ON THE AVENUES: The triumph of the scofflaws.

ON THE AVENUES: The triumph of the scofflaws.

A weekly web column by Roger A. Baylor.

The journalist, writer and social commentator H. L. Mencken celebrated the repeal of Prohibition by drinking a glass of cold water.

“My first in 13 years,” he explained.

Mencken’s witticism is repeated near the end of “Prohibition”, Ken Burns’ cautionary and instructive 2011 documentary film. It chronicles the single most ridiculous “great” experiment in American history that did not involve war, segregation, genocide, eugenics, Miller Lite or Bud Selig, because at least Prohibition killed no one, right?

Wrong, although the very same religious zealots, health fascists and bubble-headed family activists whose decades of admittedly effective lobbying brought about the country’s bizarre hypocritically wet/dry hiatus never ceases insisting, against all evidence to the contrary, that eliminating alcoholic beverages would reduce various abuses and deaths – particularly on the part of those working men cruelly subject to the destructive forces of Demon Rum … or was the real problem related to unfettered Robber Baron capitalism and the human degradation it brought to the shop floor, more so than the stupor coming on its heels?

At any rate, the anticipated utopian panacea did not come into being at the stroke of an amendment to the Constitution. People continued to be injured and to die, but for intriguing new reasons.

Fatalities, dismemberments and other injuries stemming from the explosion of organized crime, which predictably followed in the wake of Prohibition, were considerable in number. Also, havoc was unleashed when unregulated bootleg poisons were unwittingly ingested by normal, ordinary folks.

Of course, to be crippled, blinded or killed outright by drinking a simple cocktail was to expose yourself to vilification by the Prohibition era’s proliferation of nutcase moralizers: As a God-denying, law-breaking agent of perversity, you deserved to suffer.

Don’t believe it? Just ask modern-day fundamentalist quacks like Pat Robertson, forever conjuring the sophistry necessary to blame tornado victims for not praying hard enough for deliverance, or AIDS patients for being promiscuous devils who’ve made an otherwise “loving” God all irate, with dire consequences.

Pfui. By 1933, with Prohibition finally tossed into Trotsky’s historical dustbin – thanks to the terminal arrogance of its proponents, a creeping national exhaustion from the daily strain of quenching illicit thirsts, the gut-wrenching economic dislocations of the Great Depression (capitalism again), and a pressing need to steady our collective nerves before commissioning the Greatest Generation to slay Nips and Nazis – only then may we fast-forward 70-odd years to early 2012, when I sat listening, spellbound and disgusted, to a nattily attired trucking company owner from Northern Indiana, who unfortunately also serves in the House of Representatives. He was explaining his views on booze to the Brewers of Indiana Guild board.

Not only is he diametrically opposed to ruining the lives of innocent children by countenancing beer and wine sales at the state fairgrounds during the State Fair (libations to be consumed by adults, mind you – not the children themselves), but he strongly favors a return to the halcyon days of the aforementioned Prohibition era, and the re-outlawing of all forms of beverage alcohol, presumably so drinkers might join dope smokers, serial sodomites, Democrats and even readers of French literature inside a spanking new, for-profit Gulag on the Indiana prairie, its construction naturally outsourced to foreign investors, so that the half-dozen or so right-thinking and sober patriots remaining on the Outside might enjoy the state all by themselves.

His Heaven is my Hell, not unlike the rampant hypocrisies that so often comprise the American myth.

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Watching the Ken Burns documentary about Prohibition last week proved to be an excellent preparatory strategy for me, because it rendered me appropriately militant as I eagerly awaited the start of the 9th American Distilling Institute conference. The conference was held from April 1 through the 4th, with most events taking place just a few miles away from New Albany at Huber’s Winery and Starlight Distillery, itself a showplace of family business, small business, agribusiness and the tourism business.

They do it all, and Huber’s is like a textbook illustrating these connections: Kinfolk, farming, visitors and commerce. The trucker/legislator needs to read this book – any book, for that matter. Of all the voluminous absurdities he utters (trust me, it was a Candid Camera moment), the one making the least sense is his attitude of skepticism that beverage alcohol has any useful connection to agriculture.

Of course, even the most cursory examinations of world culture and human history over the millennia indicate otherwise, and yet these facts like cannot survive ideological motivations like his. It remains that fermentation is a natural process, one harnessed by mankind from times immemorial to create pleasing and at times sustaining beverages from the agricultural yield.

In the absence of refrigeration, grape juice and wort (barley liquid ready for boiling) are highly perishable. Alcoholic content helps to preserve them, thus preserving the value of the crop, because the value of wine and beer as finished products are higher than as raw materials.

Distillation takes the process a step further by concentrating the alcoholic content of the fermentables. It is a man-made process, to be sure, and one widely used for applications other than the production of beverage alcohol, but the analogy holds. There’s nothing unnatural about any of it, and all of it begins somewhere in a field, where plants are growing.

One thing I’ve noticed is that craft-oriented makers of beer, wine and spirits share an interest in restoring a sense of place and connectivity when it comes to their ingredients. This interest parallels other contemporary movements pertaining to locality and sustainability – perhaps imperfectly, but in the sense of gradual shift. As noted so often in this space, shift happens … if you want it. America’s dreadful experiment with Prohibition proved eloquently that a shift running counter to nature and human proclivities was not a good idea.

Perhaps all of Indiana’s legislators should be compelled to watch the documentary series.