This is a test
This video above has made the rounds on social media a few times in the past year. It features archival footage from 1981 (ish) of man-on-the-street interviews with Californians getting red-assed about the state’s then-new drunk-driving law, which lowered the legal blood alcohol content for drivers from 0.15% to 0.10% in response to a decade of fatal and socially costly drunk-driving incidents.2 Some quotes (emphasis mine):
[Person 1] It’s kinda getting communist when a fellow can’t even put in a hard day’s work, put in 11, 12 hours a day, and then get in your truck and at least drink one or two beers.
[Person 2] They’re making laws where you can’t drink when you want to, you have to wear a seatbelt when you’re driving, pretty soon we’re going to be a communist country.
You can see the false premise promulgated by American capital at work here. Communism is an economic system, and has nothing to do with whether you’re allowed to (or should, lol) drink and drive. But right-wing operators’ relentless promotion of the idea that economic freedom and personal liberty were inextricably linked had persuaded millions of Americans by the ‘80s that any infringement on the latter was a harbinger of command-and-control-style assault on the former, and vice-versa. Which is how you wind up with people of the opinion that drunk-driving laws are commie bullshit.
I’ll have a more in-depth review of The Big Myth once I finish it. This thing is a damn doorstop, but it’s extremely useful for understanding how the country descended into its present state of late-capitalist disrepair. It was no accident.
💊 This has been Fingers Time Capsule, a new feature spotlighting the weird, wild, and otherwise notable detritus from the annals of American drinking history that I come across in my research and reporting. Check out the previous installation here.
📬 Good post alert
If you see a good post that the Fingers Fam should know about, please send me that good post via email or Instagram DM.
🚫 Dream stories that I am NOT funded to pursue
Billionaires? Not great, as far as I’m concerned. But until such time as we restore the post-war era’s 94% tax rate on the worst capital-hoarders in America, obscene concentrations of unearned wealth will remain in private coffers. If said billionaires choose to launder their reputations philanthropically give back to society by funding no-strings-attached independent reporting grants, your perennially underfunded fearless Fingers editor is going to take a shot at that dough.
I recently applied to one such grant program, which would have allotted me cash in the mid-five-figures to produce ambitious reportage about the labor movement’s intersection with the beverage-alcohol industry. I say “would have” because my ass got summarily rejected, lol. Which, hey, it happens! This was my first application for a reporting grant, and I’m sure I did all sorts of things wrong (if you’re good at grant-proposal writing, I’d be grateful for any advice). So it goes, maybe I’ll get ‘em next time. But in the meantime, here are some of the big, ambitious story pitches I listed in my application:
Why the proposed $24 billion Kroger-Albertsons merger (and other recent consolidations in the vital grocery business) jeopardizes America’s precarious frontline workforce and already-brittle food networks for the benefit of private shareholders, and why our existing regulatory framework is ill-matched to prevent it;
How Barstool Sports and its owner, Dave Portnoy, in particular, are using food and drink ventures like High Noon vodka seltzer and the One Bite Pizza Festival to sanitize their toxic brand of hyper-individualistic reactionary conservatism into more palatable mainstream projects with substantive cultural and economic upside;
What the federal government is (and isn’t) spending taxpayer dollars on to promote climate resilience in California’s wealthy Napa Valley, where the consequences of extreme weather are borne unequally by migrant workers and the winery owners capturing record tasting room fees and bottle prices that employ them;
And so on, and so forth. The regrettable fact of the matter is that to do the deep, nuanced reporting that stories of this size and scope demand, I need a budget, man. FOIA requests, travel expenses, fact-checking… all of that shit adds up! As does the time to pursue leads and sources that may not result in immediate coverage (or any coverage at all.) I am deeply grateful to each and every Friend of Fingers for supporting my work here at the boozeletter, don’t get me wrong. But if there’s a Daddy Boozebucks out there who wants to slice me some unconditional cheddar, it’d sure as hell help the war effort. So, y’know, if you hear of other reporting grants from progressive philanthropies, bang my line.