The Standells weren’t actually from Boston, but their 1966 classic “Dirty Water” had a bigger impact on this city’s shove-it-up-yours-and-like-it identity than any other song in popular music. “Well, I love that dirty water,” the band shouts over a spritely organ line. “Oh Boston, you’re my home!”

I doubt those L.A. garage rockers knew it at the time, but these lyrics mocking the notoriously polluted Charles River would come to serve as a proud Bostonian mating call at sporting wins and dive bars, where we puff ourselves up as meaner than New Yorkers and fouler-mouthed than Navy SEALs doing standup. But “dirty water” can also be used to describe something else we swear by in this region, something so engrained in our daily routines that we never stop to question its quality, or to ask ourselves whether we deserve better:

I’m of course talking about the coffee at our beloved Dunkin’, which tastes more like the melted ice water at the bottom of an actually good cup of coffee. As of writing this, there’s one of those cups sitting beside my laptop — a medium cold brew with whole milk and three sickening pumps of unsweetened vanilla syrup — and it’s taking every ounce of strength to not dump it in the sink and go to Starbucks.

I only have a few weeks left as this paper’s opinion editor, so it’s finally time to live my truth: I’ve lived in this state for my entire goddang life, but I hate Dunkin’ — I hate everything it stands for as a cultural touchstone, and I hate that it’s sucker punched us into a state of caffeinated, comfortable mediocrity with our beverage choices.

Editor’s note: If you’ve made it to this point in this highly controversial op-ed, author Charlie Desjardins thanks you for not losing your cool.

Now, you might be sitting there thinking: Gee, this guy sounds a whole lot like Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who recently announced a war on Dunkin’ and the obscene amounts of sugar in their drinks.

“We’re gonna ask Dunkin’ Donuts and Starbucks, show us the safety data that show that it’s okay for a teenage girl to drink an iced coffee with 115 grams of sugar in it,” Kennedy said at a rally in Austin, Texas last month. “I don’t think they’re gonna be able to do it.”

Truth be told, I couldn’t give two craps about sugar, and I’m saying this as someone whose mother and grandmother both have diabetes — so you know I really mean it. I’m also not a total monster, and therefore remember a time when I was but a humble servant to Dunkin’s easygoing charms. As a child, I was known to shovel Munchkins into my tiny mouth like coal into a furnace; on summer days, I used to walk down to the Rogers Street location in Lowell for vanilla bean Coolattas and Frozen Chocolates; in high school, I swiped a parked car in the Dunkin’s parking lot and spent the rest of the day paranoid that the school resource officer was onto me.

In that sense, Dunkin’ is, like McDonald’s and a whole host of other fast food joints, the equivalent of a neighborhood bar for people too young to spend their money getting piss-drunk: a local meeting-spot, on every corner, in every town, trafficking in nostalgia with its orange-and-pink corporate layout and cheap-enough prices. Heck, they don’t say “America runs on Dunkin’” for no reason; there are over 14,000 Dunkin locations worldwide — including 205 in Chicago, 126 in Philly, and 121 in Malaysia — and over 1,000 in Massachusetts alone. 

Dunkin’s ubiquity can be a blessing for a quick pick-me-up, but as I’ve entered adulthood and started noticing the increasingly obscene amount of Dunkin’ cups surrounding me, I’ve realized that’s their one and only blessing. As the company’s image has widened, its high-profile schemes have resulted in a slew of viral menu items — including collabs with Sabrina Carpenter, Ice Spice, and Megan Thee Stallion — but an annoying lack of quality, which New Englanders have ignored for far too long on the outdated idea that Dunkin’ is personal to all of us, and we therefore need to protect it. 

“It’s a lot of nostalgia,” wrote one Redditor, “jtet93,” on r/Boston two years ago. “For most people around here it’s the first coffee they ever drank.”

“It’s that shitty thing you grew up with that gives you comfort,” wrote another Redditor, “f0rtytw0,” on the same thread. “Also, go fuck yourself, munchkins are awesome.”

Maybe these prideful feelings had an anchor in reality at one point in time. I’ve heard tales from many family members who fondly remember an era when Dunkin’ made their donuts fresh in-house and would roast robust brews that satisfied construction workers, grandparents, and morning radio hosts of all types. To hear ardent defenders of their products is to hear of a radical rainbow on which all people of all classes can coexist — one drive-thru, under God, indivisible — and coffee can be the universal superglue holding your fighting neighbors together for one more morning.

That doesn’t change the fact that today, due to typical late-stage capitalism BS, Dunkin’s poor coffee is the ultimate reflection of a company spreading itself far too thin: leaning on frozen and premade food products, and prioritizing growth over consistency. In 2019, they dropped the “Donuts” from their title and evolved into a “beverage-led” company — a poor one at that.

“It’s really not shocking to me when I hear that people don’t like Dunkin’ because their drinks come out differently every time,” Elizabeth Hayward, a former Dunkin’ employee and student at Endicott College, told me. “Corporate doesn’t allocate enough funds to pay a sufficient amount of workers that actually corresponds with how much business these places get.”

This isn’t to say that absolutely nobody genuinely enjoys the products being served at Dunkin’, but that baked into every ounce of the company’s fanbase is an ironic awareness that this stuff isn’t exactly world-class anymore. Just look at the lyrics of “Dirty Water,” or take your 100th annual trip to Fenway Park, which is, objectively, the worst piece-of-crap ballpark on the planet, but which has its own brand of obsessives due to its fossilized history: its stiff seats, chipped paint, claustrophobic footpaths, and endless stream of iconic moments.

It may be crappy, but we — branded crappy drivers, fans, and overall human beings by everybody else in the United States — like our output to be a little sloppier than most. 

“This is our fucking city,” David Ortiz proclaimed, standing on the Fenway pitcher’s mound, five days after the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings. I remember this moment more than 99% of my own life experiences.

But even if you buy into the idea that Dunkin’s coffee is as vital a Massachusetts pastime as baseball, you’d still be hard-pressed to find a shred of authentic homerism left in their entire brand.

Whereas the endearing advertising some longtime locals might associate with the company saw mustachioed men waking up to “make the donuts,” modern commercials feature Ben Affleck, Matt Damon, and Tom Brady in lazily exaggerated Southie accents and gaudy “Dun-King” jumpsuits. Dunkin’s recent testing of a 48 oz commemorative bucket of iced coffee feels like a TikTok publicity stunt; their commemorative engagement ring box with matching wedding cake-flavored munchkin feels like an excuse to be swooned over on Good Morning America.

Nowadays, buying a Dunkin’ coffee and a Boston Creme donut feels more like a lazy tourist’s idea of what a Massachusetts resident should do. Remove the “Boston” from the “Boston Creme,” and you’d be left with a below-average breakfast available anywhere from here to Austria.

“Come and take it,” Mass. Governor Maura Healey posted defiantly on X in response to Kennedy’s statement.

At this point, it’s hard to own Dunkin’ when Dunkin’ is so damn indistinct.