I'm a gal who loves a good themed pub, especially one that encourages you to dress up like Bonnie Parker and partake in illicit liquor drinking. So I was all over the trend for speakeasies in London, my favorite being the Evans & Peele Detective agency (I had THE most fun with a cracking bunch of gals who were totally into the vibe). Its all decked out in period clobber, and you have to get your story straight for the Detective before you get invited through. EPIC.
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Being the tedious know-it-all that I am I did have an irritating conversation with a douchebag on the tube on the way back where I had to correct him on a few 'facts'. Finding out that we'd just visited a speakeasy he asked me if it was a 'real' one. What? A 'real' speakeasy? In the UK, where we do not and never have had prohibition? No. No it was not. And while I'm at it - prohibition in the US was 1920-1933, so dressing up like Rita Haworth also shows a distressing lack of historical accuracy (oh yeah - I'm super fun on a night out). Its like dressing up as Ronald Reagan for a Lindy-hop.
I'm not bothered if people don't know or care about this stuff, it just worries me a bit that drinking in a US-themed bar leads Brits to start making up a new history for good ol' blighty. The little stories that are pushed into our peepers from US media sources are such lovely little vivid snapshots we have a tendency to push our own, less brightly-coloured history out of our lug holes.
It can be tough, though. Watching western movies its hard to get your head round the fact that all the fighting and taking land from the native people is taking place over a period of about 300 years, during which time, in the UK we were putting out a fucking big fire in London, watching plays with Willy Shakespeare, had a shit-ton of wars with the rest of Europe (and the rest of the UK) and said 'howdy' to Beethoven, Queen Victoria, Napoleon and Charles Darwin. Oh yeah, and those cowboys were settlers from Europe and Russia.
US history is intrinsically linked with the rest of the world, but I guess taking these snippets from popular culture, out of a wider context (that American kids are taught, BTW, for the most part), all helps to bolster the unreal, over-narrated picture of the US that most of us have. These perfect little gobbets (its a literary term - look it up) highlight the brave and the bold and distract us from the awkward and the ugly.
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As a young country America has been able to create its own brand based on some strong principles from the founding fathers (or, at least, reportedly from the founding fathers - again, giving their societal principles a strong heritage is all part of brand America), and the brand is held up by solid stories with a linear narrative. There is a hero (who is either handsome, brave, iconic or all three), a clear villain (no shades of grey here), and a moral. Doesn't that make some of these potentially apocryphal stories almost allegorical? I might be wiggling off on a tangent, but I guess it would have been helpful during the early stages of the US to be able to orally pass on why our forefathers came to this land and why we should be grateful/fight on/preserve their ideals at a time when people couldn't read/were living in fucking squalor/were at war? And oral tales of origins are a very Native American thing, so perhaps the early settlers actually borrowed that approach? Maybe?
This waffle has all gone a bit conjectural, but the history behind the standard narrative is very
interesting. For example, getting back to the speakeasies, it has been suggested that the prohibition era was ushered in to destroy the livelihoods of the German immigrant brewers a little way into the first world war. It could be bollocks, but its one of those connections with Europe and the immigrant origins of the US that I think are important. Plus, it makes for a fun discussion on a pissy night with new chums in a REAL speakeasy. Doesn't it?? Sadly, no.
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