(Image: CET Connect)
BY CHRISTY LEWIS
When you think of the Prohibition age, maybe dangerous gangsters and sexy flappers from the Roaring 20s come to mind.
But a new Ken Burns documentary airing Sunday says the period is actually ripe with parallels with today’s society. It’s sparked media conversation that highlights what the Prohibition age can tell us about America now. (VIDEO: YouTube, PBS)
On Countdown with Keith Olbermann, Burns discusses politics then and now.
BURNS: “It was echoing everything today -- single issue campaigns that are metastisized, demonization of immigrants, and a whole group of people that want to take their country back.”
“...there’s also this idea that there was this slow build up to a process that people just saw at the last moment, which you could argue was the conservative movement for the last 45 years in America and the final version of which was the Tea Party.”
And a retired police officer writes in the Seattle Times: the documentary shows today’s audience another parallel: the war on drugs.
“Like the bootleggers of old, today's international cartels reap untold billions of dollars from the drug war, and they aren't afraid to kill to protect profits or expand markets...Previews show that Burns' documentary vividly depicts the lavish lifestyles of Prohibition-era gangsters, Yet today's drug cartels are even more profitable.”
But a blogger for Time says Burns is teaching us what we already know.
“One problem I've sometimes had with Burns' documentaries in the past, as I've written before, is that they represent a kind of pledge-drive-safe advocacy: they make impassioned arguments for things the audience already believes. (Slavery was awful, war is hell, baseball represents America.)”
Finally, leave it to Stephen Colbert for a different take on prohibition’s legacy:
BURNS: “We created organized crime. We would not have organized crime had there not been Prohibition.”
COLBERT: “Oh, and without organized crime there’d be no career for Robert DeNiro.”
Transcript by Newsy
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