What are you watching?

Feb 13, 2017 0:36:49 GMT -5 thelizard said:

I tried to watch that. I think it's just too meta for me to grok.

well have you tried Documentary Now? Same folks involved. Most are very clever.

Mar 10, 2017 8:35:08 GMT -5 kuriti said:

Agreed. Crazy take away for me is that more than half of the drive for it was based in anti-german sentiment and all the brewers were german. the remainder was basically women suffragist who were tired of getting beat up by their drunk husbands.

I found that aspect of it most interesting, too. The women weren't really opposed to drinking itself, but it was the saloon mentality. Men only, spending money they didn't have and wasting time they needed elsewhere, then coming home drunk and often abusive, or at least worthless. In fact, technically Prohibition didn't ban consumption or possession of alcohol, just the manufacture and sale of it.  Ok, maybe a distinction without a difference, considering the intended effect.

A second very interesting point from Burns' doc was that before Prohibition, women never went to bars (as customers).  Once the legal bars closed and were replaced by speak-easies, the social convention changed and women went there--consistent with other legal and social liberations such as voting, driving, smoking outside and living away from home unmarried.  In short, there came a new wave of gender equality never intended by the women who caused it!

And then there was the political maneuvering--genius--that got a Constitutional amendment that clearly the majority of Americans did not want (to Jeff's point of the 50% "success" rate).  Watch that part again and be afraid, be very afraid, of what could happen with other social legislation lurking out there.