"All the President's Men" meant one thing in the 1970s and an absurdly different one in 2025

I watched "All the President's Men" on TCM Monday night, and not for the first time. A fantastic political thriller in which the good guys win.

In 2025 Trumplandia, "All the President's Men" seems, well, how do I say this? Quaint? Outdated? Just more Boomer nostalgia?

Yet, the GOP's 1970s illegal activities against the Democrats were both real and disgusting. 

But when compared with Trump's 2025 crimes against America, well, the old depredation looks mild.

Nixon and pals took great pains to cover up their misdeeds. All the lying tied them in knots of denial. They couldn't keep it quiet because real journalists from real newspapers and networks kept doing their jobs. And elected Democrats AND especially Republicans remembered their oaths of office.

The difference with Trump and his MAGA minions? They tell us their misdeeds and do them openly. Trump and Musk brag about them. Their backers spent millions outlining their plans in Project 2025. It was all there for us to read. Journalists were not around to awaken the slumbering multitudes. The New York Times could not do it alone. The Washington Post was a lost cause. Metropolitan dailies had been run into the ground by hedge fund babies. And the GOP was not in thrall to "Fearless Leader."

I was a young man of 21 when the Watergate break-in happened. That November was the first time I voted in national elections at a little church on Boston's Beacon Hill. I voted for McGovern as did many in Massachusetts that day. 

Fat lot of good it did us. Draft-age men were turning out to vote for The Peace Candidate in the hopes that this rural Dem from the West would stop feeding us into the Vietnam meat-grinder. It was odd that this heroic World War 2 veteran would be the peacenik on the ticket but that was the case. Nixon served but he wasn't piloting a B-24 bomber dodging flak and Messerschmitts over Germany. In ATPM, the 1972 elections play out in the background on TV screens.  During that campaign, Nixon worked behind the scenes to manipulate the Paris Peace Talks. His skullduggery extended the war.

But Nixon and his henchmen came tumbling down, thanks to media and the actions of Democrats and Republicans in Congress. This didn't cause us to run for Congress but it did cause many of us to go into journalism. Up-and-coming Woodwards and Bernsteins were everywhere. 

I was an English major during my years at UF but I did take a journalism course and worked for UF Information Services and The Independent Florida Alligator student paper. We knew that the truth could bring down warmongers and slimy political operatives

But America is a big place and soon we learned that the whims of the populace are unpredictable. And here we are now. Old, disabled, and stunned. That describes me. 

But Americans are waking up and speaking out. We donated to Josh Weil, the Democrat running for the House in Florida District 6, a post held previously by a Trump flunky. We donated to the Democratic Party's campaign to stymie Trump's Project 2025 rampage. 

I will not shop on Amazon on Feb. 28 because of Bezos's collaboration with Trump (damn I've spent a lot of money on Amazon). Other businesses are being boycotted for the day. Money is what MAGA understands so hit 'em where it hurts.

Finn Murphy’s “Rocky Mountain High” may give you a “Hemp Space” buzz

“Rocky Mountain High” reminds us of how we sat around a campfire everybody getting high on Colorado in the summer of ’72. John Denver’s melodic version of Aspen and the Roaring Fork Valley. Longhairs from all over stoned on this beautiful slice of paradise. I was there, a traveler from flat, muggy Florida. The air was sweet. So were the sights. The Rainbow Family gathered a few mountain ranges over. Longhairs clogged interstate on-ramps. Meanwhile, our parents’ generation was all in a dither, nervous about drugs and sex and rock’n’roll, nervous about the fate of their offspring.

We got jobs, married, and had kids that don’t listen to us. The marijuana that was such forbidden fruit then is now available at your corner dispensary in Colorado and many other states that aren’t Wyoming. The other cannabis sativa, hemp, grew into a commodity akin to oil, gas, and coal, subject to the same boom-and-bust cycles. Guys who looked like hedge-fund managers (they were) began showing up at farms along the Front Range asking where all the hemp was and did the farmers have any for sale?

If the present situation seems ripe for dark comedy, Finn Murphy spells it out in “Rocky Mountain High: A Tale of Boom and Bust in the New Wild West.” Murphy’s a Boomer, an enterprising capitalist and Ivy League grad from Connecticut. He sees hemp as they new big thing and moves to Boulder County, buys a 36-acre spread, and strolls out in his Wall Street suit to greet his rural neighbors.

It didn’t go well. There are some high times to celebrate but, as the reader knows from the subtitle, both boom and bust await Mr. Murphy and his colleagues in “The Hemp Space,” the countercultural term for this new business.

First, the boom. Hemp is a cannabis product that cannot register more than 0.3% of THC, so says the Colorado Department of Agriculture (and the one in Wyoming). The CDA inspects your crops, makes sure that you are not growing smokeable marijuana because that’s a whole other thing. That’s being grown a few fields over. Hemp is made into CBD among other products. CBD was a thing in the 2010s, the cure for every Boomer’s aching joints. CBD stores popped up on every corner. Many of us bought the overpriced oils, put drops under our tongues, rubbed it on aging body parts, and eagerly awaited the cure.

Murphy saw the promise of legal hemp. Over the decades, he had birthed and sold many businesses, some in areas he knew little about. In the book, he leads us through his decision-making process and into the growing, harvesting, and selling of the product. He thought the harvesting end would be the most lucrative. He told his neighbors (he calls them the “Weedwhackers” – and they shall remain nameless) he would harvest their crop and since nobody knew the costs of such a venture, agreed to settle up when the work was done.

Murphy spends way too much time telling us about the costs of this enterprise. But it is instructional. Farmers need farm implements to harvest fields of five-foot hemp trees. Murphy buys three big hoophouses in which to dry the hemp. They are $10,000 each. He later has to buy thousands of dollars of tools and equipment to erect the hoophouses. He spends more than the $150,000 he budgeted for equipment on bucking and trimming machines, fans, generators, and humidifiers. He hired a band of trimmigrants to do the tough and sticky work.

But it’s the author’s self-effacing humor and eye for life’s strange contradictions that kept me reading. He also knows how to keep the reader turning the page. He concludes the “Start Me Up” chapter this way:

We’d all be rich and happy. We agreed then and there on handshakes to go forward, and the room was awash with good fellowship and excitement.

My thought: This is really going to be bad, isn’t it?

And it was. Nobody died but the “fellowship” didn’t last.

Murphy’s first book is “The Long Haul,” also by Norton. It’s about his foray into the long-haul trucking business.

For information on the Wyoming “Hemp Space,” go to the Wyoming Hemp Association.

Remembering The Great 1972 Rainbow Family Scare in Colorado

The Colorado Sun reposted this piece by Jason Blevins in the Outsider newsletter:

The Rainbow Gathering of the Tribes plans to return to Colorado this summer to celebrate its 50th anniversary. The weeks-long confab that draws tens of thousands of hippie campers to public lands announced this week that the national gathering of possibly 30,000 would be returning to Colorado. 

The group’s national bacchanal was last in Colorado in 2006, with about 10,000 people camping on Forest Service land in north Routt County outside Steamboat Springs. Before that, they were 19,000-strong outside Paonia in 1992. The first national gathering was near Granby in 1972. 

My girlfriend Sharon and I hitched through Colorado during the summer of ’72. We weren’t card-carrying members of the Rainbow Family but your average observer couldn’t tell. My hair was long, my jeans scruffy. Sharon wore braids, a halter top, and jeans that were definitely not scruffy.

We wondered why we got flipped off as we stood with our thumbs out on the side of the road. We were both just good-natured college dropouts on a spree. Why don’t people like us?

You dirty hippies!

I took a shower yesterday.

Me too.

Can’t please some people.

When we arrived in Denver, we found out about the Rainbow Family Gathering of Tribes soon to descend on Colorado. The citizenry was up in arms about hordes of longhairs in scruffy jeans invading their mountains. The interlopers allegedly were going to smoke lots of illegal weed the quality of which would pale in comparison with the mind-blowing cannabis now grown all over Colorado and sold legally at your corner dispensary. Colorado newspapers raised the alarm that Rainbow Family members were going to trip on LSD, now the favorite micro-dosing drug of the techie who built your VR headset. The citizenry feared that Rainbowites on magic mushrooms might swarm their city, recruiting Colorado young people to psilocybin. Thing is, in the last CO election cycle, psilocybin was decriminalized by your grandmother’s pickleball group in Longmont.

My, my.

Colorado was a different place in 1972. My Uncle Bill sold insurance and Aunt Mary played bridge with her pals every week. They voted for Republicans and cursed hippies. Thing is, when Sharon and I turned up on their front porch in Denver, they took us in, fed us, and housed us -- in separate rooms, of course. We hung out with my cousins. Uncle Bill wouldn’t let them go full-hippie but they smoked pot with us anyway. Went with the cousins to Elitch’s Amusement Park, the old one in West Denver. We played miniature golf and drank a lot of 3.2 Coors. Went to a Red Rocks concert. Their friends didn’t care that we were dirty hippies as we were all young together, having fun. On the Fourth of July, we traveled up to Estes Park to watch fireworks from a friend’s lofty cabin.

Sharon and I eventually hit the road for points west. Many adventures along the way. Saw the sights. Swam in the Pacific Ocean. Went to some concerts. Met a lot of cool people. Visited a high school pal at Berkeley. At summer’s end, we hitched to Boston where we lived and worked for awhile. The relationship ended and I headed back to Florida, worked and went back to school.

Never really got close that summer to Strawberry Lake near Granby where the Rainbow Family was rocking out. They were doing their thing. Now their kids and grandkids are coming back to Colorado to rile the populace. I’m old enough now to curse the damn hippies but I know better. Besides, I live in Wyoming, the live-and-let-live-state. The Rainbow Family has gathered three times in Wyoming. Not sure about any casualties. It’s 2022 but all the good drugs are still illegal in The Equality State. While here, you will have to buy your weed from some shady guy on the street corner. Bring your own is the best bet. WYO is flanked by pot-friendly states Colorado and Montana.

According to the Marijuana Policy Project:

Wyoming is one of just a few states that continues to criminalize adults and patients for possessing and using cannabis.

My guess is that the Rainbow Family will choose any one of the weed-friendly states for future get-togethers. Besides the two already mentioned: California, Washington, Oregon, New Mexico, Arizona. Millions of acres of forestland await you. Be careful with fires, though, as it doesn’t take much to start a conflagration. Edibles are a better choice.

Happy trails.