M2RB: The Kinks
You keep all your smart modern writers
Give me William Shakespeare
You keep all your smart modern painters
I’ll take Rembrandt, Titian, da Vinci, and Gainsborough
I was born in a welfare state
Ruled by bureaucracy
Controlled by civil servants
And people dressed in grey
Got no privacy got no liberty
’Cause the 20th-century people
Took it all away from me.
- "20th Century Man" by The Kinks
Give me William Shakespeare
You keep all your smart modern painters
I’ll take Rembrandt, Titian, da Vinci, and Gainsborough
I was born in a welfare state
Ruled by bureaucracy
Controlled by civil servants
And people dressed in grey
Got no privacy got no liberty
’Cause the 20th-century people
Took it all away from me.
- "20th Century Man" by The Kinks
"Nothing so needs reforming as other people’s habits. Fanatics will never learn that, though it be written in letters
of gold across the sky: It is the prohibition that makes anything
precious.”
- Mark Twain
As I always say, Progs are only pro-choice when it comes to uteri,
rectums, and pot. In the Washington Post today, Steven Pearlstein
writes, "Eat your broccoli, Justice Scalia!" Of course, Mr Pearlstein
would never dream of saying:
"Do not swallow that birth control pill, Ms Fluke!"
"Do not have that abortion, Ms Roe!"
"Do not have anal sex with another man, Mr Lawrence!"
In all of those cases, he would say, "Keep your laws off of my and their bodies!" But, when it comes to salt, transfats, broccoli, Big Gulps, raw milk, fresh eggs, mandating people enter into private contracts, etc., well, THAT'S different. OF COURSE, the government can tell its subjects what to do....or tax them into doing it!
"Do not swallow that birth control pill, Ms Fluke!"
"Do not have that abortion, Ms Roe!"
"Do not have anal sex with another man, Mr Lawrence!"
In all of those cases, he would say, "Keep your laws off of my and their bodies!" But, when it comes to salt, transfats, broccoli, Big Gulps, raw milk, fresh eggs, mandating people enter into private contracts, etc., well, THAT'S different. OF COURSE, the government can tell its subjects what to do....or tax them into doing it!
Exquisitely, CS Lewis wrote:
"Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its
victim may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber
barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's
cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated,
but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end
for they do so with the approval of their own conscience."
- C S Lewis
Mr Pearlstein, how about you try to make Mikey eat his broccoli? I dare you.
Better yet, how about you leave the rest of us the bloody fuck alone?
"Very little good has ever been done by the absolute shall."
- Anonymous American clergyman, 19th century
Bonus for all of you "direct action" broccoli protesters (and, no, don't read anything into it): More Kinks!
And, another bonus for ya!
From my: The "Absolute Shall" Shall Always Absolutely Fail, Especially In America! And More Cheers For It!
"By God, I’ll drink to that, Ken
Burns must have thought to himself, as he settled into making his latest
historical epic with fellow filmmaker Lynn Novick. This one would be
about Prohibition, and it comes to the small screen in three parts,
beginning tonight — ironically, the same night as the Emmy
Award-winning Prohibition-era epic, Boardwalk Empire.
Hold on to your hat.
Hold on to your hat.
"Prohibition:
A Film" by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick has loftier ambitions. It’s seeped
in sepia-toned nostalgia and the kind of first-person witness narrative
so familiar to followers of Burns’ earlier epics The Civil War, Jazz,
Baseball and The War. And then, there’s the music: breathy, bluesy jazz,
soaked in fine whisky and delivered straight-up ... with ice.
“The conventional image of the Prohibition era is, of course, the rain-slicked Chicago streets around which the Model T is careening, machine guns blazing, or the flapper who is shimmying in her miniskirt with her bobbed hair,” Burns said in an interview. “We have a lot of that, and it is very exciting and sexy violent.
“But we also felt the story we needed to tell encompassed other things. Our whole first episode details the century of events that led up to Prohibition, and takes us right up to the moment the law goes into effect.”
Anyone with a sober, lucid view of 20th-century history has a vague idea of what Prohibition entailed, and virtually everyone knows it was an abject failure in the end. Burns’ and Novick’s Prohibition is filled with the kind of hidden, little-known detail that brings even familiar stories alive, though. It’s those little-known details that compelled Burns and Novick to tackle such a daunting, all-encompassing historical project. Passage of the 18th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution on 16 January 1919, Burns noted, “would turn millions of law-abiding Americans into law-breakers.”
In strictly legal terms, the 18th Amendment barred the “manufacture, sale or transportation of intoxicating liquors within, the importation thereof unto (and) the exportation thereof from the United States.” In real-world terms, it provided a foundation for the rise of organised crime. In Burns’ words, it pitted the countryside against the cities, natives against immigrants, Protestants against Catholics. It raised questions about the proper role of government, about individual rights and responsibilities, about means and ends, and unintended consequences, and about who was and who was not a “real American.”
“The conventional image of the Prohibition era is, of course, the rain-slicked Chicago streets around which the Model T is careening, machine guns blazing, or the flapper who is shimmying in her miniskirt with her bobbed hair,” Burns said in an interview. “We have a lot of that, and it is very exciting and sexy violent.
“But we also felt the story we needed to tell encompassed other things. Our whole first episode details the century of events that led up to Prohibition, and takes us right up to the moment the law goes into effect.”
Anyone with a sober, lucid view of 20th-century history has a vague idea of what Prohibition entailed, and virtually everyone knows it was an abject failure in the end. Burns’ and Novick’s Prohibition is filled with the kind of hidden, little-known detail that brings even familiar stories alive, though. It’s those little-known details that compelled Burns and Novick to tackle such a daunting, all-encompassing historical project. Passage of the 18th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution on 16 January 1919, Burns noted, “would turn millions of law-abiding Americans into law-breakers.”
"After
Prohibition, after everyone had seen how devastating it was to morals,
to policing, to government. It was really a failure. People are
picking up the pieces trying to make sense of it. The key thing,
though, about this picking up the pieces after Prohibition, was the same
God that laughs at our folly -- and there was folly in Prohibition --
still holds us responsible, still wants us to build a better society, to
build a better world, and doesn't disdain human endeavour. And, I
think that post-Prohibition, you were picking up the pieces trying to
find a moral framework to build a better America, but without quite so
much of the pride, arrogance and self-assurance that the Prohibitionists
had."
- Martin Marty, Theologian
In strictly legal terms, the 18th Amendment barred the “manufacture, sale or transportation of intoxicating liquors within, the importation thereof unto (and) the exportation thereof from the United States.” In real-world terms, it provided a foundation for the rise of organised crime. In Burns’ words, it pitted the countryside against the cities, natives against immigrants, Protestants against Catholics. It raised questions about the proper role of government, about individual rights and responsibilities, about means and ends, and unintended consequences, and about who was and who was not a “real American.”
Prohibition was repealed in the 21st Amendment, on 5 December 1933 — in time for Christmas — but the damage had been done: The so-called “American century” would never be the same.
Prohibition was, for a brief time, a uniquely American moment in history. Other countries were having none of it.
“The Home Secretary of Great Britain,” Burns said, his voice lowered in mock solemnity, “a man named Winston Churchill, refused to life a finger to stop the flow of rum from a little protectorate off the coast of Florida named the Bahamas. As a Brit, you must understand why some many of us cheer our wonderful Winston! I'll also tell you this: Neither the Catholics nor the Protestants were much upset when the Puritans left the Isle and sailed the New World with their puritanical lifestyle, but even they had a ship hold full of rum and cider.
"Prohibition was an affront to the whole history of mankind.”
- Sir Winston Churchill, Home Secretary of Great Britain
In
fact, alcohol was as American as apple pie, Burns says: "The hold of the
Mayflower, the ship that carried the first Puritans to Massachusetts,
was filled with barrels of beer. At Valley Forge, George Washington did
his best to make sure his men had half a cup of rum every day, “and half
a cup of whisky when the rum ran out.” A young Abraham Lincoln sold
whisky by the barrel from his grocery store in Illinois. “Intoxicating
liquor,” he later remembered, “was used by everybody, repudiated by
nobody.”
Prior to Prohibition, Americans drank
at every meal, including breakfast. By 1830, the average American over
15 years of age drank the equivalent of 88 bottles of whiskey every year,
three times as much as their 21st-century descendants do. Americans
spent more money on alcohol each year than the total expenditures of the Federal government.
“What
we begin to understand is that the study of history provides us
insight, and (we hope) helps us apply compassion and tolerance to the
political circumstances we find ourselves in today.”
"Prohibition is not a matter of abstract morals; it is a matter of social welfare
- New York Governor, Alfred E. Smith, Democratic Presidential nominee
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