Drink American

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

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

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

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

...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...

...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...

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

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

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

...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...

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

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

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

...Nor was price a factor...

...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...

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

...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...

...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...

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

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

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

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

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

...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...

...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...

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

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

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

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

...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...

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

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

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

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

...It revolutionized the highball...

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

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

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

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

...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...

...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...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

...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...

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

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

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

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

...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...

...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...

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

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

...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...

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

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

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

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

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

...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 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...

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

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

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

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

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

...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...

...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...

...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...

...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...

...Yet that had not happened...

...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...

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

...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...

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

...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...

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

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

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

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

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

...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...

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