Quite a few horrible things have happened this year. You could probably say that every December, but in 2011 all the bad stuff seems to have had a gigantic, momentous feel about it.

We started the year with three quarters of Queensland being declared a disaster zone and we followed the action on youtube. A month or so later Christchurch, one of the world’s most beautiful cities, was flattened by earthquake.

And then, the unimaginable horror and biblical-scale devastation of the Japan Tsunami, the effects of which will be felt for decades to come as one of the world’s biggest economies struggles to recover; and don’t forget Japan’s been technically insolvent for years now. The pro- and anti-nuclear lobbies have been working overtime ever since, trying to find new ways to write “whither nuclear?” and coming up with evidence from Fukushima that their position is the right, and only, one to hold.

Which is the way of things in this second decade of what was always supposed to be a magical century (where’s my jetpack???). There are only two ways to look at anything, it seems: my way, and the wrong way. There is no need to listen to, or even acknowledge, another’s point of view once you can point to their employer or their upbringing or their sex and hurl it back at them as “bias”.

Write about Climate Change and you are, on the one hand, a Green fascist socialist warmenist, or on the other, in the pocket of Big Coal and a shill for the LNP.

Write about the Carbon Tax and the same applies.

Write about race or religion or Gay Marriage and you’re either a PC leftard or some kind of vile religious bigot.

Freedom of speech, expression and information have been the most important argument going around this year but were reduced, like everything else, to partisan squawking and polemic.

Andrew Bolt was found to have breached the Racial Discrimination Act and decried, as usual without a scintilla of irony, from the front page of the Herald Sun that he was being gagged.

Loons from Left, Right and Pluto managed to confuse Freedom Of Speech with Freedom From Criticism, to wit: Sophie Mirabella standing with a bunch of people hurling abuse at Anthony Abanese and, when he responded, shrieking that he was stifling their God-given rights.

Opinion has become fact has become a plantation of astro-turf, vested interests and opaque funding models.

Which (the funding model thing, not the vested interests thing) brings us to our message for this month.

We never thought it was going to be easy self-publishing a totally independent magazine and bringing it to a larger audience. We never kidded ourselves that Twitter-love would instantly, magically, translate into piles of cash, we really didn’t.

We did like to think, however, that quality such as what you’re holding in your hands right now, would somehow walk off the shelves and bring us and our writers the recognition we deserve and enough income to keep going.

We may, perhaps, have been a little naive. But it’s not over yet.

We have exactly NO marketing budget; we rely on word of mouth, which is where you come in. We really really really need you, if you like the Tribune, to make lots of words come from your mouths about how much you like it and how much everyone else would like it too.

If you work somewhere in the real media, give us a plug, we do great interviews and don’t say “fuck” on air very often, except in a helpful and contextual way.

If you work for, or own, a business that wants to be seen by the kind of reader we attract, perhaps an inside-front page ad would do nicely at very reasonable rates thank you very much...

We don’t need much more income to get over that “shall we keep going” line”, but a thousand bucks may as well be a million when you don’t have it.

Being believers in and a part of the free-market we accept that if nobody wants to buy your widgets, well, you’re outta business. But we have very nice widgets and we just know that if enough people, with your help, can feel the quality of our widgets, we can make it.

Enough with the Oliver Twist and our deepest apologies for all the moaning.

Of course there were less-than-perfect things about him, he was a human being. It didn’t take long, though, for worthy souls worldwide to remind us, long and loud and filled with hatred and glee, that he supported the invasion of Iraq and that meant he agreed with Bush and Blair so total bastard, right, kids?

Whatever his belief, whatever his argument, his prose was some of the best you will ever read. Whether slashing at the untouchable hypocrisy of Mother Theresa or writing about his own impending death, or even just flogging the dead horse of The Church Has Done Bad Things, he dragged you in and entranced you and, if you’ve ever fancied yourself as a writer, left you feeling pale and inadequate.

Vale, Hitch, a writer for the ages. Whatever that means.

On the night we have to go to press and are supposed to be doing one last proofread and putting another issue to bed with the clinking of champagne glasses, Vaclav Havel dies.

That a playwright can become president of a liberated ex-communist dictatorship gives one a tiny bit of hope that mankind, despite its best efforts to prove otherwise, has some good points and, more importantly, a future.

“... though I have a presence in many places, I don’t really have a firm, predestined place anywhere.” ~ Václav Havel, (1936-2011) Disturbing the Peace

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Oh, and just to prove that we are not totally full of shit, huge congratulations and not inconsiderable envy to Lois Jessop who won the iPad2, drawn on Sunday 19th December.

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