"Why Bottled Water Is Worse Than Satan"<br> <br>By I.B. Dog. <br><br>I’m not your average American. For one thing, I have paws and a tail and am entirely imaginary. This makes me Like Satan in 2 out of 3 categories—the tail, and the being imaginary. Yet I, a mixture of beagle, rotweiler, mutt, a touch of Alsatian, Chinese Astrology and Socrates’ favorite oath, am Better Than Satan. Bottled Water, while sharing none of these three categories—though there is much about bottled water that is imaginary—is Worse Than Satan. This goes back, if you like, to Leibniz and his much-parodied assertion that this, our big blue marble, is the Best of All Possible Worlds. The reason for this, which seems to have eluded M. Arouet (known to y’all as Voltaire), is simple—this world, unlike the other possible worlds, exists and existence trumps everything else. Just as a Smith and Wesson beats four aces. Bottled Water exists, and Satan and I do not. Got it? <br><br>So what about bottled water is so damned awful? Well, for one thing, most of it is in cheap plastic bottles. It seems, dear deluded contemporaries, that you all like the taste of cheap plastic bottles, for that is what your bottled water tastes like. Bad. Now, your Perrier, your San Pellegrino, your Santa Croce (yum), your Gerolsteiner, these come in glass and taste dandy. But they are still wholly evil. Worse than Satan, remember? But back, for a moment, to the water in the cheap plastic. You think, if that be the term for your tube-addled mentations, that bottled water is better for you than, say, tap or rainwater. Well, friends, it ain’t. Not least because your drinking, in that taste of cheap plastic, well, cheap plastic. This means phthalates and other lovely organochlorides and petrochemicals. Yummers, eh? (You’re also drinking the same lovelies in other beverages which come in cheap plastic, but at least you’re not tasting them. Nor are you imagining—are you?—when you drink your one-calorie Tab, your Diet Pepsi, your Dew, that you’re wise and health-conscious. No matter, Coca-Cola and Pepsico are big in the bottled water business.) Then there’s this scambo which the water-bottlers are pulling on you—the fact that you are, after all, drinking tap water. DaSani—tap water. The Walgreens and WalMart brands—tap water. The present list is not exhaustive. There have been recalls of bottled water, and lawsuits attendant thereupon, in Britain for the stuff being so unfiltered as to have caused disease. You know, like the tap water from Milwaukee. (Arf!)<br><br>This leads us into the revolting political economy of bottled water. Where—other than taps—does this foul stuff come from? Well, let’s take the case of the snowman who sells this fluid on TV—Ice Mountain. Ice Mountain comes from Mecosta County, Michigan, home—ironically?—of traditionalist conservative publicist and quasi-intellectual Russell Kirk (“inventor and psalmodist of the Conservative Mind”—from the Pierre Bayle Society—of which I am a founding member and pet—‘s Language Rectification Dictionary, available from the same source as this here aperiodical
the.calumet.review@sbcglobal.net ). From Mecosta County, Michigan and from the Muskegon River watershed so beloved of canoeists and fisherfolk alike. Not to mention beloved of the hundreds of thousands of people in Western Michigan who require said watershed to flush their toilets, brush their teeth and shower each morning, noon and night. Here’s the story in brief. Michigan is again fallen on hard times. Michigan makes the mistake of allowing a Republican governor to sit in Lansing—though, surely, a New Democrat would have done likewise—and this gent decides to hand, with heapings of money, a big pump and the infrastructure to support it and bottle what it pumps to the folks who own the Ice Mountain brand, namely the froggy Perrier. Locals put up resistance. The politicos and the Perrier corporate types don’t care. But a local—Republican—judge—who likes fishin’ and doesn’t want his native pine barrens, lakes, rivers, swamps, etc. turned into desert—puts the kabosh on the project. Meanwhile, froggy Perrier gets gulped by Swiss purveyor of all things evil (really, no foolin’) Nestle. The people who want to force Third Worlders with no adequate sanitation to buy their formula rather than breastfeed and so have contributed mightily to worldwide infant mortality (with the help of the W.R. Grace Corporation, Pat Robertson and the US Government—against the wishes and even the actions, for once noble, of the UN) in the last quarter century. You see, Formula plus Dirty Filthy Water equals cholera, equals dysentery, equals amoeboid and vermiform parasites equals Dead Babies. Millions of Dead Babies. You got that? Dead. Babies. Worse Than Satan. Nestle not only wants—and, last I checked, is getting—its pump in Mecosta County (pending further litigation and/or legislation, they got a restraining order to “temporarily” override the local judge), it wants another pump up near Petoskey. [See below—ed.] Northwest Michigan, among the most staggeringly beautiful areas not involving mountains in these United States. Of course, here conflict may arise. After all, Petoskey is home to the golf courses, trout-stream and elk-hunting guides and outfitters and summer homes of Rich Fuckers. A technical term, easier, we think to grasp than rentiers, plutocrats and the like. What’s a Rich Fucker, who owns substantial Nestle stock, yet can’t wait to hunt elk or bring home a trophy brookie or Coho, to do? The chicken marked everyday evil cometh home—summer home, at least—to roost. Bear in mind that it is the taxpayers of Michigan who are paying for all of this—to be robbed of their most precious resource so that you can drink a fluid which tastes of phthalates. Nestle gets it all for free. The water, the taxes on the pump and the plant and the parking lot for the trucks to haul it all away to a store near you. “He was made of snow but the children know how he came to life one day…” There must have been some magic in that old sow’s ear they found—for when they read the bottom line, they began to dance around. That snowman is no fairy tale. Worse than Satan.<br><br>Y’see, friends, petroleum crude is not the only vanishing liquid on this here planet of our’n. We have a little problem wherein there are too many billions of people and not enough potable water and the problem is rapidly worsening. Of course, the billions aren’t gulping down the agua as fast as they can—rather the fountains and the golf courses and the blooming lawns of the desert are. And the absurdities of American agriculture. Now, as a good little doggie, I ain’t sayin’ it’s all the fault of the American Southwest and California (a profit on the golden shore). But there’s a good deal of waste going on. Why should water be diverted from the Colorado into a canal which cuts across the Mohave where most of it evaporates before it can reach an Orange County orchard or Riverside reservoir? Why should metropolitan Los Angeles, with a native water supply (in days of old, for who now can tell?) for less than half a million people, have a population in excess of thirty times that figure? But, to be fair, America isn’t the only place where water is taken from the poor (defined quite broadly) and given to the rich—there’s also—Israel. Read Noam Chomsky on the Israeli “security” wall, and you’ll learn how Palestinians have been separated from their olive trees—and their wells. Barbara Tuchman and other pathetic Israeli apologists have long waxed euphoric about how the Arabs—if they were even there at all to begin with—spent centuries in the sandy desert and how the Jews in a few short years made said desert bloom. Friends, deserts, excepting cactus and yucca foliage and the other native flowers, ain’t supposed to bloom. They only bloom by means of massive government subsidies. Orange County and the Gaza Strip have this much in common. But all this wanders too far afield—suffice it to say that there are already water wars going on as there are already petro-wars going on, and that they are likely to worsen. One is already going on in our beloved Great Lakes—hands off, you marshmallow-peddling formula-foisting Swiss devils! Go suck your own glaciers dry!<br><br>Let us turn now to a very broad aspect of why Bottled Water is Worse than Satan. Generally speaking, the provider of tap water in American, Canadian and European communities is some government agency. In our Midwestern instances, that agency is usually an aspect of the municipal government. Now, our governments, emphatically including our municipal governments, are very bad. Yet they are not so completely depraved as are private concentrations of power beholden to virtually none but the Rich Fuckers (remember, a technical term). Municipalities still feel some compunction to provide services such as reasonably clean water to their constituencies for a relatively nominal fee. This is quite easy for communities such as Lovely, Leafy Hammond, Indiana, which can simply slurp water from the gigantic sweetwater sea which forms its northernmost boundary. We, the hopeless and hapless residents of Hammond pay about two hundred bucks a year for our water, sewer and garbage combined. Not so bad. What is not so Not So Bad is that there is considerable amounts of toxic yuckus in our water, mostly heavy metals from old pipes and from a century of Hammond’s being a toxic cesspool as the result of its once-staggering concentrations of heavy industry. Our Elected Officials protest that our water really isn’t any worse than that of any of the surrounding or comparable municipalities—and they’re right. We all deserve clean water. Water is an essential human right and anyone who bitches about a Right to Life but doesn’t apply it to the needs of the actually living can promptly shut the fuck up and, preferably, commit hairi-kairi. Or change their wicked, wicked ways. Posthaste. We deserve clean water from our governmental providers, not some distiller or reverse-osmosis filter or some such we have to go out and buy from multinational corporations. At least this water stands a reasonable chance of actually being better than tap water. At least it stands a reasonable chance of not being tap water. <br><br>Bottled water, and someone made this point recently on AlterNet (of all places), is part of the general tide of privatization, and an insidious part at that. And like all privatization, it is fraudulent. It is a part of “the transfer economy,” the transfer being upwards, to Rich Fuckers. Corporate welfare, some have deemed it. Y’see, friends, the poor we have always with us, so sayeth The Bible—but welfare we always have with us, too. Too many of us just don’t notice it when it’s welfare for those who always get the most welfare—Rich Fuckers. Will we have us with us for much longer if all the water gets privatized into nonpotable oblivion? Worth a moment’s thought, no? Privatization and Bottled Water and Rich Fuckers have one major thing in common, and in the case of bottled water, the term is quite literal—they suck. They suck us dry. Like vampires, like lampreys. Worse than Satan. And I.B. Dog.<br><br>***************<br><br>The following is extracted from the recent non-online issue of <!--EZCODE ITALIC START--><em>The Calumet Review</em><!--EZCODE ITALIC END-->, Volume Three, Number Four, Sometime in 2006 - a ranting, low-tech overground aperiodical masterminded by one J. Blum. <p></p><i></i>