[The series] doesn\u2019t pound on the lessons for today that spring from the nation\u2019s disastrous ban on the sale and purchase of alcohol between 1920 and 1933. It did not need to.<\/p>\n
The roots of Prohibition the series identified are still visible. Moralists still try to tell other people how to conduct private lives.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
And other “moralists” respond to conflict by trying to get big government to impose utopia on the “enemy”.<\/p>\n
“There’s a chance the children of immigrants – or gun-clinging Jeebus freaks – might believe things that are inconvenient to those who control society; let’s centralize and standardize education under the government!”<\/p>\n
“Guns scare us<\/del> aren’t how civilized people settle their problems; let’s ban them from the highest level possible!”<\/p>\n“We don’t like too much (of our opponents’) money in politics; let’s create federal laws to make sure elections are unpolluted by (our opponents’) money!”<\/p>\n
In small towns \u2014 the \u201creal America,\u201d in Sarah Palin\u2019s parlance \u2014 many people still look askance at urban habits. Americans of longer standing still wish immigrants would change their ways.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
And the fact that all people are “we-ists” mean that it will ever be thus; that people, including urban people, will intrinsically trust people who are more like them, and be less sympathetic to people less like them.<\/p>\n
Prohibition\u2019s message for 2011 in Minnesota and the rest of the nation seems to be a warning: Allow these roots to sprout and grow, and the consequences could well be unpredictable and undesirable.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
And the other, bigger, real-er lesson? \u00a0The “we-ist” with the printing press gets to decide which ‘we-ists” get called ‘good” and “noble” and “upstanding”, and which don’t.<\/p>\n
Well, they did, anyway.<\/p>\n
That<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Ken Burns has a new documentary series, about Prohibition. Lori Sturdevant shows her ability to tease the wrong lesson out of history\u00a0– or, more accurately, the lesson she wants her less-informed readers to find: [The series] doesn\u2019t pound on the lessons for today that spring from the nation\u2019s disastrous ban on the sale and purchase […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25,130],"tags":[258],"class_list":["post-23393","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history-and-its-making","category-tc-media-bias","tag-we-ism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23393","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=23393"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23393\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":37478,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23393\/revisions\/37478"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=23393"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=23393"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=23393"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}