This is such a great article. It’s about the gargantuan con job advertisers have pulled on the American public over the past four decades. For those of us who grew up in the sixties and drank water from supposedly dangerous public water fountains (like the author of the essay), it will remain forever baffling how we turned into a society that now prefers to pay for what was once free.
It’s such a simple and important essay. To her credit, the author concludes by mentioning the term “shifting baseline,” as well as Bill McKibbon’s term of “hyper-individualism.” And one wonderful additional tidbit: if you look at the first comment following the article, the person points out that on the webpage where the article was first posted, there were adds for…bottled water. Like a pack of vampires, advertisers these days are willing to blindly swarm to anywhere that mentions their product, even if it’s an essay against the product.
How did we end up with a society so gullible? The most common question I get in the post-screening discussions of “Flock of Dodos,” is, “Why is this intelligent design controversy so uniquely American?” I think I’m going to start answering that question with, “You tell me–why is bottled water so uniquely American?”
This guy has enough bottles to build a raft and sail to Hawaii.