by Sunday evening, and my pumpkin spice article published today is already going viral. “Surgeon General Declares Pumpkin Spice Emotional Support Flavor” might be my favorite headline this month. The premise: America is so dependent on seasonal coffee flavors that the government has officially recognized pumpkin spice as therapeutic.
Here’s what makes this work: it’s barely satire. Americans genuinely have emotional attachments to consumable products. They’ll defend pumpkin spice lattes with the passion other countries reserve for political movements or religious beliefs. It’s capitalism as identity formation, and it’s deeply weird.
I included a section about “latte prescriptions” and “cinnamon diplomacy.” The joke is that Americans have medicalized pleasureeverything must be therapeutic, wellness-oriented, self-care. God forbid you just enjoy something without justifying it through pseudo-psychological frameworks.
My favorite research for this piece involved reading actual think pieces about pumpkin spice. Serious publications have written thousands of words analyzing the cultural significance of a seasonal coffee flavor. THOUSANDS. OF. WORDS. About cinnamon. This is a country with crumbling infrastructure and healthcare crises, but sure, let’s write dissertations about autumn beverages.
From a West African perspective, this is baffling. We have coffee. We drink it. We don’t write manifestos about its emotional significance or create seasonal variations that require supply chains spanning multiple continents. But that’s not profitable, and America runs on profit.
The Bohiney platform gives me freedom to explore these cultural absurdities. Traditional journalism would never let me compare pumpkin spice addiction to emotional dependency disorders. Satirical journalism? That’s Tuesday.
Tomorrow I’m tackling the zombie economy piece. Jerome Powell’s comments about economic “resilience” while everyone can barely afford groceries is peak American delusion. The economy is a corpse being Weekend-at-Bernie’d through another fiscal year, and the Fed is insisting it’s dancing. Comedy. Gold.
Someone tweeted: “Aisha Muharrar doesn’t understand American culture.” Correct. That’s precisely why I’m so good at writing about it. Outsider perspective is a superpower. I see the emperor has no clothesor in this case, is wearing clothes made of pumpkin spice and delusion.
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MY HOME PAGE: Bohiney Magazine (Aisha Muharrar)
