Purists Gone Wild

By TIMOTHY EGAN
NYT

I reached for an Irish whiskey — two fingers, neat, as my uncle used to say in trying to teach me how to drink — just after finishing “Last Call,” Daniel Okrent’s haunting and entertaining book on Prohibition. The drink was necessary, in part, because his gallop through one of the most otherworldly episodes in American history made me shudder at the parallels to this age.

We are about to get a full immersion in that great moralistic experiment from 1919 to 1933, a generator of crime not just vast and organized, but vertically integrated from street thugs to judges. “Prohibition,” the latest story from the history factory of filmmaker Ken Burns, is set to run on PBS stations in October. It was co-directed by Lynn Novick and is a “first cousin” to the book, in Okrent’s words.

The obvious echo will be about drugs. You will hear “if only” in many variants this fall — as in, if only the most popular of illicit substances were brought out of criminal shadows to be legalized and taxed.

But the film and book are much more instructive on the political fevers of the early 21st century, particularly those aroused by monomaniacal anti-tax pressure groups and their foot soldiers, the increasingly unpopular Tea Party.

(More here.)