolled chemical experimentation on the atmosphere leading to ever greater climate disruption, with Naomi Oreskes’ Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming racketing around in my brain, with the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal campaign to replace dirty coal-fired power plants with clean renewable energy, Bill McKibben’s Do The Math tour promoting divestment from fossil fuel interests, politicians afraid to use the word climate (unless they’re the sort who attack the scientists and the science), and ever-more-aggressive pushback from the coal and oil industries, it’s a very different hmmm… indeed.
Yes, of course I’d love some Candy Coal! And could I please have some Light Sweet Crude Maple Agave to go with that? Perfect!
Yeah, right. I need a candy cigarette.