War on Water or Just War?

Water is not the only thing that Joshua Ortega is against bottling up these days. Although his argument in the article “Water Wars: Bottling Up the World’s Supply of H20,” stems from the disdain for the globalization and privatization of the world’s water supply, he argues his political agenda more effectively than he does anything about water. Ortega’s bleeding patriotism and allusions to the Iraq War and the Republican Party outshine any valid discussion of the privatization of water.

At first glace this article seems as if it is just another innocent left winged writer trying to have people listen to his cause for a better world for our children to live in. At further examination though, one can pick up on Ortega’s inflated statistics his repugnance for the G.O.P. His stance that we are not Americans if we allow water to be a privatized industry sets the entire tone of the article.

Patriotism is an overarching theme throughout the entire article and Ortega does his best to appeal to those who are patriotic. The word American is used five different times in this short article. What exactly is Ortega trying to tell us? His use of diction seems to point that we are not American if we drink bottled water or are pro-privatization. Quite the opposite is true though. The United States of America is a society of consumption. Whether we like it or not we are known to use. Ortega makes this clear in the first couple of paragraphs in his article by using overstated statistics to get his point across. He states that, “The Container Recycling Institute reported that 14 billion water bottles were sold in the U.S. in 2002, yet only 10 percent of these bottles were recycled — 90 percent ended up in the trash. That's an extra 12.6 billion plastic bottles for the landfills…” But isn’t that what landfills are for? I agree that Americans need to recycle more, but to say that they are un-American for not recycling is ludicrous. Americans are Americans because they do not recycle.

Not only does Ortega call Americans un-American, he subtly incorporates the Iraq War into his argument as well. He does this even through the first half of the title. Although the title is Water Wars, he only makes mention to an actual war of water once. The war he is really referring to is the war that is currently being fought against terrorist in Iraq. Hidden under a discussion about the privatization or water, Ortega mentions that, “In Britain, water corporations have had a terrible track record. In an eight-year period, from 1989 to 1997, four large corporations, including Wessex (a former subsidiary of Enron), were prosecuted 128 times for various [water quality] infractions.” The sheer mention of Enron and the mind-set that is conjures up, brings up the Republican Party into the picture by default. Ortega doesn’t just mention Enron once in the article, but twice when he argues that, “An energy crisis was bad enough — just imagine if the Enron scenario happened with water.” His political agenda runs rampant throughout this section of the article. This discredits his argument as well as his image as a writer.