The American Spectator

Reader Mail

(Page 6 of 13)

LIGHT HEARTED br> Re: G. Tracy Mehan, III's This Bud's Not for You : /p>

How many Americans remember years back in 1969 when AMF bought Harley Davidson Motorcycle Corporation? This resulted in a labor strike and a lower quality of bikes. The bikes were expensive and inferior in performance, handling, and quality to Japanese motorcycles. Sales declined, quality plummeted, and the company almost went bankrupt.

What binds Harley Davidson and Anheuser-Busch together is that they both are unique American institutions that are recognizable all over the world and this uniqueness and recognition is the driving force of the companies' success.

The InBev Anheuser-Busch deal has similarities to AMF and Harley Davidson. InBev doesn't look at Anheuser-Busch as an American institution but just a boardroom statistic that has the propensity for large profits that will be achieved by massive and draconian cost-cutting measures that will be implemented by faceless corporate automatons, who could care less if Anheuser-Busch is American, Chinese, or any other national beer. Anheuser-Busch is just another profitable acquisition and everything else is irrelevant.

It is a given if this deal is approved either by a friendly, or hostile takeover, the quality of Anheuser-Busch that has been its hallmark will surely decline as did Harley Davidson after the AMF buyout. Anheuser-Busch will lose its Americana, it will lose its only one of a kind quality, and it will cease to be American corporate icon.

I write as a United States Marine who has drunk his quota of two cans of Budweiser sitting on a 100-degree flight deck on a United States Naval warship floating around the Persian Gulf during a steel beach party. A small part of it was, "damn this cold beer tastes good," but the biggest part purely symbolic, because the main reason that those cans of Budweiser tasted so good was that it tasted of home, it tasted American, those simple red and white cans of Budweiser was a testament of everything that is and will be American. Those two cans represented New York City, Seattle, Portland, and every American city, village and town across our country and it validated at least on a personal level in why I was sitting on that flight deck in the middle of nowhere.

p>Oh sure my opinion will be scoffed at by the globalists and free market purists, but then again as Americans who cares what the globalists think anyway, come to think of it, they don't even like drinking beer anyway, it isn't considered chic. br> -- Melvin Leppla br> Jacksonville, North Carolina /p>

topics:
John McCain, Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, Economics, Business, Religion, Global Warming, Constitution, Law, Military, Russia, European Union, NATO, Africa, Unions