What's for sale?
Here in NYC, wealthy hipsters drink PBR as an ironic statement of aspiring to the working class. Sensing a marketing windfall, the makers of the drink have decided to package the decidedly inexpensive brew as a luxury beer in China. How high end? $40 a bottle high end.
Silly Chinese - sophisticated Americans would never fall for such bald marketing.
Unless, of course, you consider that the exact same thing takes place here with Stella Artois.
It's far closer to Miller beer than craft Belgian lager in Europe, where it's anecdotally considered cheap brew. In fact, it's considered discount beer in France, called wife beater in the UK, and barely breaks 10% of beer consumption in its native Belgium.
Here, however, their marketing team went with the slogan Perfection has its price for much of the 2000s and we lapped it up. Quite literally.
Which is not to say that I'm not a sucker for slick marketing myself.
Just a month ago, I said that the developers of the NYC mosque were wrong to build so close to ground zero but that it's their right. Then I found that there's already a mosque in the area and it's been there for some 40 years with no outrage for the past nine.
This reminded me of that Stone Temple Pilots lyric that goes, What's real and what's for sale?
Consider what's real with outspoken critic of the proposed mosque, Rick Lazio, who's hoping to be our next governor. Perhaps that it's an election year and he's trailing the Democratic front runner in the race for governor by some 60%. It's his outrage that seems to be for sale.
I've since changed my mind about the mosque. After all, changing one's mind in light of new information is never a bad thing. What is a bad thing is using a national tragedy for personal gain, at the expense of the national discourse. For that, despite being one of maybe two moderate conservatives in NYC, he'll never get my vote. Ever.
Cheap beer in fancy packaging is also probably a bad thing. Then again, Stella Artois is doing quite well around the world. Regardless of geography, it seems it's hard to tell what's real and what's for sale - whether that be $40 beer in China or a mosque downtown.
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