By Dave Andrusko
Lynn Novick and Ken Burns
Drats. I was so busy watching our granddaughter last night that I did not realize until an hour ago that the first episode of “Prohibition,” a Documentary by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick (the title of which is, “A Nation of Drunkards”) aired Sunday. Full episodes are available on the www.npr.org website, so I hope to watch the first of the three-part film later tonight.
Burns’ documentaries have long since lost their fastball. He’s been getting by with off-speed junk for years. So why mention his latest documentary film at all?
Simply because Burns is itching to liken the people who brought us Prohibition to (you guessed it) pro-lifers. A review of the series at The New Republic today makes that explicit.
Author and professor Michael Kazin tells his readers that “the right-to-life movement [is] the prohibitionists of our own time.” (“What the Temperance Movement and the Anti-Abortion Movement Have in Common.”)
The analogy goes like this.
What was once intended only to limit drinking morphed into a campaign to end it, and, well the rest is history. If what happened to the Prohibition movement is that its success bred its own demise, well, so, too, would be the fate of our Movement were we to succeed.
To repeat, while I’ve read some comments from Burns prior to the series beginning, I did not see the opening episode. According to Kazin, Burns’/Novick’s approach (at least in the beginning) acknowledges that at least some member of the “dry army” were “humane,” with noble motives.
“Unfortunately, to document its downfall, Burns and Novick rely on clichéd images and a narrative of inevitability,” Kazin writes. Unfortunately, Kazin falls into the same trap. Were pro-lifers to make a real breakthrough the public would rebel at “indecent assaults on individual freedom.”
(A recent book about Prohibition by Daniel Okrent seems to be cut from the same cloth. And since the point is to make sure to paint pro-lifers/social conservatives as knuckle-draggers, the impetus for Prohibition, according to Okrent—the first ombudsman/public editor for the New York Times–was fueled by ugly motives.)
Two concluding thoughts. First, if you have a chance, I’d recommend you catch up on last night’s first episode.
Second, both Burns and Kazin know that no two social movements are alike. And as much as academic apologists for abortion like to pretend otherwise, the Pro-Life Movement is Middle American incarnate.
Our views and attitude on abortion are much closer to where a majority of the America people are than are our counterparts’. That drives pro-abortionists crazy, which is one reason we MUST be demonized.
But there is a larger point. When we carry the day for unborn children it will be through the gentlest of means–when through law and practice the hearts of the America people are soften, their eyes opened, and their ears unstopped.
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