Happy National Beer Can Appreciation Day – Fratty is Back

We apologize to our readers. This week’s article will not be an original piece, but will be an update of several prior articles.  No, we are not celebrating National Beer Can Appreciation Day, which today honors the anniversary of the first canned beer sold in the U.S., or any other obscure holiday.  Instead, the cause of our switch is personal -- this author was called up for jury duty.  While I was not selected for a jury (litigators rarely are), the process nevertheless consumed more time than it should have, and it threw off my writing schedule for this week.

However, even ignoring the tribulations of my personal timetable, there are other reasons justifying an update rather than a longer piece.  So many subjects of prior articles have been popping up all over the news, some in ways that our articles predicted, and some in ways which have confounded us.  Accordingly, regardless of the calendar, I felt the urge to revisit certain subjects.

The most obvious subject of an update is Sports Illustrated, one that evokes a note of sadness.  In several articles, Sports Illustrated and the Politics of The Pin-Up, Sports Illustrated and the Politics of The Pin-Up -- El Tri Meets The Rainbow (Update), and Sports Illustrated Strikes Out (Another Update), this author lamented the demise of a great magazine that had lost its mission as a chronicler of sports.  Last week, Sports Illustrated went from its metaphorical deathbed to its real-life one, as the licensee authorized to publish the magazine announced that it was laying off almost all of the publication’s editorial staff.  It is unclear whether the license holder will seek a new licensee, or renegotiate the terms of the current license, but it remains to be seen whether Sports Illustrated will survive.

Observers have blamed the digital age for the magazine’s woes.  Others have blamed the magazine’s adoption of “wokeness,” with a particular emphasis on its calendar issue and its selection of overweight and transgender models.  Certainly, this author has bemoaned the magazine’s penchant for placing a greater emphasis on politics than upon sports, although I have been more concerned with its effect upon the editorial content than with its pin-ups. 

However, one suspects that Sports Illustrated was doomed long before it veered away from straight sports reporting to slanted political reporting.  Certainly, Sports Illustrated’s core audience has changed.  Once upon a time, its readers consisted of upper middle-class, educated men, who were interested in sports such as Davis Cup tennis, Ivy League football, horse racing, and even bridge.  Collegiate crew was covered more extensively than college baseball.  Now the reverse is true – the College World series, and even women’s collegiate softball are now given extensive coverage.  Try to recall when rowing was the subject of a nationwide article.

At the same time, as SI’s core audience grew older, its staff grew younger.  While these young writers may know something about the sport they cover, they lack the experience and, more importantly, the perspective of their predecessors.  This perspective was a necessary component of Sports Illustrated’s articles, as they often were published days after the sporting event in question occurred. 

With the internet, sports reporting is now immediate.  There is no longer any call for the long-form journalism that SI did best. To the extent that long-form journalism remains, statistical analytics has replaced human interest.  There is likely less of an audience for that.

If Sports Illustrated is to die, one suspects that it will be long remembered, but hardly missed.  It no longer occupies the niche which it invented, and it has been dead for some time.

The second subject of this update is our perennial favorite, Harvard, which invokes not a note of sadness, but one of hilarity.  Despite not having Claudine Gay to kick around anymore, the university continues to display a singular ineptitude.  This week, it was reported that an affiliate of Harvard Medical School, the Dana-Farber Institute, was seeking to retract six studies and to correct 31 other papers.  More than 50 papers are the subject of a review, including four by the Institute’s president, suggesting that academic misconduct is the surest route to success at the university.

Of greater note is the news that a faculty member, chosen by interim President Alan Garber to co-chair Harvard’s Presidential Task Force on Combating Antisemitism, Professor Derek Penslar, has himself been accused of antisemitism, having written that “Jewish culture was steeped in fantasies (and occasionally, acts) of vengeance against Christians,” and having signed a letter which characterized Israel as a “regime of apartheid,” guilty of “Jewish supremacism” that was attempting to “ethnically cleanse all territories under Israeli rule of their Palestinian population.”  Apparently, the position was vacant because Howard Zinn was no longer available.

Harvard’s continuing embarrassment has been particularly hard on alumni such as me, who have watched a lifetime of smugness that comes from being a Harvard graduate, which we perceived to be our birthright, being slowly wrested away by those now running the university.  Until recently, every Harvard graduate, no matter how unsuccessful in life, could always take solace in the fact that for four years, at least, he was once a beautiful person.  Even for those of us who were not smart, a Harvard degree allowed us to act as if we were.  Harvard was once the standard against which other universities measured themselves, the “Harvard of the West” (Stanford) or the “Harvard of the Midwest” (Chicago).  Now, the university is in danger of becoming a punchline, the “Evergreen State of the East,” and we graduates are the ones bearing the brunt.  Tant pis.

It is often said that alcoholics are unlikely to change until they hit rock bottom.  It is hard to know whether that time has come for the university, or if it will not come until the Harvard Coop is forced to start offering discounts on the school swag it sells to tourists from around the world.  However, as this site wrote in our article, Gaîté Harvardienne – Could Claudine Gay Become The Third Bash Brother?, it is unlikely, at least for now, that the university will seriously address the rot with which it is clearly permeated.

If our first update was sad, and our second side-splittingly funny, our third is a happy one.  John Fetterman, the subject of two stories on this site, Clothes Make The Man -- So Is John Fetterman The New Gandhi? and Biden, Fetterman, & The 11th Century "Weekend at Bernie's" has been in the news recently, primarily for the heterodox positions he has taken on Israel and illegal immigration that go against his image as a reflexive progressive.  What makes this story a happy one, however, is not that the senator is taking what many, including me, believe to be sensible positions, but that he has shown a marked recovery from the cognitive issues that resulted from his stroke last year.  Mr. Fetterman’s improvement is stunning, and he is clearly on his way to getting even better.  Whatever one’s politics, that is undeniably a good thing.

Our final update concerns a topic closer to my heart than Harvard (although that includes a multitude), and one that is particularly appropriate on National Beer Can Appreciation Day, namely Bud Light.  Those who read our story, The Budweiser Controversy – Is There "Lite" At the End of the Tunnel?, will recall how Miller Brewing Company’s CEO, John Murphy, revolutionized beer advertising by portraying everyday people in real life scenarios, in effect making the beer drinker the star of the commercial.  In particular, as blue-collar men drank 80% of beer at the time, he directed his ads at them and included them.

Bud Light forgot this message when it retained transgender personality Dylan Mulvaney, repelling, rather than appealing to its core audience.  Bud Light also ignored the Murphy playbook when it first attempted to recover from the Mulvaney fiasco.  Its initial campaign struck a patriotic chord, but featured a Clydesdale rather than those who previously drank Bud Light.  That campaign failed to stem a decline in beer sales.  Bud Light eventually dabbled with Murphy playbook, employing commercials that featured normal people and a forgettable tag line, “Easy to Drink, Easy to Enjoy.”

Apparently, however, Bud Light has seen the light, and has determined that the only chance it has to arrest the decline in its beer sales is to go full John Murphy, who created a juggernaut brand, Miller Lite, from virtually nothing.  He did so by utilizing, in his Miller Lite commercials, retired professional athletes in humorous ads that appealed to men.  Bud Light’s latest television advertisement features Peyton Manning and Emmit Smith in a humorous scene that even, when Manning first orders a Bud Light and the bar hushes in response, acknowledges the Mulvaney controversy. 

In short, Bud Light’s commercial could not have plagiarized Miller Lite’s to a greater degree had it been written by Claudine Gay.  Time will tell whether Bud Light’s latest ads augur a belated comeback for the brand.