Not a single word in the above about movies, TV and rock music being responsible for all the ills of contemporary society? Man, Sparky -- you're slipping. Seriously -- you used to have a work ethic. Simps
WHEN I FIRST started doing this, writing things and posting them, first on comment threads then on my own blogs, I was often surprised at things that got a strong negative reaction. Not so much the big controversial issues on which I knew I was not hewing to secular-lefty convention but the merely ephemeral and things not central to an effective liberal or lefty agenda. One of those was the night I innocently observed that the worst thing about America's experiment with prohibition was that it didn't work. That it didn't produce a sober society and nation. And that's all I said, at first. It got an immediate and impassioned reaction on what was then one of the major lefty blogs. A blog which had reached its high point around the 2004 election and had already started on its long and continuing decline. It featuring a link for "Drinking Liberally" on the side panel perhaps had a bit to do with that decline. One guy who I knew was a professional journalist angrily said that I'd deprive working men of being able to unwind with some drinks after a hard day at work. To which I said if they didn't drink they could probably be in better shape to organize to make their work less arduous and more satisfying. As the brawl developed, I listed the glaringly obvious benefits of having a society or even a country where no one drank alcohol.
No alcoholism, no accident caused car and other accidents, no alcohol related violence up to and including murders, no drunks rolled and robbed sometimes killed, no alcoholics having to resort to prostituting themselves (no pimps using alcohol to gull young idiots into it), no women or children gotten drunk and talked into sex they wouldn't have otherwise, none of the large number of unmentioned diseases that even moderate alcohol consumption causes and exacerbates,* no drunken husbands beating their wives while drunk, no drunken parents neglecting or abusing children, no children getting started on addiction in their early teens or earlier, etc.
Other than food and housing assistance and medical care and perhaps, arguably, the chance at an education, I doubt there is a single social or governmental program ever dreamed up by a social worker or lefty scribbler that would produce as much good in the lives of the community and the nation than would have come with an actual abolition of the consumption of alcohol, if that had proven to be possible. When people wonder why those who adopted the prohibition amendment to the Constitution could have done it, they could certainly see many if not all of those benefits, women who were regularly beaten and abused and raped and neglected by drunken men, who saw their children being abused and neglected due to alcohol could see those possibilities, those weren't things to be shunned and despised. Unfortunately, due to the corruption of those who would have had to enforce it, the organized crime who immediately took advantage of the national appetite for alcohol and the pop culture which romanticized and made fashionable drinking and getting drunk, those good, even wise and well meaning intentions were quickly turned into a crime wave. That wasn't the fault of those who wanted to end the nightmarish reality of life in pre-prohibition times, especially as electronic media and the newly mass media popularized drinking and getting sloshed. It was the fault of those who profited from subverting their intentions. You would think the ease with which the ease with which those things enslave People, causing them to destroy their lives and the lives of others would make those exactly the opposite of what an American style liberal or a real lefty dedicated to making lives longer and better would favor.
I have noted here before how bizarre it was for the secular-play-left to champion alcohol use and, later, drug use, things that are guaranteed to enslave a large percentage of those who used them far worse than wage slavery could - the part alcohol played in that kind of voluntary, duped and induced enslavement doesn't seem to figure at all in the huge amount of lefty lore I ever saw or read. I think the opposite is true as I found out that night and subsequently. No amount of reasoning could cut through that pile of bullshit or maybe the rip-roarin', bar room atheists who were always ready for a fight (a virtual fight, that is, not one that risked a black eye among that genteel college-credentialed crowd) were too afraid of being shunned out of the clique that sits on the high school stairs. One of the things I learned from frequenting the lefty blogs of the 20OO's and beyond, reading the quick and unfiltered thinking or what counts as thinking among them, is just what a bunch of soft-handed, scaredy cat cowards and slaves to conventional thinking they are. I wrote here once how I came to understand how, for example, those legendary and great heroes of such a left, The Weavers, could present a song glorifying those involved in illegal liquor production as some kind of good, only once I looked more deeply into the actual history of them and their predecessors, The Almanac Singers, they always had feet of clay.
And, as I mentioned, what was true of the place of alcohol in such pop-secular-play-lefty bullshit was as true about drugs. What drinking and drug use ever had being mistaken for a legitimate issue for a genuine American style liberalism or its actually daffy and impractical and often deranged wing of secular-leftism has been of enormous use in coming to understand how the American left got sidetracked and distracted and deeply damaged into destroying their effectiveness.
The real lesson of prohibition was that whatever sweeping attempt at changing such a deeply entrenched habit which carries its own falsely-positive reinforcement on a personal level is extremely hard. Making that habit into some kind of stupidly adopted cause celebre of any liberalism or genuine leftism is not only not helpful, it's guaranteed to make things worse.
At the very least, the left could admit that alcohol and drugs are not only bad for People, they are intrinsic to their enslavement, disempowerment and misery here as they have been in in Czarist, Communist and now Putin-fascist Russia. And every Supreme Court, ACLU promoted permitted liquor ad on TV, every product placement in movies (don't get me started on Nick and Nora) and on TV, every song that promotes alcohol use contributes to that as much as a methyl-tainted bootlegger or 1920s gangster did. Think of that the next time you hear ol' Pete and Ronnie and the gang beltin' out Darlin' Corey.
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I could mention things like prostitution and other sex industries, the promotion of irresponsible sex, especially at very young ages as Hollywood, TV and pop music has done, reckless driving, the "anti-political-correctness" fad that began with the promotion of what I called fascist chic during the late 1970s and into the Reagan years - what Bill Maher, among the least funny comedians of all times still lives off of as he tries to catch the same cresting wave as the more overt Republican-fascists do. In my attempt over the past seventeen years to find out why "the left" has failed so abysmally in the United States, in Britain and Canada I have found that the actual left that can be depended on to even pursue things that might work is much smaller than I had thought. The play-lefts here and elsewhere are actually far bigger and far less interested in actually doing something that will work to produce real and lasting change. And, as I have been railing about for quite a long time, we are up against the anti-egalitarian, anti-democratic features intentionally embedded into the body of the Constitution by the friggin' founders and those baked into the Bill of Rights, likely by sheer stupidity by the First Congress through their inferior 18th century poetics than intention. The corrupt Supreme Court more than they did, though, used their terse wording and tacit explicitness to make those much worse. That's another thing you're never supposed to mention as an American liberal or lefty, the actual corruption of that document, including the idolized First Amendment. I would note that the history of the distortion of the much better written 14th Amendment by the Supreme Court, which is not only continuing today but is reaching new depths of intentional dishonesty and evil brings into focus some of the other prohibited truth telling among the self-declared free-speech-press absolutists.
I have to say it's my experience that I've been told I can't say those things by civil libertarians even more often than I was ever told I couldn't advocate LGBTQ+ equality, even back before Stonewall. I think the prohibition on telling the plain truth about such things, supported by enormous confirming evidence is at least as strong on the play-left as it is in the commercial media or even on much of the less drunken, less violent right.
* In my looking into the consequences of alcohol use, I'm convinced that the health and other damage caused by "moderate" alcohol use is probably even a worse public health issue than that caused by the minority who become alcoholics. Yet I have never, once, heard any discussion of that in the media or among my fellow lefties and American liberals. It's as bad as the decades of cover-up and silence of the health consequences of tobacco use.
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