Miller 64

When I was a kid, a product bearing the suffix "64" was considered to be something of value and its accessories could be widely celebrated years after the 64-ness had become outdated. Three Nintendo consoles later, the world is no longer so simple and predictable (thanks a lot, Obama).

The fact of the existence of Miller 64 should be onerous enough for any society. A low-calorie, low-quality beer, whose claims to healthfulness are given lie with minimal effort. To have this thing thrust upon us, promising beer with none* of the health drawbacks usually associated with beer is so absurd as to be grotesque. You'd almost think we've become a callow civilization, wanting all the good things in the world and accepting none of the negative consequences. Unless you consider a tasteless, essence-less facsimile of beer trickling down your throat to be a negative consequence. Which I do. 

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*None aside from the very small amount of alcohol, which, even at 2.8% ABV, is still technically a low grade poison. So why bother trying to make the product healthy in the first place, one wonders. But one is thinking too hard about this already.
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The marketing company with a brewery attached that is MillerCoors (not quite so as prolific as Sterling Cooper Anheuser Busch, but irritating in its own "us too" kind of way) has had this ad out for almost a year now. You've probably seen it if you've fallen asleep watching ESPN and woken up hours later, acutely aware that you've wasted your Saturday, a sting that's punctuated by having this self-satisfied bastardization of pub songs and sea shanties blared in your direction.

Let's take it from the top, shall we?

We run a mile before breakfast
If you're looking to lose weight, you should try running that mile immediately after breakfast. A big breakfast.

Sure, I had a salad for lunch
Oh, you poor, downtrodden thing, being able to afford a salad for lunch.

But a Miller 64 at dinner
Did your dinner have any say in this pairing? Or was it a plaintive, "No, that's fine. I'm just a baked chicken breast. Didn't even get a decent marinade because you're trying to keep fit. Miller 64 will do. You won't even know you're ingesting either of us, we're so tasteless. It's actually kind of perfect, in a way."

Oh yes, cause I've worked off my paunch
I'm going to pause here while one of the men in the ad boxes with a cute female partner (in case we hadn't already internalized the hardships they endure). Reasonably fit, basically attractive young men are talking at us about the healthfulness that can be had with the Miller 64 lifestyle. And, hey, I'm down for fitness. I think most of us could use more of it in our every day lives. But what state can a person be in where Miller 64 becomes a rational beverage? Someone looking to lose serious weight might consider doing without beer entirely. Or, if they must drink, they could opt for another adult beverage; most wines and liquors are in the 60-70-calorie range (I'll link you here again). It's all empty calories, however delicious (a word that obviously precludes the likes of Miller 64). The truly fitness-oriented are generally aware of this and are less inclined to consume alcohol for the sake of consumption. If one must imbibe Miller 64, I'm more likely to assume "misinformed alcoholic" than "health nut."

The other type of conscious dieter that might consider sipping a Miller 64 is an irreparably brain damaged person individual who's just looking to maintain his weight or maybe drop a couple of vanity pounds, in which case the health rules remain the same, if a bit relaxed. And, looking at the ad, all of these guys fall into this latter category. They're not even TV schlubby. They may not be Adonises (Adoni?), but seem above par for the real world.

This is what television does: it shows us pretty people. And it's not with the intent of making us feel bad, by the way. It's because we prefer aesthetically-pleasing things: people, landscapes, naked people, etc. But the natural consequence on our end is to feel worse about the way we look because everyone looks better than us. So here I see men who are likely in better shape than I am and I wonder, what sort of sacrifice did it require along with exercise and, gasp, salads for lunch?

"Miller 64," they sing back at me. "That's my option," I sigh, my face dropping noticeably. "Perpetual schlubbiness or stale piss water." It doesn't take me long to start asking: do I really enjoying being alive that much?

Cause we live a life of balance
That's not what that word means.

And no one can say that we're wrong
They saw this coming. The androids who wrote this took a hard look at the deed they were committing and they got an unfamiliar tingle of self-awareness. But before they could examine this new, unpleasant feeling, they looked down the road and saw sensible critique barreling in their direction at an alarming speed. And rather than reconsider their lives' choices and put an end to whatever douchebaggery they were involved in, they offered a childish "haters gonna hate," hoping to stymy any attempt of ours to tell them, "yes, you're wrong," as though someone might have room to say such a thing. But that couldn't be.

So here's to good Miller who cut out the filler...
Yeah, "filler." All that flavor and taste. Just gets in the way, amirite?  

...and made a beer worthy of song. 
At long last, man has found occasion to communicate about alcohol in verse. It feels like cheating to send you to a list of country songs about drinking, but I'm gonna do it, anyway.

To Miller 64
No.

To Miller 64
No.

To love, sweat, and beers...
How do you like that, they managed to fit the recipe into the song.

...and well-deserved cheers.
Cheers for what, exactly? For the kind of ill-considered life decisions that lead a person to spend money on an almost non-existent beverage in the hopes of being able to enjoy themselves guilt-free? Or for the courage it takes to say to another human being, likely acting in a professional capacity, "yeah, I'll have one of those." Or perhaps we're using collective well-wishes and good cheer to distract us from the sickly spittle we're about to pour into our faces.

Or maybe the cheers are for the ad execs who were forced to sit in a room, drinking their sample 64's until enough self-respect had been drained from them that this song seemed like a decent idea. Yeah, fine. Let's toast to them, the poor sods. And their widows and orphans, too; the ones who've had their loved ones ripped from them by something as coldly indifferent as alcohol poisoning and self-inflicted gunshot wounds to the chest.

If that last bit seems harsh, consider the psychological ramifications of thinking on the existential nature of Miller 64 for too long: "A beer couldn't possibly be 64 calories. And yet it tastes like 64 calories. Which means it doesn't taste like beer. So, what is it? What am I? Is it possible that I'm only a third as substantive a person as I pretend to be? Do I, too, have so flaccid a bearing that one could cast reasonable doubt on the reality of my existence?"

There's some kind of rule, or at least should be, that the more you have to tell people what a good time something was/is/will be, the more likely that is to be a lie. If the hype goes on long enough or becomes loud enough, you can fairly expect the thing in question to be unrepentantly awful. Like when Donald Trump talks about himself.

This, of course, is the macros' bread and butter. They cornered the beer market decades ago (to the tune of about 80%) by flogging a bland product designed to appeal to as many people as possible after the end of Prohibition. Since then, it's been a battle between the macros for as much of the revenue as can be had. This usually takes the form of insulting gimmicks, like Coors' blue mountains, intended to help the drinker tell when an aluminum can has gone cold. They're all slinging the same swill, so the only way to get separation is with a proxy mascot war or the occasional half-hearted experiment (Miller's taunting 64 calories have actually been undercut by Budweiser). To wit: they look at a nation desperate for relief from an obesity epidemic and its related health problems and they decide to help out by offering us... this.

To Miller 64!
FUCK. YOU.