Bottled up animosity

Have you noticed the perfect storm that has engulfed the bottled water industry? As a foot soldier in one "challenged" sector of the economy, I am deriving some guilty pleasure from their suffering.

In a nutshell, bottled water has replaced the SUV as the poster child for environmental depradation. Why? Because: (A) Transporting water from faraway places (Britney needs her Fiji!) burns carbon fuels. (B) The plastic bottles, made from petroleum, hardly ever get recycled. (C) After years of being gulled by dubious marketing campaigns hailing the virtues of exotic source water (from icebergs!), most Americans realize that their tap water is just as clean as the stuff from Maine, France, and points beyond. And it's generally free.

Also, forswearing bottled water is easy. You don't actually have to do anything that might affect energy consumption, like join a carpool or lobby for new nuclear power plants. It's like sticking a "Save Darfur" sign on your lawn. Message: I care. What's for dinner?

Big Water's Summer of Bad PR started in June, when San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom said city departments would stop buying bottled water. Salt Lake City followed suit. This month The New York Times editorialized "In Praise of Tap Water," and just last week an alderman in Chicago proposing taxing each water bottle 25 cents and spending the money on the municipal water system.

Big Water is mighty big. Coke, Pepsi, and Nestle are all major players in what is described as a growing, $15 billion industry. So I assumed their high-price PR flacks would have come up with a sophisticated response to the tsunami of bad publicity.

Not really.

On the transportation question, a spokeswoman for the American Beverage Association who asked to remain anonymous (you'll see why) argued that "it's not like bottled water is the only thing on a truck." French wines and iPods, she said, travel a long way to my home. Yes, but the city of Newton isn't pumping Beaujolais into my kitchen, gratis, the last time I checked.

Nestle spokeswoman Jane Lazgin allowed that, yes, the anti-water tide was rising, although she claimed that Nestle, which markets Poland Spring, Perrier, and many other waters, has not felt an impact. Industry flacks don't like to trash tap water because some bottled water come directly from municipal water supplies. Big Water opposes the one measure that would result in more recycling: a 5-cent deposit on still water bottles, now enforced only in California, Maine, and Hawaii. "Our view is that curbside recycling is better," says Joseph Doss, president of the International Bottled Water Association.

We're both fans of Jon, but this book is a little much. Sure, Massachusetts is a grade-A freak show, a one-party state where the hypocrisy and sense of entitlement run thicker than the bluefish off Point Judith. But has "the Cradle of Liberty become the Deathbed of Democracy," as Jon's publisher wants us to believe? Was Deval Patrick swept to power in a beer-hall putsch while I was watching DVDs of "The Shield"?

I'm stumped by Keller's fixation on the nefarious baby boomers, who dominate politics across the land, not just here. And who cares about Massachusetts? We are a small state, famously predictive of nothing. It was a right-leaning Democrat from Arkansas, not one of these well-born New England chumps, who most recently restored his party to the White House. The only presidential candidate nominally from Massachusetts -- Michigan's Mitt Romney -- spends all his waking hours dumping on us.

By coincidence, Jon's parents, Morton and Phyllis Keller, are simultaneously publishing an updated version of their book "Making Harvard Modern: The Rise of America's University." My wife didn't tell me what to think about this book, so I merely note its appearance.

Alex Beam is a Globe columnist. His e-dress is beam@globe.com.