Mr. Squish and the cola wars.

I grew up with the “cola wars”—the insistence that, if you’re gonna have a cola, it must under all circumstances be a Coca-Cola. (Unless your brand was Pepsi, Tab, RC, or Dr. Pepper. Then that.) Offering you an alternative cola was unacceptable: If your server said, “We don’t have Coke; how about a Pepsi?” you were to have anything but Pepsi. Pepsi, despite tasting largely the same, was foul, noxious swill. Only Coke would do.

One of my aunts collected Coca-Cola memorabilia, and I think she was even a shareholder in the company. Whenever we had family functions, she simply had to have Coke. (One of my other aunts for a time simply had to have coke—with the lowercase c. But that’s another story for another time.)

The cola wars were of course invented by the cola companies. As is any brand-name loyalty campaign. For most of us it makes absolutely no difference whether you buy a Chevy or a Ford, an Apple or a Dell, coffee from Starbucks or from Peet’s, raisin bran manufactured by Kellogg or Post. Same with cola. Nut-flavored fizzy water largely tastes the same, and though I admit a preference for Dr. Pepper, I have no trouble with Coke or Pepsi instead. (I would still prefer an iced coffee if available.) But if you’ve been properly brainwashed by the cola companies, give someone a Pepsi instead of a Coke, and they’ll slit your face. Or, more commonly, angrily react, then lower your tip.

Yes, when I was a teenager I wouldn’t drink Pepsi. But this had nothing to do with the cola wars. I’d drink all the other colas. (I preferred Jolt, primarily for the caffeine.) Pepsi made me gag, and I suspect it’s because I had got sick after drinking a Pepsi. Have you ever eaten a whole lot of something, then soon after—not necessarily because of the thing you ate—thrown up? For some people they can’t ever eat that thing again. The taste memory is too strongly connected to the sense memory. That’s why my brother Chad still won’t eat at Chevy’s. And probably why I can’t abide the soapy taste of cilantro. It takes years to wear off, and I couldn’t stand Pepsi until my mid-20s. Today: No problem.

So to me, the cola wars are stupid. Even more stupid: Corporate loyalty. At family functions, because of that aunt, everything was Coke and Coca-Cola products, like Sprite and Mr. Pibb and (nowadays) Barq’s. I was a big Mountain Dew fan, but that’s a Pepsi product, and therefore verboten—which really annoyed me. I could understand if you’re a beverage distributor with a contract, but this was a family function: Buy the boy some Mountain Dew! It’s not like if you put Coke products in the vicinity, a wormhole will open up, the fabric of spacetiime will be ripped asunder, and John C. Pemberton will rise from the grave to feast on the brains of the living.

To make up for it, I’d get a Sprite, add an ounce of Coke, and voilà, it looked like a beer. Fun for freaking out certain adults.

Anyway, after noting with some irritation that the soda machines at Solano Community College only dispensed Coke products—I wanted a Mountain Dew, but in exchange for a free scoreboard in the stadium, they had a Coke contract—I spit up the original version of the above “Mr. Squish” strip. Later that year at Sac State, with a deadline and no new idea coming to mind, I redrew it.

The objection to Coke bottling in South Africa was because of apartheid. Yeah, that was still going on. Racists don’t deserve Coke. But Coca-Cola, which is headquartered in Georgia, clearly had no trouble selling to racists in the past. So, despite many Americans’ call to divest themselves in protest, they kept their plants, and their profits.

Why was Pepsi not “politically correct”? That was an inside joke. (I still needed to learn to not make punchlines out of inside jokes.) My church friend Dave, not to be confused with my editor-in-chief Dave, had a regular prank: Whenever anyone made a choice—he was going to this particular gas station, or gonna order this particular item on the menu, or picked out this particular frozen burrito at the grocery store—Dave would throw them off by saying, “Dude, no, don’t do that. It isn’t politically correct.”

Dave never explained how it wasn’t politically correct. He didn’t know why, nor care: It was a joke. But people would actually change their minds for fear of not being politically correct. Others would say, “Oh, Violent act political correctness,” and do what they were gonna do already. Dave was amused either way; he was just messing with them.

Now, the “Tastes great / Less filling” bit. That was a fake argument in ’70s and ’80s Miller Lite commercials: Two sportscasters, two steroid-raging athletes, or two well-known alcoholics like Rodney Dangerfield or Mickey Spillane, would get in a heated debate about which attribute of watered-down Miller was better. They never actually came to blows, which was a shame. I always hoped one day, one day, Billy Martin would smash a beer bottle on the bar and cut George Steinbrenner a new orifice. Never happened. Oh well.

Nobody caught the irony of Leonard’s “Team Anarchy” shirt. Still one of my favorite jokes.

Well. When you’re 19, you never expect you’ll be blogging about this old comic strip when you’re 43, and have to explain all the topical humor. Nobody warns you how topical humor doesn’t stand the test of time. Not that I would’ve paid attention had anyone warned me. Most of the stuff I found funny at the time was topical—Saturday Night Live, Murphy Brown, “Bloom County,” “Doonesbury”… so I did what amused me. Still kinda do. But the jokes people still laugh at, are the ones where you don’t have to explain why Coke in South Africa was a problem in 1990.