Designer Nothing

I bow humbly in the presence of the gods of advertising and marketing. This is their finest hour, their most perfect accomplishment. Water. In little bottles. Costing big money. Like about $4 billion a year (which is what we Americans spend on bottled water.) Wow. What an absolutely stunning act of perceptual manipulation. Water is liquid nothing, when you get down to it, isn’t it? Just like air is gaseous nothing. So what’s with this designer water phenomenon?

This pre-millennial moment, will be remembered, perhaps, for the Clinton mess, for the McGuire record, the massacre in Littleton and a few other things that will stick out. One of them is sure to be The Incredible Bottled Water Scam. You know, the time when millions of otherwise intelligent humans made liquid asses of themselves, experiencing some cerebral glitch, suddenly deciding that paying a lot for nothing in liquid form, even when liquid nothing was still readily available for free, was a good idea. It’s our version of the Great Bicycle Craze.

Companies sprung up, trying to create the impression that the water they were selling was special somehow, which is why it would be worth paying a lot for. As if it were milk or soda pop or beer or champagne. But actually, for the most part, the difference between ordinary nothing and this “special” designer nothing is next to nothing.

One quarter of all bottled water is simply municipal water, filtered specifically to remove whatever taste might be present, which usually ain’t much. And who said water shouldn’t taste like anything, anyway? I find it a little suspicious when I consume something that doesn’t smell or taste like something. How water should taste is a personal matter, and often a function of what you were brought up on. My favorite water is Lake Superior water. It has a distinctive taste. It tastes like . . . Lake Superior water.

Free water is filtered and purified and treated a lot. In almost all cases, it doesn’t contain any meaningful levels of anything bad for you. It’s clear. And, the fact is, free water is tested for contaminants far more often than any bottled water.

Pricey designer water is filtered and purified and treated too. Instead of having five parts per million of this or that stuff, like free water has, it might have one part per million. Big deal. What my philosophy teachers used to call “a distinction without a difference.” For this I should pay $4.00 for 12 lousy ounces? What kind of a sap do you take me for don’t answer that.

Why do you think the leading brand of liquid nothing is “Naive” spelled backwards? The name mocks its own devotees. Here’s a brand name for bottled water a friend of mine thought of: Wholly Water. Truth with a halo.
This water scam is the most embarrassing case of Emperor’s-new-clothing-itis I can ever recall. One phenomenon which drives this craze is the cultural state of hysteria called Eeeww-it-has-germs-on-itaphobia. Buy Tide because it kills the germs on your pants, so that you can suck on your pants in confidence. All kinds of companies are making a mint leveraging our phobia du jour. What all you H20-so-gullible folks haven’t come to accept yet is that it’s a lost cause. Maybe you can lessen your chances of ingesting E coli, but bacteria and viruses are the very essence of ubiquity. They’re everywhere! They’re everywhere! And it’s a good thing. Because a lot of these little critters are our friends. I would venture to say that, without certain bacteria, we’d all be dead meat. By the way, for those of you who squirm at the thought of coming near microscopic animals and stuff, did you know you’ve got little mites living on your eyebrows right now and there’s nothing you can do about it?

Of course, we mustn’t discount the elitist, conspicuous waste aspect of this phenomenon. For many people, the purity of the water isn’t really what designer water is about. If it was, they could simply buy gallons of generic distilled water, which really is pure, and save a lot of money. Or boil their tap water. In fact, it’s more about oh-look-at-me-I-think-nothing-of-spending-$4.00-for-a-little-bottle-of-liquid-nothing-because-I-can, and besides, drinking tap water is . . . just . . . not done. If the word “gauche” weren’t passe, drinking tap water would be considered gauche. (And what are we to do when “passe” becomes passe? Or is it already?) In any case, the point is, free water has become the water of the great unwashed.

Speaking of washing, if free water is too unclean to drink, surely it is too unclean to wash with. How long will it be before the special people will feel compelled to bath in designer water. And instruct the help to wash their dishes and their unmentionables in designer water as well. Think how expensive and conspicuously wasteful that will be. Something to aspire to.

Beyond that, we can look forward to designer air soon enough, I’m sure. Nada´: Like Air. Only better, or You’ll never be out of breath again or Caviar For Your Lungs. They’ll just need to work the bugs out. Like, how do you package designer air so that, when you go to the candy counter at the movie theatre, you can order a cubic foot or two of designer air in such a way that, when you return to your seat, it won’t obscure the view of the people sitting behind you?