the more things change

I just finished reading "Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition" by Daniel Okrent, a meticulously researched and sprightly written history. I learned so much from this book (did you know the Founding Fathers were sots? Jefferson, Washington and the rest drank like fishes. Did you know the oh-so-Puritan Pilgrims drank heavily and brought more alcohol on the Mayflower than water?).

But what struck me the most was how, due to a lack of education, I have been misperceiving American politics. I went to school in a very rural school district, where our "social studies" education covered the same limited ground every single year. Every September we opened a new social studies text and started reading about the Pilgrims, and every June we stopped midway through the book at Reconstruction. Never, never, never did I hear a word about either World Wars, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Cold War, or even suffrage or Prohibition. None of those topics were ever raised. I often think of my own education when I hear other countries criticized for what they leave out of their education (I have repeatedly heard Japan harshly ripped for failing to teach its children about the wartime excesses committed in China, but meanwhile in my American school we never studied how we dropped not one but two atomic bombs on Japan).

Anyhow, beyond learning how closely suffrage and Prohibition were linked (I had no clue that the great suffragettes were Prohibitionists and indeed some of them turned to suffrage after being rejected, on the basis of their gender, from the Prohibition movement), I was most spellbound by how much the politics of that age reminded me of current times. I have for some time been deeply concerned that politics have become too religious and that the far right is moving into new territory, injecting religious doctrine into textbooks (and again I note about my own childhood: the word "evolution" was never spoken in my school. We never learned a thing about it), making "family values" a fetish. It turns out that there is no new thing under the sun. American politics were just like that back in the 1910s and 1920s. Schoolbooks contained horrible, morality-based, science-be-damned falsehoods about alcohol, such as the "fact" that a single sip of alcohol tears flesh off a drinker's throat and that all habitual beer drinkers die of "dropsy." Religion and arguments about the family, the poor, beleaguered, threatened American family monopolized public discourse. It was all so very, very familiar.

I feel considerably educated now about an era of time I knew so little about, and I feel reassured, in an odd way. Our current "culture wars" are nothing new. As a nation, we've bungled and bumbled through much the same thing already.