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| 2018 Redford |
I
am going to add some focus to my internet-based, pretend political commentary
career and will henceforth brand myself as a “Foreign Water
Correspondent.”
This
will give me the air of authority and specialization without too much effort while still permitting commentary on hot issues and indulgence in tax-deductable travel to water-fronting hot spots. It
should also increase the flow to my now web-footed website.
The
thought of making “water” my specialty first formed in the post-Watergate era when I realized that covering stories featuring that word could
lead to book deals, Hollywood movies, and the popular belief that you looked
something like Robert Redford. (Just for the record, I do bear a
striking resemblance to 2018 Robert Redford).
But the development that tipped the glass so to speak was the deluge of news coverage a few years ago around allegations that Anheuser-Busch had watered down and mislabelled Budweiser beer ! All major news networks, daily newspapers, and international media of every kind inundated their viewers and readers with the story and special features on beer testing and the legal issues around watery beer. Twitter was awash with twater on water and beer.
Even before this story bubbled up, water had drawn a lot of attention because Beam
Distillers had purposely added more to its whisky in order to increase production, sell more product abroad, and deliberately make
more money. The Beam stories, in turn, resurrected the controversy around a 2004
decision by Jack Daniels to add more water to its products thereby
reducing the alcohol content from 43 per cent to a pale, thin 40 per cent. This combination of media controversy, beer, whisky, and a funny court cases has seduced
me and thus caused me to consider the issue
as an imaginary career defining opportunity.
Reflecting on this, I realized that many news stories can be made water-related.
Thanks
to Zero Dark Thirty, we have all know that the
C.I.A.’s use of water-based torture did not prevent the capture of Osama bin Laden and that water overboarding played a key role in his
disposal. In 2005, a year after the Southern distiller of Old No. 7
began flushing water into its bourbon, the south coast of the U.S. was flushed
by Hurricane Katrina, and its aftermath was characterized by absent water
bottles, sloppy back-slapping, floating bodies, and a flood of finger pointing.
Clearly,
I will never run out of story angles good-enough-for-Internet news using a water-related metaphor.
Katrina and natural disasters like the 2011 earthquake and tsunami that hit Japan,
of course, points to the perils of climate change, melting icecaps, water shortages, and water pollution. But other
journalists have already tried covering those stories and bored people to
watery eyes with them.
That stuff is a waste of time.
Me. I’m
going to direct my pseudo-political commentary journalism on the really hot,
career engorging stuff like water in the beer.
