In the old days it was about taxes and heaping the payoff of the national debt on farmers who made whiskey out of their corn. In 1790, it was considered an abomination and the farmers rebelled. Abraham Washington or George Lincoln, I think it was, sent troops and eventually the Whiskey Rebellion became a footnote in history.
The song was ended but the melody lingered on.
Miss Marcy doesn’t quite fit the theme, but it involves whiskey stills, illicit sex, murder, dancing, adultery and other dirty stuff, and it’s a good song. I’d be remiss leaving it out.
The Night Chicago Died isn’t precisely historically accurate, but it’s the only song comes to mind encapsulating what Prohibition led to: Gangsters, cops and bystanders being gunned down, speakeasy whiskey nights, corruption, and a lot of richer cops, politicans and gangsters with nobody else better or worse for it except prison guards, more lawyers, judges and cops. Sound familiar?
Even into the 1960s illegal whiskey still brought a smile and tacit approval from a population unaffected by the tiny wars still going on between back-woods whiskey-makers and ‘reveneurs’. Not to be mistaken for Jack Daniels or Johnny Walker. Nobody was getting killed over in the Jack Daniels plant.
Roger Miller’s classic’s just another example the general public attitude as opposed to the governmental enforcement apparatus tactics.
The US Government isn’t a fast learner. They were already controlling and taxing whiskey. They’d have saved more treasure than anyone can imagine it they’d taken that approach to dealing with cocaine. The substance abuse happened, the machinery of justice cranked up to deal with it, the prisons filled, and the taxpayers paid, paid, paid without taking it off the streets. Nor even out of the prisons.
Much the same song, different stanza for the poppy derivative family.
But whiskey and illicit drugs weren’t enough. The only obvious place the government was successful collecting taxes across the board was on tobacco.
But even a lot of whiskey drinkers and cocaine snorters didn’t like smokers. Gradually smokers were eased over there with prostitutes when it came to hammering them out of existence.
I’ve included a lot of different versions of this next song because we’ve needed a lot of jails for the people who get crosswise with moral superiority, barrels full of money, cops, politicians, judges and people who just like to know people they don’t agree with are in jail.
I’ve had to leave prostitutes and prisons for women full of them out of this because nobody cares enough about them to write a song.
If the power to intimidate is derived from a 'legitimate' source the term 'bully' is not applicable.
When I promised a summation of conclusions about bullying behavior based on ponderings and experiences described in those recent other posts, I didn’t grasp what I was setting myself up for. Every direction I took in my thinking led to unsettling places I couldn’t trust without backing up and thinking it through from other directions.
If you’re new to this blog and haven’t read the earlier posts it’s possible you’ll find it easier to follow if you read them first.
Okay, all that prefacing and cowardly side-step-waffling out-of-the-way, here’s what eventually I found myself inescapably glued to as a conclusion:
Bullying is so much a part of life on this planet we don’t even notice it. It’s the glue holding every community together, every species, cross-species, inter-species. It’s the determinant governing community behavior of every description. We just don’t recognize it as bullying unless it falls into a class of activities we happen to disapprove in our matrix of human-cum-societal judgements.
That’s if ‘bullying’ is defined as a behavior, as opposed to being anchored to a larger concept: the source from which the power being exerted is derived. Building a concept bounded by ‘legitimacy’ and protocols does allow what we usually label bullying to be cut out of the herd and isolated in a pen of repudiation. But by doing so we’d be forced to accept an equally unpalatable conclusion:
If the ‘bullying’ behavior subtracted from the bullying definition is legitimate because it derives power from approved sources of authority is an important piece of what holds things together, we’re stuck with it. Lock, stock and banana-peel. As an example, that 5th grade teacher of mine who liked to beat-hell out of me and other kids who weren’t in a ‘protected’ mode, wasn’t bullying us at all. Reason being that his power derived from his position as a designated tool of the power of legitimate authority.
Similarly, all that Jew-baiting that went on in the 3rd Reich and elsewhere in the world. The pervasive use of police forces to beat hell out of union strikers in the late 1800s and early 20th Century. The iron fist used constantly after the Indian wars in the western US to keep tribal members on the REZ and out of the hair of the ‘legitimate’ citizenry far into the 20th Century. The removal of the tribes east of the Mississippi, to designated places west of the Mississippi, even though doing so was a clear violation of previous treaties and agreements. National Guardsmen shooting students at Kent State. Policemen spraying little old ladies with mace.
Almost overnight, previously accepted non-bullying behavior/attitudes can become disgusting examples of bullying.
Sometimes focusing precisely on where the power resides becomes ambiguous.
Other times it’s not ambiguous in fact, but owns the tacit approval of de facto power.
Sometimes it’s bullying when it happens to the the group in question, but non-bullying when they’re doing it.
Sometimes it’s just a matter of being the wrong place at the right time.
And when the ‘legitimate’ source of power tacitly approves it, it’s not bullying.
So when a cop tasers a ten-year-old kid it’s actually business as usual. It might eventually become ‘brutality’ or might be deemed excessive force, but it will never become ‘bullying’.
But it gets more complicated than that. There’s a more subtle side of non-bullying we all see so frequently we take it for granted. For instance, the entire pantheon of political rhetoric today is choreographed to promote an atmosphere of something akin to bullying, character assassination, and denigration of the opposition. But because it’s satisfying to the targeted body of listener/participants, it’s ‘legitimate’.
Bullies constantly strive to give the moral high ground to their attitudes and behavior. Frequently, they succeed, and when they do those attitudes and behaviors cease to be bullying. Probably the best example can be found in the most non-bullied segment of society filling the jails and prisons in the U.S. Prostitutes.
They do openly and honestly what millions of women do every night with less honesty, more covertly, in singles bars and honkytonks. They do it on streets surrounded by ‘legal’, ‘legitimate’ porn houses run by ‘legitimate’ businessmen and patronized by ‘legitimate’ consumers paying to observe the act of fornication.
But prostitutes enjoy the unique, traditional status of being bullied by pimps and johns, brutalized and extorted for sex by cops, exploited by lawyers, and of being the ‘product’ passing through the criminal justice system into the prisons-for-women industry.
They’ve never achieved the sanctity of the moral high-ground to get wives, girl-friends, and ‘respectable’ women objects of scorn and outlawed. They’ve never found a reservoir of support to allow them to see those other classes of women outlawed and thrown into jails.
But they probably would if they could.
Inside they’re almost certainly bullies, too, like cops and schoolteachers, and like you and me.
74 years old, a resident of Leavenworth, KS, in an apartment located on the VA campus. Partnered with a black shorthaired cat named Mister Midnight. (1943-2020)
Since April, 2020, this blog is maintained by Jeanne Kasten (See "About" page for further information).
https://sofarfromheaven.com/2020/04/21/au-revoir-old-jules-jack-purcell/
I’m sharing it with you because there’s almost no likelihood you’ll believe it. This lunatic asylum I call my life has so many unexpected twists and turns I won’t even try to guess where it’s going. I’d suggest you try to find some laughs here. You won’t find wisdom. Good luck.
So Far From Heaven 