Drink American

...Instead, what journalists don't know is camouflaged by opinions expressed with varying degrees of skill, and this unsavory mixture has been turned into a virtue that brings Pulitzer Prizes...

...After that, no one could be persuaded to take cartels seriously...

...Domestic bottlers had demanded a nationwide "Drink American" campaign, and had, in a nationwide television blitz, encouraged consumers to boycott the foreign competition...

...As usual, the deliberations of the Council were inconclusive, yielding nothing but a decision to convene another meeting...

...if one wanted to follow events in Europe, one read, or listened to, H.R...

...Domestic water in most areas sold for less than one dollar per thousand gallons...

...In fact, no one with any taste would touch the stuff...

...The French organized the dreaded OMWEC-the Organization of Mineral Water Exporting Countries--and drove the world price of mineral water to a level that no econometric model had ever contemplated...

...Initially, we had turned to France, which was prepared to supply us with water in small green bottles...

...imported water sold for one dollar per seven ounces...

...But Britain has lost its decisive role, and in North America those who do not share the cozy complacency find home only in periodicals, or manage to squeeze in an occasional article on the op-ed page of a THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1980 25...

...Manor, a graduate of the King Charles University of Prague, spent more than 50 years in journalism...

...It was scarcely fit for washing the car...

...This levy, which had as its purpose reducing the number of bubbles per bottle in order to make imported water more like domestic water, had little effect...

...The constrictions in the market for natural spring water were seen as temporary, more the result of politics than of the laws of supply and demand...

...He was a fi)reign correspondent in various parts of the world for Reuters and the Times of London, and recently retired after 25 years with the Winnipeg Free Press...

...Then there was the Coca-Cola Conversion Act...

...It was hardly surprising that concerned Americans would take matters into their own hands...

...Finally, people even began importing water from Mexico...

...Nor was price a factor...

...Once entrenched, and prodded by theCommunists and by those nations where the annual rainfall was less than three inches per year, the exporters raised prices and reaped enormous profits--waterfall profits, as they were known in the industry...

...Today, it was 53 percent, and that figure was growing...

...They were familiar with the history of the nation about which they were writing, and knew its politics inside out...

...The Boston Water Party, now an annual tradition more or less, rejoined Americans to their fighting heritage...

...Nor was the Internal Revenue Code the answer...

...Kraft knows so little about his next-door neighbor, how much credence can be given to his judgment when he writes about more remote countries ? The parlous state of the West is partly due to the fact that there is no strong journalistic voice to marshal the facts and write in a stirring yet readable prose that would warn the public of the dangers that lie ahead...

...Instead, he preferred to spend two dollars for a quantity of water that could scarcely wet his whistle...

...Manor NEWS ON THE MARCH With recipes and gossip...

...The latest statistical evidence demonstrated that, in the past five years, the nation had become dangerously dependent on imported mineral water...

...Why, then, our dangerous complacency...

...The President's advisors traced the origins of the new crisis to the Water Import Control Quota Plan of several years ago...

...Who today has heard of C.P...

...John Nollson DRINK AMERICAN F o r the third time in a week, the National Security Council met to grapple with the latest threat to national security...

...It is a decline in which a profession first was reduced by its own union to a "craft," and then allowed to decay to the present level of gossip-mongering and dull writing confined to the narrowest of horizons...

...The trade balance dipped deeper into the red and the dollar plummeted to its lowest levels in history...

...Americans began to make even their ice cubes out of imported natural spring water...

...Two generations ago, if one wanted to know about what went on inside Africa, one read John Gunther...

...Of these, the ice dodecahedron was the most popular...

...According to the theory of the rational consumer which dominates contemporary economics, a rational man would have gone to his faucet and, for less than a penny, could have drunk enough water to burst his innards...

...Then they turned on ice cubes altogether, coming to prefer water frozen in the shape of a regular polyhedron...

...It seems to have ended with Walter Lippmann and Joseph Alsop, and we have been left in all of North America with one man, Joseph Kraft...

...guages to be able to talk to their contacts freely, without the help of interpreters, and read foreign newspapers rather than pre-chewed and translated precis published by an embassy or foreign ministry...

...It was also thought that water packaged in cans would have greater appeal than water bottled in bottles...

...Nothing of this sort exists today except perhaps in Britain, where the Daily Telegraph still is a voice crying in the wilderness...

...It was flat in taste, and it was not naturally carbonated...

...They were, as William L. Shirer wrote about John Gunther, "bursting with energy and [had] an enormous curiosity about life and people...

...But it was not until the French Communist Party attained power that we felt the full force of the water weapon...

...I t is time," he had said, "for a National Water Policy as thirsty as the American people themselves...

...We have become profligate drinkers of imported water, and unless we move vigorously to insure our water independence, future generations will be at the mercy of a handful of mineral water exporters--whether they choose to drink it straight, or as a mixer with their favorite intoxicant...

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...Where facts are produced, almost invariably they are mixed with opinion...

...It revolutionized the highball...

...The hawks favored reinstating the Eighteenth Amendment with slightly altered wording, so that it would apply to imported water rather than to intoxicants...

...OPEC, which had held sway for only ten years, collapsed shortly after American scientists discovered a process which converted cumulus clouds directly into gasoline...

...Foreign mineral water was, initially, cheaper than domestic water, so that the European exporters gradually developed a stranglehold on our market...

...And to underscore his commitment to water independence, the Pres~;dent,~as a candidate, had ridden over Niagara Falls in a barrel...

...Ten years ago, only 3 percent of the water swallowed by Americans was imported...

...Kraft might qualify by knowing something about everything, but his dispatches lack the scholarly touch that a proper exercise of the profession would demand...

...This was the grim conclusion of the memorandum under discussion...

...No, nothing seemed to work...

...Then it was Spain, which supplied water in small pink bottles...

...Scott and his dictum that "Comment is free but facts are sacred...

...No writer with political discernment would have called Pierre Trudeau "perhaps the world's most gifted leader," and if Mr...

...And if in the 1930s opinion-makers were, on the whole, complacent about the Nazi danger, there were always outspoken daily newspapers and outspoken radio commentators who, at least in some measure, prepared the public for the horrors to come...

...Those who believed that the colored bottles were the secret of foreign water's appeal were disappointed when the stuff was purchased in growing quantities and imported in supertankers which OMWEC had picked up from OPEC after the latter's demise...

...It was discovered that if the water were flashfrozen, the bubbles remained embedded in the ice cube, creating an effect that was as pleasing to the eye as to the palate...

...Insteadl Americans started to mix Coke syrup with Perrier, creating a new sensation, and driving the demand for imported water even higher...

...Then 24 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1980 they began to import such ice cubes themselves, neatly packaged, with a small fleurde-lis running through them, instead of the plain old round hole which was a feature of the mundane ice cube produced in the average American ice-making machine...

...This was an embarrassment to the President, for it made a mockery of his campaign pledge to restore America to its former greatness...

...What was once a trickle had become a flood...

...I t became painfully obvious that the government's countermeasures had been thwarted at every turn...

...Knickerbocker, Ed Mowrer, Dorothy Thompson, Madame Tabouis, and a host of other writers who travelled the world, were on intimate terms with those in power as well as those in opposition, knew the leading lights in the various branches of endeavor, spoke foreign lanF.S...

...It spells the end of an era that lasted for almost two centuries, and bodes ill for the future of our freedom, of which sound journalism, press and electronic, is an essential pillar...

...The doves, on the other hand, favored total deregulation...

...The fact was that we had failed to move to develop our own supplies of mineral and spring water...

...This, then, was the stark reality which hovered over the President and his advisors as they pondered what to do next...

...A~ the discussions continued, it was clear that a bitter division existed between the hawks and the doves...

...There are, after all, abuses which can be tolerated no longer, affronts to the national dignity which must be answered...

...It was not clear what that meant in the context of water policy, but the doves kept falling back on their point that, whatever it meant, it was surely in keeping with the temper of the times...

...The Water Independence Act, which provided huge subsidies for desalinization projects, did not have any noticeable effect...

...Besides, as one expert put it, the world is swimming in water--or we are swimming in a world of water, he had forgotten which--and sooner or later the weight of the world's oceans would be brought into play...

...And so it happened that in the dead of night a band of patriots, dressed in 18th-century attire, boarded a freighter of Panamanian registry moored in Boston harbor and proceeded to dump case after case of French water into the sea...

...nor did it come from any mysterious spring originating deep within the earth's surface...

...A nation which will not drink its own water has lost its instinct for self-preservation...

...And it has become a standard around which native-born beer drinkers will surely rally...

...The French, in their typically opportunistic fashion, had chosen to exploit political turmoil on the continent to their own advantage...

...Next Germany began to export Loewenwasser to the United States in ever-larger quantities...

...Its purpose was to offer enormous subsidies to the soft-drink industry t o remove the flavoring and color from its products, so as to make them more like imported water...

...Yet that had not happened...

...But this produced distortions in the market...

...Eom a reputable profession, journalism has sunk to an occupation that provides part-time employment for academics, and full-time employment for writers whose main achievement seems to be to quote verbatim, from tape-recorded interviews, statements made by people whose names fleetingly appear in the day's headlines...

...Congress had deliberated long and hard before passing the Excess Effervescence Tax...

...The only response to that brave call, however, was more of the same...

...I t is nothing but selfhatred," he had said on the stump...

...The President's advisors theorized that it had something to do with the ease with which the notorious oil cartel had crumbled...

...Consumers shunned freshwater made from the sea...

...But where is this kind of journalism now...