Fiji Water and Vinyl Records

Those Fiji Water commercials are in heavy rotation on the TV stations I watch, the ones with the choirs of children singing in the background, symbolizing purity, while the child narrator, symbolizing even more purity, talks about purity even more, and how Fiji Water is "untouched by Man." I don't think it says anything good about my IQ that this crap is in heavy rotation on the channels I frequent. (Then again, it could just mean that advertisers don't know what they're doing.) Seriously, how dumb do you have to be to believe that water which is transported 10,000 miles to be put into plastic bottles and sold to rich hipster doofi* for several dollars a pop is "untouched by Man"?

*"Doofi" is plural for "doofus."

About as dumb, I think, as you need to be to believe that "vinyl sounds better." In fact, I think that in very many cases, the people who drink Fiji Water and play music on vinyl are the same individual people: people with too much disposable income and too little clue about reality.

I want these people to be tested: give them tap water which they see flowing from Fiji Water bottles, and Fiji Water which they see coming from a tap, and ask them to describe each sort of water -- assuming that we were able to get them to take a taste of the Fuji Water they saw come out of a tap. Blindfold them, and play them the same recordings of their favorite music: once on vinyl played on a $25,000 turntable, and then on a $10 mp3 player, both fed through the same equalizers and speakers. Ask them to describe their experiences.

The really infuriating part is that it won't work: do such tests, confront the stupid people with the results, and they will find ways to reject what you say and to disbelieve you, so as to remain stupid, drinking their bottled water transported from 10,000 miles away in the name of the environment and of opposition to Evil, and using 19th-century technology to achieve what they continue to believe is the very best possible home-listening experience. And just as with Fuji Water drinkers and vinyl listeners, so too with Republicans and people who pay psychics to read their palms and their tarots.

I want to help these people. There are those of us who want to help them, and those other people who want to rip them off, and they keep going with those others. How do we reach them?