(This essay originally was published here.)
Allowing for the possible exception of Mick Jagger, we’re all destined to awaken one morning and find that we’ve pole-vaulted past the invisible line in the sand that delineates prevailing fashion.
Whether or not we ever cared about “cool” in the past, from this point forward the choice is summarily withdrawn, and popular culture no longer comforts.
Rather, it jeeringly antagonizes us.
Examples that remind me of my eligibility for social security include the bizarre veneration of AutoTune, a form of compensatory digital wizardry that renders pop music unlistenable (and actual singing into a lost art); the mobility cult of brain-dead Buc-ee’s (why, exactly?); and the lesser-known of the co-prefixed pandemic behavioral waves: cosplay, or the prevalence of a 24-7 preference for pretending to be something, someone and somewhere else to the exclusion of one’s location (and identity) in the real world.
And isn’t AI cosplay on steroids?
And then there is the contemporary speakeasy, which is a full-stop contradiction in terms, although it didn’t stop the Indiana Pacers from announcing the addition of one at Gainbridge Fieldhouse in Indianapolis in 2024.
Perhaps wearing a jock strap (or sports bra) wrapped coquettishly around your head is the secret signal for entry. Better yet, the rules governing the basketball game might revert to those requiring a center jump after each score, just like in the 1920s, seeing as the 1920s and early 30s comprised the last time in American history when the word “speakeasy” could be used non-ironically.
And yet there it is, popping up several times a year, and about as recurringly meaningless as the Instagram page of the downtown whale oil vendor who keeps our municipal street lamps lit.
Me?
Well, I adore dictionaries, seeing as the job of those charged with writing them is to mercilessly filter flagrant inaccuracies in order to get down to a granular level about the actual meaning of words.
Thankfully, Merriam Webster performs precisely this task for speakeasy, one of the most abused words in the entirety of the American English language.
Speakeasy (noun)
»speak·easy ˈspēk-ˌē-zē (plural: speakeasies)
A place where alcoholic beverages are illegally sold; specifically: such a place during the period of prohibition in the U.S.
Synonyms provided include alehouse, tavern and dive; while familiar, and periodically prone to misuse (please don’t get me started on contemporary “dive” bars, another self-anointed contradiction), there is nothing about these terms that suggest the defining characteristic of a speakeasy, which is its illegality.
Much closer to the mark is “blind pig” (sometimes blind tiger), the back story of which establishes a suitable link with illicitness in the sense that if alcohol cannot be legally sold, tickets can legally be vended for folks to come inside and see the blind pig — and while there, receive free drinks after the viewing.
Just remember that no matter how many free drinks you consume, the pig still can’t see you.
Hence the modern conundrum, signaling the dictionary’s lament as it is subjected to torture by the clueless. The theatrical and imagined speakeasy imagery, which is all that any of us can possibly grasp, because the people who actually experienced speakeasies during Prohibition are long since dead, is desirable because it conjures the sort of cosplay illusion/delusion so much in vogue nowadays.
However, an actual speakeasy today, just as it was during Prohibition, must be illegal for it to be a speakeasy, and when deprived of this critical feature by virtue of pragmatic business principles (read: the fear of being raided, shut down and prosecuted), the very same selfie-driven showiness that invariably leads to TikTok immersion is sacrificed.
Ergo, any modern-day speakeasy inviting desperate local news channels to dress their reporters like Al Capone, all the better to be served martinis by artfully costumed flappers, is by definition not a speakeasy at all.
Rather, it is a marketing concept, although I’ll allow for an exception: if the owner is in fact bribing regulatory authorities to ignore illegal alcohol sales, then an identification as speakeasy might still be allowable. But so long as the state’s license hangs on yonder wall, a speakeasy you are not.
Yes, I know. I’m so very out of touch.
Speakeasies are cute, and they’re fun, and we can have dress-up parties; the bookshelf slides into the wall or Maxwell Smart drops through the bottom of a phone booth, and just because modern computing places the entire history of human knowledge into a space no bigger than a quart bottle of bathtub gin (you’re probably not drinking any of THAT these days, either) we’re perfectly free to ignore these many facts and choose instead to invent fairy tales from whole cloth, whether mythologizing a booze business or an self-interested oligarch.
NEWS FLASH: I just now popped the cap on a vintage bottle of white pastry sour stout brewed with spices used by the Inuit to cure whale blubber jerky (then filtered through salty pebbles from the Yucatan) — and I poured it straight down the drain even though the sewer department advises against it. New Glarus Spotted Cow? Ah, yes. Gimme. That’s far better for breakfast on a Sunday morning while writing about speakeasies.
Here’s the coda. You’re advised to take notes; there will be a test.
Contemporary speakeasy-envy annoys me aesthetically, pervasively and on its own merits, but I’d probably be far more conducive to the idea if I thought any of the rampant make-believe might lead by hail-Mary osmosis to a greater understanding of Prohibition, and how the mindset that brought us this failed experiment lives on, well into the faux speakeasy era of the present.
Prohibitionism actually isn’t a simplistic blue vs. red sort of dichotomy; rather, the prohibitionist’s rationale cuts across the ideologies. So fine, cosplay the whole Disney-fed speakeasy thing if you really must, but then please read a damn book and be reminded of what words meant back when words had genuine meaning.
My reading suggestion is this: The War on Alcohol: Prohibition and the Rise of the American State by Lisa McGirr, in which the author establishes that America’s entry into World War I hastened Prohibition’s arrival. I mention the war because we experienced a similar prohibitionist sentiment during the COVID pandemic; there were people seriously advocating for bans on alcohol in 2020, and for reasons paralleling those oozing to the surface during Woodrow Wilson’s administration.
During WWI, a rigid diktat of sobriety — previously mandated by reason of Protestant fundamentalism, anti-immigrant sentiment and pure racism — suddenly merged with teetotalism as a manifestation of patriotic imperatives in wartime, and BOOM … the foundations of greater government intrusion in our lives became established for the first time, and once given a platform, was expanded in all directions during the decades to come.
And yes, the playbook for the War on Drugs (not that excellent band that somehow functions without AutoTune) was written with speakeasies in mind, back when the stakes were real, and “escapism” meant avoiding jail time, not searching for the Tuesday evening’s superhero costume, which differs from Sunday’s.
Enjoy your Blind Pachyderm cocktails. Thanks for reading. Perhaps it is time for a consciousness-deadening dram or three of whale blubber sour, maybe with a drop or two of purple food coloring to enhance the social media posts from the “illegal” dispensary next to the coal bin where we’re partying like it’s 1925.
Because satire is the last subterranean refuge for scoundrels like me, and you can bet your last Dogecoin that I’ll inhabit it.
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“Edibles & Potables” is Food & Dining Magazine’s Sunday slot for news and views that range beyond our customary metropolitan Louisville coverage area, as intended to be food (and drink) for thought.
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