We used to be a load of drunken assholes. Around the turn of the century the average American drank three times more than they do today. One hundred years ago your drunkest friend would be ridiculed by the town Sunday school teacher for not gulping down an adult portion of whiskey. We were so drunk for so long that we actually let a group of old haggard right-wing Christian woman, dutifully followed by their pussy whipped, mustachioed husbands succeeded in passing a constitutional amendment to ban alcohol in all its forms forever from the United States of America, an idea so radical, so outlandish, that it was the equivalent of banning breakfast. Ken Burns’ documentary, Prohibition, meticulously documents the wild ride we took to ban booze. The story is told in the usual Ken Burns style, which is good if you’re into that sort of thing.
The 18th amendment was widely disregarded. It vilified booze so only villains could have booze. Any bumpkin with a bath tub and some corn could become Scarface over night and could roll down the street in his new Rolls Royce wearing a fur coat drunk as hell “fuck the police”, knowing everyone was on the take. From the president to the mayor the local pigs, everybody drank. The amendment was only popular with the kind of people you wouldn’t want to associate with anyway. People’s drinking habits changed only in the way that they started dressing up and drinking with woman instead of just with the good ole boys. Everybody who was anybody cramped themselves into basement speakeasies and did the crazy floppy leg dance. When you get both the sexes drinking and dancing together one thing eventually leads to another and before you know it you have a full one sexual revolution on your hands. For the first time the American male was introduced to the drunken Snookie style of American female. Loaded, loud, and dressed like a five dollar whore, the flappers became an icon and redefined what it meant to be a woman.
It wasn’t all gin and pus though. Gangsters took control of the city streets. Aided by crooked cops the likes of Al Capone and Bugs Moran ran cities like Chicago giving the good people a steady supply of booze and hookers. Capone and Moran’s fueled came to a head on the St. Valentine’s Day massacre. It made people step back, take a deep breath, look around and say, what is going on here.
Prohibition is a film about good ol’ American FuckyouI’mgoingtdowhatIwant- ism, the very principles that founded our great land. Burns gives us a look at how the people really thought and acted with photos and videos form the time period. It moves at the pace of a history lecture but if your patient with it you’ll learn something, that nothing is new under the sun. Our grandparents liked to get wasted and finger bang each other just as much as we do now, everyone’s always wanted to be a gangster, and people are always going to do whatever they want to no matter what the consequences
Ken Burns’ Prohibition is a cautionary tale about the moral minority championing a single cause all the way to the highest levels of government. The, would be, do-gooders tried to save Americans from themselves but instead caused a huge backlash, it over taxed judicial systems, overflowed prisons, and invited open disregard for the law that many Americans thought was unjust. Thankfully we have learned our lesson and there is nothing like it today.
Photos
djhobby.blogspot.com
flickr.com/photos/castlekay/3030317484/
crimespace.ning.com
