Gatesgate And The Politics of Beer

On the White House bar menu this evening: the president will be drinking Budweiser (InBev, a Flemish-Brazilian beer giant); Henry Louis Gates will be drinking Jamaican Red Stripe (London-based Diageo International); and Cambridge police Sgt. James Crowley will be drinking Blue Moon (MillerCoors). Considering the White House’s efforts to promote the local food movement, the beers on tap for tonight’s historic picnic/farce strike me as odd. Locally grown carrots from small local farms are okay, but… a locally brewed American beer from a local microbrewery is not?

The White House, of course, doesn’t want the president to be accused of drinking the liquid equivalent of arugula, i.e. a fancy food product preferred by elitists and snobs and rejected by real Americans. (Quickly: can someone please explain how preferences for salad greens become a front our interminable culture wars anyway? Iceberg lettuce, romaine, butter lettuce, arugula—out in “real America” they don’t eat much salad, period, regardless of variety.) And without a doubt if the president did serve up some local brews tonight—from D.C. or from one of the hundreds of small breweries that have sprung up on the East Coast over the last two decades—all the “real Americans” on Fox News would be screaming about how those elitist snobs in the White House were showing their contempt for “real Americans.” Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity would spend half their shows tonight shouting about how that the brands of beer preferred by real Americans just aren’t good enough for this White House. What’s wrong the real beers real Americans drink when they’re chomping into their deep-fried heads of iceberg lettuce at the ball game anyway?

Um… microbrews aren’t brewed by ballet dancers in lofts in Chelsea, packed into crates by people who write for the “Styles” section of the New York Times, and delivered to bars in trucks driven by liberal college professors. Microbrews are small, locally-owned businesses created by American entrepreneurs—the kinds of businesses that Republicans are always describing as the “backbone of the American economy” and the “engines of job creation”—and there’s nothing effete or elitist about their products or the men and women who make them. Microbreweries: real Americans making real American beers for real American beer drinkers. It would’ve been nice to see at least one on the drinks menu tonight.