Stupidity on Tap

There's been a lot of talk recently about bottled water, the latest cause celebre of the Australian media, for some inexplicable reason. It’s been amusing, in a tragic sort of way, but – enough! Let’s end the bottled water ‘debate’ here and right-bloody-well now.
Bottled water is disturbing in the way that it reveals how some factions of the environmental movement (all the ones that write for newspapers, apparently) can develop severe ADD at moments when their attention should be on genuinely terrifying problems, like the possible ensuing destruction of the entire planet by negligent Governments who cheerfully let us burn whole valleys of brown coal to fuel our knick-knacks.
Anyway, ‘experts’ at The Age and the SMH have recently discussed the environmental impact of bottled water as if it made a detectable, even alarming, contribution to global warming. Their argument goes like this: the bottles that entomb retailed water are made from oil – true. Also, the fossil fuels needed to transfer this heavy product from, um, mountain to shop, cause further damage. This is trivially true – as Dad always told me, a cubic metre of water weighs a whole damn tonne) – but utterly negligible by any reasonable definition. It makes as much sense as attacking shoelace manufacturers for their industry’s devastating contribution to land degradation caused by the cultivation of cotton
More importantly, the above bogus argument overlooks the clear benefits of bottled water, which performs a valuable service that is almost never discussed in polite circles. Like homeopathy – a highly sophisticated, soothingly ancient and completely non-invasive system of medicine which is also 100% water-based, and therefore useless – I see the bottled water industry as an indirect system of redistributive taxation which steadily takes money away from the cretinous, eventually making it available to the rest through stimulating the economy. (Admittedly this trickle-down effect, so to speak, must occur via the overstuffed coffers of unscrupulous multinationals, but let’s look at the positives for now).
The fact that someone can voluntarily pay for this stuff is one of the quirkiest aspects of modern life. Sure, we don’t have nearly enough water in Oz; but, at least in urban areas, it gushes prodigiously out of that wonderful device that we blithely call ‘the tap’. (A free pearl of wisdom for bottled-water connoisseurs: there’s one of these magnificent oracles in your kitchen…and another in your bathroom, O happy day!)
Even funnier than watching people buying the clear stuff for exorbitant prices is watching advertising companies trying to flog it – which they do with spectacular and depressing success. The meagre clutch of arguments deployed to this end can be broken down into a few distinct groups:
• The ‘healthful’ argument, i.e. bottled water is better for you than tap water. This argument is easily demolished due to its being such out-and-out bullshit. Bottled water is tap water. And putting it into a bottle doesn’t make it magic – only Jesus can do that, children. (Biblical scholars please note that His disciples, bless their pragmatic souls, became awed only after He turned water into wine. Working the miracle circuit would have been much, much easier for JC if the shindig at Canaan was populated with today’s water-purchasing yuppies. He could have easily convinced them of his Godliness in a jiffy, simply by pouring water from a large amphora into a slightly smaller one. End of miracle. Cue gasps, applause, cries of ‘Why, that was a good one, Lord!’)
• The ‘tasty’ argument, i.e. bottled water tastes better. Sorry: it doesn’t taste better, it tastes worse. Much worse, actually – almost as if it’s been distilled from the synthetic urine of a gigantic inflatable llama.
• The ‘picturesque source’ argument: the bottled water that you buy is taken directly from pristine sandstone repositories in the [insert photogenic mountain range here]. Bullshit again in most cases, I’m afraid: most of it comes out of the good ol’ tap, augmented with a bit of Capitalist wand-waving to provide it with its shiny commodity-aura.
• The ‘portability’ argument: although this is by far the most hilarious tactic, I often become stricken with worry for the human race when I wonder if this has ever actually influenced anyone’s buying habits. This quasi-Dadaist selling point emphasises the fact that the bottle of water you just unforgivably purchased for 3 bucks ‘moves with you’. (What’s the cheapo alternative, I wonder? A bottle of water that stays on the counter when you leave the shop?) As I found out to my intense disappointment, so-called ‘portable water’ still requires you to physically carry it, rather than, say, gliding serenely beside you on a velvet-lined Rickshaw held delicately aloft by a bevy of nubile Arabian Princesses. Oh well.
• The ‘lifestyle’ argument (also featured in every other ad ever made for anything): Drinking Brand X bottled water will make you sexy. (Tried it. Didn’t work. Beer is infinitely better for this, and for most other purposes to boot. The best thing that can be said for water in this respect is that it doesn’t Provoketh the Desire while it Taketh away the Performance, as I learned in my Year 10 English class.)
So, next time you see a misguided person serenely sipping the elixir of life from their translucent-blue Mt. Franklin bottle, don’t lecture them on their implicit support for the Military-Industrial Complex. Spend the money that you save on Beer, the real elixir of life – then laugh drunkenly at their precisely-measured, acetic, spuriously-carbon-neutral sippings from the other end of the bar, preferably while passionately making out with a beautiful, and equally tipsy, person whom you just met.
Them Yuppies’ll break eventually.