It is the end of the year and many organizations, from mainline journalistic to individual folks just running a blog, are asking for money.

I am not. This is not because I am in any way superior to the folks who are asking for money. I am a fan of money, and through a series of circumstances that don't reflect any particular cleverness on my part, my family and I are well cared for. So I am not.

I am well aware of the problem outlined in the 2020 Current Affairs essay by Nathan Robinson, The Truth Is Paywalled But The Lies Are Free. The lies are not so much free as they are paid for by other folks with an agenda. One of the great dodges of the policy world is the Think Tank, a bunch of folks paid to advocate and argue for a particular agenda. And because they are paid by the Thinky Tank backers, they can offer all manner of op-ed and policy paper and "report" for "free." This same principle applies to propaganda shops set up to mimic legitimate journalism. These tricks are available to the whole political spectrum, but some parts of the spectrum are far more well-funded than others. The Curmudgucation Institute is not very well funded and has a minimal staff, and that's just fine.

Fact remains that people who collect and research and write and publish ideas and arguments need food, clothing and shelter like anyone else. 

Some outlets do pay me for my work, and I accept that deal because A) they ought to and B) I'm not going to "compete" with other writers by working for $0.00. Substack lets people pledge to pay to subscribe, and it is not-inconsiderable ego boost for me to see those pledges. But I got into this because I wanted to share certain ideas and argue for things I care about and get the word out to as many people as I could in as many ways as I could. Also, when I work for pay, I feel an obligation to maintain a certain level of professionalism and grown-up work. But at the mother ship, the roots from which the rest of my work grew, I started out just wanting to vent, and I am happy to maintain that freedom.

The freedom, for instance, to meander and digress.

Let me get to the "but." 

I am committed to running this space for free, but I am able to do that because I benefit from certain privileges which others do not enjoy. For some folks, this is an important, even a main, source of income and support. And many of these folks are just so excellent and important as writers and analysts and observers (and many of them are not so comfortable passing the hat).

So my ask this New Year is this-- if you have ever had an urge to send money my way, I ask that you transfer that urge to someone whose work you appreciate and who has, however shyly or boldly, held their hat out. Plunk down some bucks for the work that you value and that you want to see staying in the world.

We make the world a better place by holding up and supporting the people who are doing the work that we value. Share the lift and the light. And have a happy New Year! 

The Institute main office. (Not shown: Victrola and tuba)

The subject of the day is marijuana, so let’s indulge in a little nostalgia. Do you remember the first time you smoked a joint?

I do, and that is part of the problem with pot. The act of smoking pot back in the day, when it was illegal, was such a special event that you can remember who you did it with and what the whole “getting high” thing felt like. If you’re my age, you can probably even remember the hopes and dreams for pot – with rock and roll music and something called “free love,” which was neither free nor love, would somehow combine to change the world.

Well, I haven’t smoked marijuana for fifty years. I’ve seen the world change, but not in the way that my 20- self expected. The results of the vote on November 5 should be enough to confirm that. You’ve read all the analysis about why people voted for Donald Trump – they felt forgotten, they were angry, they wanted to get back at the libs…on and on the reasons go, and we know to whom those reasons apply.

But what about the perplexing strength of the vote Trump received in urban America and among young people and those with college educations, especially among white voters? His numbers went up in that cohort of our fellow citizens and in those unlikely areas. What accounts for that part of Trump’s vote in 2024?

Post-election poll results have shown what can only be described as jaw-dropping cognitive dissonance in the voting public. In sector after sector, from women to young people to Black people to Hispanics, voters were seen to have voted against their own interests by marking their ballots for Trump. Some analysts have said those voters made the difference in battleground states.

Here's my question: how many of those people were pot smokers? What if part of being mellow isn’t so wonderful? What if being mellow has the side effect of just not caring very much about who’s running things in far away Washington D.C.?

I looked up the battleground states Kamala Harris lost. In every battleground state – Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin – marijuana is either completely legal or decriminalized to one degree or another. In North Carolina, up to 1.5 ounces is decriminalized. In Pennsylvania, it’s decriminalized by jurisdiction. Every jurisdiction where the Democratic vote went down from Biden’s totals in 2020 had decriminalized marijuana. The same in Georgia – marijuana is decriminalized in Atlanta, Fulton County, Savannah, Macon, all places where the Democratic vote was down from 2020 totals. In Wisconsin, it’s decriminalized in the Democratic strongholds of Milwaukee and Madison. In Arizona, Nevada, and Michigan, possession for recreational use is completely legal.

This is an excerpt from my weekly Salon column. To read the rest of the column, go here:

Feeling mellow, man

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Here’s the problem with taking power: It’s up to you to run the thing that you are taking over. That is what Donald Trump and his followers and hangers on and cronies and fellow travelers face as we tick off the days until January 20. It isn’t even Day One yet, with Trump’s massively advertised plan to turn everything inside out with the stroke of his pen on a series of executive orders, and already the swamp-weasels are chewing on each other’s tails.

Have you been watching whatever is going on with Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy? The two of them, having billionaire-bulldozed their way into Trump’s inner circle, have discovered that it’s filled with fools and ignoramuses. And oh, my goodness! Who’s that over there in the mirror? Why it’s us!

It seems that the two billionaire geniuses failed to notify Stephen Miller and Steve Bannon and the MAGA faithful of their plan to continue running their own personal Department of Immigration for the Following People. We’re talking here of the H-1B visa program which allows employers to hire skilled foreign workers, supposedly when their skills are not available in the American workforce. According to CNN, Musk’s Tesla corporation has sought and received permission to hire more than 2,000 foreign workers under the H-1B program, and so have two of his other businesses, X and Neuralink. According to the Department of Labor, in 2023 alone, Trump requested and received H-2B visas for non-skilled workers that included seven hotel desk clerks, 17 housekeeping cleaners, 53 waiters and waitresses, 24 cooks, five first-line supervisors of food preparation and serving workers, and five bartenders.

Just couldn’t find any locals in Florida to change beds, swab out toilets, check-in guests, and prepare rubber chicken dinners at Mar-a-Lago.

So, Musk is all in with the H-1B program, posting this on X on Friday: “The reason I’m in America along with so many critical people who built SpaceX, Tesla, and hundreds of other companies that made America strong is H1B. Take a big step back and FUCK YOURSELF in the face. I will go to war on this issue the likes of which you cannot possibly comprehend.”

Let’s leave aside for the moment Musk’s plagiaristic usage of Trumpian “likes of which” language and his obvious elitist contempt for those attempting to read what he wrote and have a look at the fallout.

Miller and Bannon and Laura Loomer and a rather large smattering of what passes for the MAGA intelligentsia acted dumbstruck. What happened to what we might call “the whole immigration thing?” The idea that it’s time to “close the borders” and “hire American” and “America First” and practically every other slogan Trump ran on?

Trash heap of history, apparently.

So, now we know they’re against immigration but for it when it comes to exploiting low skilled and highly skilled foreign workers both for their personal companies and the companies of their cronies. What else is on the menu?

They’re against shipping jobs off to Mexico and Indonesia and India and Pakistan except when their friends own the companies doing the out-sourcing. They’re against vaccinations except for themselves and their children. They’re against the NIH and egghead scientists except when they come down with diseases like pancreatic cancer for which there are now designer mRNA vaccines that can be customized for individual patients who can afford them. They’re against women in combat until they need female soldiers to question and search female prisoners of war and gain intelligence from women in Muslim countries who are forbidden from even speaking with a man who is not their husband.

And of course they’re against abortion, except when an inconvenient pregnancy crops up in their own lives. Take for example arch-conservative Congressman Scott DesJarlais of Tennessee, who pressured his mistress to get an abortion and arranged and paid for two abortions for his wife, according to transcripts from his divorce proceedings…from the wife who had the two abortions.

It's only the beginning. Just wait until Trump gets going on “drill, baby, drill” on public lands. There will be whining and pissing and moaning and even lawsuits from right wing billionaires whose zillion dollar ranches back up on national forests and public grazing lands. Trump’s plans to cancel tax credits for electric cars and solar panels are already running up against…you guessed it…Elon Musk, who sells electric cars and batteries that store power produced by home solar panels.

The entire Trump plan for his second presidency is based on cancelling fairness – in employment, college admissions, distribution of funds for disaster relief and basic programs like agriculture subsidies, school breakfasts and lunches, healthcare, and that’s just for starters. They’ve got Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security in their gunsights, too.

What happens when fairness goes out the door? Why, it’s replaced with cronyism, payoffs, nepotism, corruption right up to and including bribery and blackmail. Remember how Trump burned through cabinet secretary scandals in the opening months and years of his first term? Buckle your seatbelts. The crew he has nominated this time are a whole new category of horror-story.

We’re in for quite a ride.

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The man entering had shoulders that touched both door jambs as he passed into the room. His face was the size of a catcher’s mitt, pitted and creased and polished dark at the cheekbones from taking punches, his tiny eyes like black seeds buried in flesh. They called him Roast Beef.

“Hey, Beef,” said a skinny guy with weak chin and an oiled pompadour.

The big man’s voice was surprisingly high pitched. “You seen Anthony?”

Pompadour gave a shrug and moved to one side as a slight figure wearing red canvas slides slipstreamed behind the big man, smiling, eyes swiveling around the room. A voice called out, “Switch! Over here!”

Switch made his way through the crowd. A hand reached out. Switch ignored it and sat down next to a squat man with thick arms who compensated for his thinning hair with an unconvincing combover.

There was a loud rap on a table at the front of the room. A swarthy man whose large knuckles showed signs of having been broken more than once rapped the table again and spoke loudly: “Welcome to Cell Block B’s nightly meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous. My name is Larry, and I’m an alcoholic.”

“Hello, Larry,” the room chorused without much enthusiasm.

“Please take your seats.” He called out to a man seated in the back, “Samuel, will you please read the open meeting statement?”

Samuel, nearing 80 and bent nearly double at the waist by arthritis, stood slowly, holding a sheet of paper in a plastic sleeve in his painfully crumpled right hand: “This is an open meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous. We are glad you are all here – especially newcomers. In keeping with our singleness of purpose and our Third Tradition which states that ‘The only requirement for A.A. membership is a desire to stop drinking,’ we ask that all who participate confine their discussion to their problems with alcohol.”

“Beansie, will you give us the Serenity Prayer?”

The squat man with the combover stood as the entire room intoned the prayer’s words with him: “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.”

He sat down, glancing at the guard who stood in the corner checking names off a list on a clipboard. He reached the bottom and called out to the room, “Anybody seen Anthony?”

A voice in the back said, “He’s in the clinic. Fell down and broke his knee.”

Laughter rippled through the room.

The guard started for the door. “I’m going to be right outside. Any fucking around, and every one of you is in lockdown, got it?”

As he turned to leave, a guy in the back shot him the finger. The guard closed the door behind himself, and the room went silent.

Larry glanced down at a sheet of instructions on the table before him. “We’re going to pass on reading the steps and go straight to our speaker for today. Johnny, you want to come up here and take a seat?”

Johnny Machine, 35, beginning to go gray at the temples and skinny as a walking stick, stood and walked to the front of the room and sat down behind the table.

“Hello, my name is John and I’m an alcoholic,” he said with a barely suppressed smile.

“Hello, John!” someone called out from the back of the room. A guy with a crewcut sitting in the same row told him to zip it.

“I know most of youse need to be here if you want a chance at parole. That don’t matter. I know I said it before, but I’m gonna say it again anyway. AA ain’t just about the booze. It’s about life, right?”

A few guys nodded slowly. One guy let out a fart so loud, it got a laugh and a punch in the shoulder.

“I did some stupid shit when I was drinkin,” Johnny said. “I did even more stupid shit when I was flat-out drunk. But the stupidest thing I ever done, I was stone cold sober, right, Beansie?’

Towards the back of the room, Beansie acknowledged his friend with a nod.

“Dumb fucker that I am, it was my idea to rob a bar in the Village in the middle of a blizzard on Christmas Eve. Wearing Santa suits. That was my idea too. What wasn’t my idea was gettin’ caught.”

Johnny leaned against the back of the chair, which like every other chair in the room, was fixed to the concrete floor with a 3/8^th inch bolt, its nut filed smooth so it could not be removed except by drilling out the bolt.

“I gotta back up. We got caught twice that night, first by Vincent ‘The Chin’ Gigante, to whom I owed some money.”

“Tell ‘em how much you owed Chin, Johnny!” Beansie called out.

“It was two grand, but when you’re into the Chin, it coulda been a C-note. Doesn’t matter how much you owe, it’s gonna hurt, you don’t pay up. Anyway, Chin saw us walkin’ down the street, yanked us into his club, and he was about to turn loose Tony the Hammer on me when I told him we were on the way to take off the Roadhouse on Seventh Avenue. He asked me what the fuck we were doin’ in Santa suits, and I told him they was our disguises. You coulda heard him up on 14^th Street, he was laughin’ so hard. ‘This I gotta see,’ Chin says. He even drove us over to Grove Street. The Chin and Tony sat in the car on Bleecker and watched us cross Seventh Avenue and walk into the Roadhouse.”

“In our fuckin’ Santa suits,” called Beansie, waving a hand in the air.

“You got that right. Me and Beansie walk through the door, and it’s so crowded, we could barely move, music blasting from about six speakers, people dancin’ between the tables, partying like it was fuckin’ New Years Eve. We had a shotgun in this fuckin’ bag Beansie was carryin’ and reached in and took it out and waved it over my head and yelled, ‘This is a fuckin’ stick up! Everybody on the floor!’ Nobody could hear us over the music, so I shot out this big fuckin’ speaker near the bar, there was a couple of pops and the music stopped, and I racked the gun and shot out the back bar and yelled, ‘this is a stick up’ again and waved the gun around the room, and everybody dove for the floor.”

Most of the guys at the meeting were new and had never heard the Christmas Eve story before, and Johnny had their full attention now.

“Beansie was goin’ around grabbin’ wallets and purses and jewelry and watches and shoving them in the sack. I went up to the bar and pointed the shotgun at the bartender. I didn’t even have to say the words, and he was emptying the register and shovin’ bills across the bar. I turned around to grab Beansie and split when I feel this hard jab right in my crotch, and I hear a voice I recognized. ‘Hey, Machine. That’s my service revolver you’re feeling down there below your waist. How are they hanging?’ It was this cop who drank in bars around the Village, the Lion’s Head, the Corner Bistro, obviously the Roadhouse. He was the NYPD’s chief hostage negotiator. I froze.”

“‘Put the gun on the floor,’ he says, ‘Slowly. That fuckin’ thing goes off and I’ll shoot off your balls one at a time.’ I did what he said. I look at Beansie. He’s headin’ for the door. The cop yells at him, ‘I can see you behind that fake fuckin’ beard, Beansie. If I have to come after you, I’ll get the DA to tag a charge with five extra years on your indictment.’ Beansie stops. I’m standin’ there with my arms over my head, and for the life of me, Beansie looked like fuckin’ Santa Claus with that sack over his shoulder. The whole thing lasted, maybe, three minutes.”

Johnny looked around the low-ceilinged room. Two dozen or so rapt faces looked back at him. He smiled.

“It was at that very moment God gave me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,” Johnny said to uproarious laughter. “A .38 in the nuts will do that to you.”

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