The espresso, real coffee, is too small for American taste buds. We would be finished with it before anyone watched us have it.

Americans’ relationship to coffee may be the perfect symbol for our relationship to everything else.

We don’t produce it, but we are the biggest consumers of it on Earth. While in other parts of the world coffee is drunk in small quantities and cherished for its quality, in America we consume coffee the way we consume soda, gas and fat — and everything else: by the gallons.

It does seem fitting that we would popularize (Wal-Martize) the delicateness of coffee-drinking, making its intimate experience into an on-the-go, banalized tool for personal PR. We do it with everything else.

Someone must have heard somewhere that intelligent people drink coffee, talk about politics and modern art, then ask for a refill. And while actually discussing intellectual subjects would require time, painstaking reading and effort, donning a coffee cup only costs $1.98 and it takes as long as getting a burger.

In fact, drinking coffee and eating burgers occupy the same experiential sphere in America.

The fact that we choose overabundance over moderation shows our very own insecurities in terms of that which is not particularly measurable. We need, as a culture, the countable, the accumulable, so that everything becomes potential social capital.

And only those who are very insecure about the long-termed, difficult nature of the immeasurable (knowledge) would develop this obsession with visual overindulgence.

While in Europe and South America coffee is something to be shared, belonging to an intimate, intellectually inducing experience, in America it belongs inside the soda holders of our minivans.

Perhaps an addiction we can tolerate, coffee also seems to be quite the symbol for cosmopolitan savvy, perhaps the easiest route to looking cultured. A visual for the abstract concept of intellectuality, a coffee cup serves as pseudo proof for notions that are too elusive and unfamiliar for the American mind.

We don’t drink coffee for the taste — American coffee tastes like cardboard and black water — we drink it for the paper cup, for the social capital opportunity that it represents.

In fact, we are so oblivious to savoring coffee, we try to mask its taste with the innumerable coffee drink inventions. And the ridiculous, foreign-sounding titles they have come up with (the closest we will ever come to speaking another language).

Grande frappucinos, soy macchiattos, frappu-mochas, frappu venti americanos with whip cream on top, anything but actual coffee.

The espresso, the ultimate delicacy of the coffee world everywhere else, is relegated to an obscure little dose no one would dare to order or know how to consume. The espresso, real coffee, is too small for American taste buds. We would be finished with it before anyone watched us have it. So it would feel like we never even had it.

While Starbucks didn’t invent the coffeehouse by any means, it has popularized it and slapped a uniformed glaze over it. The Starbucks phenomenon is so popular and, also (therefore?) completely absurd.

Dozens of apparently concentrated urbanites doing homework, reading thick novels and working on their laptops in the middle of a bacchanalia of blender noises, metal thumping, cash register ringing and pop jazz in the background. Who could actually concentrate in an environment like that?

It seems that even “concentration,” perhaps the most invisibly abstract of all concepts, must be made into public display for it to be validated.

And last year I encountered the epitome of the American coffee-drinking experience: a drive-thru Starbucks in Kenosha. It takes longer to order and the drinks taste like pure sugar every time.

But the chances of you getting to work and still having coffee inside your two-liter paper cup to show in the office are higher.

And, in some level, “that must be what those people on the East Coast do.”

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