KEN BURNS' "PROHIBITION"

I just saw the second installment of Ken Burns' documentary about prohibition. There was a lot in there that I didn't know before, and it raised some interesting questions. For example, whatever happened to neighborhood bars?

When I was a kid they were all over the place. In some neighborhoods you could find a bar on almost every corner.  They weren't especially rowdy, in fact they were sort of "family" bars, but singing and shouting would spill out into the streets on some nights, and occasionally you'd see falling down drunks trying to make their way home at night.

If you lived in the neighborhood saloon era, that institution would have seemed as permanent as motherhood, but the saloons are mostly gone now, as are cigarettes and men's hats. Things change. Drunkenness was once seen as romantic and funny. Drunks were known as jovial philosophers and truth tellers, and were on the cutting edge of the jazz era. Nowadays they're considered so....so yesterday.

Burns' documentary probably wants us to draw comparisons with today's War on Drugs. I don't smoke marijuana but I wish it would be made legal so we could put to rest all the fuss that's made about it. More serious drugs are another matter, though. If they become widespread we'll have a permanent underclass in this country, and nobody wants that.

The philosopher inside me says that on principal people have a right to destroy themselves, and that I should just mind my own business. The practical side of me says that numbers matter. A few people taking serious drugs is just an expression of an alternative lifestyle: a lot of people doing the same thing is a major threat to the stability of society.

My own philosophy about the War on Drugs (hard drugs, that is) is that it's worth fighting, even if it ultimately can't be won. Sometimes a long fight is necessary just to prevent things from getting worse than they are, and winning or losing isn't the point.

Will this problem ever be resolved? My guess is that it will, probably within a few decades.  The time will come when serious drugs just aren't considered fashionable anymore. When hard rock and hippies recede into the past, the drugs and the romantic view of them that came out of that culture will recede with them. Hard drugs will diminish, just like saloons and cigarettes did.

Maybe the real menace of this type lies in the future. Imagine an electronic brain stimulator that, at the push of a button, floods the pleasure centers of the brain with the absolute ultimate sensation of pleasure. If you think about it, nothing could ever induce you to stop pushing a button like that. No alternative could offer a higher reward. You'd push it til you starved to death.