DO ALL THAT YOU CAN DO NOT TO DRAW BLOOD

133. DO ALL THAT YOU CAN DO NOT TO DRAW BLOOD:

Is it that someone will rob you in the pants that you fear ? then do all that you can do not to draw blood for you are REMEMBER in the American Isles and the rules are different - no machete no scimitar no saber allowed - and things are all about finesse are they not ? NO they are not these are again the AMERICAN Isles and people take seats where they choose they sit where they may and talk about whatever it is they wish to talk about and no stopping them for that : every subject becomes of course tendentious prattle and boring nonsense mostly filled with error but one cannot AGAIN stop that (I want to be a fly on THAT wall) and I'd love to listen to her talk some more BUT I GOTTA' GO! and did you know that Prohibition was one of the longest dumbest chapters in the history of 20th century American folly and the impulses behind it are still alive today ? or that the architects of that bizarre experiment were as varied as the country in which they lived and included : 'faith-based Christian zealots idealistic social reformers flat-out bigots a few solemn feminists and more than a few cynical businessmen who simply wanted their blue-collar workers to show up sober and on time' and that part of the ease and success of the Prohibition movement came from being tied in with the 'support our boys' war effort underway in WWI with Americans being urged to 'support our boys in uniform by keeping them away from alcohol and loose women' and because we were fine upstanding people and 'blessed by God we should never enter combat with the dastardly Hun while suffering from hangovers' but the problems Prohibition faced - at the same time - came from immigrants and especially New York immigrants the millions of Irish Italians and Jews and even Germans who were being asked to abandon their own cultural habits including drinking and thereby ABSOLUTELY prove they were Americans and that the 13 years 10 months and 18 days of Prohibition were little more than a crazed American utopian delusion pressed down onto hordes of hard-drinking recent new citizens part of whose new 'birthright' they had thought was Individual Liberty and the right to do something they'd selected to do and all it did - even as these American soldiers returned home and marched in parades in a dry city - was cause a cultural insurgency unlike any other seen before and the new proliferation of speakeasies caused crime to proliferate as Jews Italians and Irish took it first upon themselves to form illegal syndicates for distribution and then later UNITE and COMBINE these operations into alliances - and corruption was then used to cut down on enforcement through payoffs and dirty cops and by playing upon the easy temptations of money presented to enforcement officers (who were often not even real police) and it was nearly impossible to stop saloons and later speakeasies anyway as they had always served immigrant communities well as centers for social commingling employment centers shakedown halls mustering centers and simply places of socialization and community bonding - in these cases a sort of defiant laughter was their response to all this foolishness - and thousands of Americans would die too during these years from bad liquor during the 'noble experiment' - THERE WERE 15,000 saloons in New York when Prohibition started and within a few years of it there were 32,000 speakeasies as saloons and eventually even ENFORCEMENT was only done reluctantly and the American delusion faded away AND WHAT'S THAT TELL YOU - idealists can always ruin an ideal so be assured of that : and like the old pick-up line from some 1930's film 'you've got the curves baby and I've got the angles' the whole story was made for a match - the ideal against the real the concept against the error - AMERICA has always been in the grip of something whether a fierce crusade for some perverse ideal or a 'dangerous lobotmizing notion of endless war' and a 'great writer of fiction of course by writing truthfully about the society in which he or she lives cannot help but evoke the better standards of justice and truthfulness that we have the right to press for in the imperfect societies in which we live' (heard all that somewhere by candlelight one night drinking wine on a 62nd Street couch in a perfectly shaded ivory room on some seventh floor of somewhere and the person who spoke was wise beyond means (I thought) and vivacious and stunning too but I didn't know my reasoning went much beyond that and I only later found out that such was the means by which revolutionaries too were given training and just like 'cells' in the old communist underground these small groups of people known only to each other communed in a silence louder than sin but it was cool and so was I and everything went well for a very long time and THAT'S HOW WE LEARN and that's how we grow in these 'strenuous mercantilistic biases which are American culture' ( a part of me sensed I wanted nobility I wanted a royal European culture but was instead getting this...) I got motor oil in grassy ground I got singed trees where a forest once was I got both the YES and the NO of the culture at the very same time - a coarsened sensibility and an ineffective mind but that was the American way back then ('and I was so much older then - I'm younger than that now').