This Bud’s for me
You might find it surprising that although I began playing in bar bands when I was 16, I didn’t try beer until I was 18. And when I finally tried a 3.2 brew at a truck stop in West Virginia, I hated the taste – so much so that I was 29 before beer again passed my lips. It wasn’t “near beer” that time, but I still didn’t enjoy it. To this day beer isn’t my first choice for alcohol consumption. In fact, beer gives me a headache, so I quit drinking it altogether.
That’s why I wasn’t particularly interested in the boycott of Bud Light engineered by conservative political elements a few weeks ago after Anheuser-Busch presented a single commemorative can to transgender social-media influencer Dylan Mulvaney. Why should I care who boycotts it? Unless one of them is Kid Rock.
Rock is a Detroit-born musician who started out as a hip-hop rapper in the late 1990s. Over the course of the past 20 years he has morphed into a semi-heavy metal country blowhard. And Rock never blew harder than after the Bud Light-Mulvaney story broke. In protest, he recorded a video in which he used a semi-automatic rifle to shoot cases of Bud Light stacked up on a table. Then he announced he would boycott Bud Light and aimed a few choice words at Anheuser-Busch. Tough guy, right? Sure. But beer can’t shoot back.
Not long after Rock’s pseudo-macho temper tantrum, Detroit rocker Ted Nugent joined the fray, calling the presentation to Mulvaney “the epitome of cultural deprivation.” Pardon me, but I think the epitome of cultural deprivation takes place when the decidedly non-Native American Nugent, wearing a headdress, shoots a flaming arrow into a cheap guitar during his shows. Macho, macho man, right? Nah. Guitars don’t shoot back, either.
Don’t get me wrong. Boycott away, boys. In America, you are free to embargo anything for any reason. We boycott products if the political or ideological beliefs of the businesses that make them don’t line up with our own. We boycott theme parks after their CEOs express distaste for certain laws passed by the states in which they operate. Heck, we boycott entire countries and states for various perceived affronts.
But perhaps we’re unaware that boycotts seldom have the effect we hope for. That’s because people are lazy. We don’t do our homework and then find out the replacement products we’re buying are made by the same company we embargoed. Or we forget that we’re boycotting and buy the product, then refuse to throw it away because it’s paid for. Or we get thirsty.
Although sales of Bud Light were off by 26% for the week ending April 22, the long, hot summer just around the corner virtually guarantees that beers sales will ramp up again. And when that happens, American beer drinkers will find themselves between Kid Rock and a hard place: 10 of the top-selling beers in America are made by Anheuser-Busch.
If you stop drinking Bud Light, the No. 1 beer, are you going to move to No. 2, Coors Light, which reportedly tastes like dishwater having had a few hops waved over it? Are you going to opt for Corona, Dos Equis or Modelo, all brewed by foreign-owned companies? Are you patriotic and idealistic?
For me, the choice is simple: I’m boycotting the boycott. If I’m gonna start drinking beer again, it’ll be Bud Light.
If a single can of the stuff can terrify macho posers and conservatives alike, I’ll be afraid not to drink it.