14 December 2015 – We were so fortunate this week. Instead of our usual show, we decided to invite some other lefty podcasters to join us and we just opened it cup for a free-range discussion. JM Bell, of The LEFT Show, was with us from Utah along with Travis Rosen and Rachel Hutcheson, from Irreverent Testimony. The LEFT Show and Irreverent Testimony are both podcasts I never miss and are wildly different from one another. Please check them out as they are examples of smart, well-informed and funny people doing good work.
21 November 2015 (for 16 November show) – I should begin by apologizing for not having posted here this past Monday. My family experienced a serious (and ongoing) family emergency. My husband and I are fine but I’m reading everything I can find on traumatic brain injury so that I can be of assistance to other family members. As we all learned again this week, be it via media or in person, life can be completely and utterly changed in just a moment.
That being said and in the lee of the attacks in Egypt, Beirut and Paris, Will was left to handle the podcast alone with no notice so he soberly took a look at world events and ran our first interview with Middle East expert, Landon Shroder (@landonshroder on Twitter). When we ran it initially, the first part of the interview was on-air and the rest was available only via the Extra Mad (extended) podcast version. This past week Will ran the full interview on-air.
Will also took a moment to pull some rumor weeds out by the roots. Post-Paris attacks separating fact from fiction is essential and something you can be sure will not be the natural default of the GOP.
For anyone who expected me to be talking about taxes in this podcast, since I said I would last week, that IS my topic for the next show. Thanks in advance for sticking with me.
The upcoming show, for 23 November, will be our second interview with Landon. Given the attacks in Egypt, Beirut and Paris, it seemed (sadly) appropriate. Carrots! Escarole!- Arliss
This podcast was tough. The combination of our learning curve and strange technical issues was exhausting. Eventually, both Will and I ran out of time. We also ran over time. If you heard the podcast when it aired on Netroots Radio you immediately noticed that the introduction was trimmed, there was no interstitial music, there was no opening chatter between Will and I and Will’s comments on the Catholic church were both fascinating and lightening fast. Will, who handles the editing, had to cut seven minutes out so everything not absolutely necessary got thrown overboard. Obviously, we made rookie mistakes.
The good news is that it’s a podcast (and does not air live, for now) so I was able to do a new edit on Friday night. (It would have been done much earlier in the week but I have a demanding job and Will spent his week at the dentist…don’t ask. Ouch!) The “extended” edit (Director’s Cut, lol) has returned our full opening, the chatter we recorded but did not use in the podcast that aired and the interstitial music to the proper places.
Sadly, because we could no longer stay awake last Friday, when we were recording, we each ended up recording our “blocks” separately so there is no exchange between us when Will is talking about the Church or when I am talking about Serra. This isn’t how we planned it it’s just how it ended up. We’ll improve.
The whole process really does make me realize how spoiled we were just popping in twice a week and doing guest spots on The After Show. Both Will and I are full of ideas and we love the freedom of our own show but we are learning by doing and that always adds in a Jack-in-the-Box full of surprises.
The Pope Canonized the Devil and Walk for the Ancestors Responded with Grace
I was supposed to be talking about the Vatican Bank this week. I was all set. Then I read that Pope Frances, while in the United States, was going to canonize Fr. Junipero Serra. I lost my mind. Once I located it again I called Will and we changed the entire direction of the show. Will gave us a quick-march through Catholic history as it relates to the broadest social, and especially political, impact of the Catholic church as an institution.
I explained who Junipero Serra was and trust me when I say I provided the PG version. This man was very, very bad and the examples I include are just the tip of the Serra iceberg. I am not stretching the truth or embellishing the facts when I tell you that Serra was both cruel and genocidal. Now he’s also a Catholic “saint.”
Our interview was with the wonderful Caroline Ward Holland. Like so many people in the indigenous nations in California, Caroline could not rest easy knowing that Serra was to be raised up and canonized while the stories of her ancestors, their whispers and cries, were to continue to be ignored. This is especially disconcerting coming from a Pope who had so recently apologized for the outsized impact of colonization on the indigenous peoples of Latin America. Apparently, he was not also looking to the north.
Caroline and her son are walking 650 miles, visiting every mission in California, to draw light and focus to the stories not being told of the tens of thousands of people who were enslaved, abused, ripped from their cultural foundations and died. Caroline’s vision, Walk for the Ancestors, is a genuinely beautiful story. You can follow the Walk on Facebook at Walk for the Ancestors 2015. Please do. – Carrots! Arliss
21 September 2015 – We survived the launch! It would have been better had it not taken us about eight hours to record the show only to later discover that we still had a strange audio problem in a couple of places but all-in-all we are still in one piece and we are downright hoppy with the result. It’s hard to be anything but thrilled with the end product because we had such a wonderful time talking with SUNY professor and Daily Kos feature writer, Denise Oliver-Velez. I think it’s obvious that Dee is basically a progressive rock star. She answered questions about hope, Puerto Rico, the Latino get-out-the-vote effort and education. I especially loved the conversation about the fact that the Moral Mondays platform and the Black Lives Matter platforms are putting forward issues that are not “new” contrary to the commentary by mainstream media. Dee, with her wealth of perspective on progressive movements closed out by commenting on the difference between getting out the word in the 1970s versus the social media of today but she was sure to say, “The revolution will be slogged, not blogged.” We make change by talking with one another directly.
Will and I began the show talking a little bit about how we got started in the space that ultimately lead to “Hopping Mad.” We then went on to talk about the need for a new New Deal via job guarantee programs.
21 September 2015 – I wanted to take just a moment to tell you about the music we are using as part of Hopping Mad. Music is a large part of both of our lives and we wanted to reflect that in the show. In fact, just last night Will sent me a link for Mongolian rap. I know what just flashed through your mind…Will is crazy. Okay, that’s true but the link he sent took me to an incredible video. How DO Mongolian throat singers do that? Really, if you aren’t already a fan of Mongolian rap then you simply must listen to this. After you come back I’ll tell you about the music we are using in the show.
Intro Music
Our intro music is a small snip from the lead-in to the great James Taylor’s song, Stand And Fight. It’s a deep cut from Taylor’s 1981 album, Dad Loves His Work. This is a song every progressive around the world should, at the very least, hear and I recommend you purchase it so you can listen to it whenever you need to remind yourself why the hell you are doing all this (fill in the blank) anyway. Here’s a link to the complete song on iTunes: Stand and Fight.
Interstitial Music
Liz Carroll isn’t just any traditional Irish fiddler. First of all, she was raised in the American Midwest. Still, Liz made her mark in traditional Irish music early when she won the All-Ireland* senior category competition in fiddle (a very competitive category) at the age of eighteen. She was also honored with a National Heritage Fellowship Award in 1994 and became the first Irish-American traditional Irish musician nominated for a Grammy (2010) for her album with John Doyle. We feature music from two of Liz’ albums, Lake Effect (2002) and On the OffBeat (2013). From the former we are using The Rock Reel/Morning Dew/Reeling on the Box and from the latter we are using Liam Child’s/Balkin’ Balkan/The E-B-E Reel. Even from the very short selections we are using on Hopping Mad it is clear that Liz is an extraordinary musician and composer. She is also just a generous and lovely person. We thank her for allowing us to use her work and encourage you to download more of her music. Trust us when we say, it doesn’t get better than Liz.
[*Note: the “All-Irelands” are the major international competition for Irish music…obviously.]
Outro Music
Our outro music is by one of my very favorite singer-songwriters, John Gorka. Here’s a tip as to how old I am – the first several John Gorka albums I purchased were on vinyl. Then I bought them again on cassette. Then I bought them again on CD. Then I downloaded them from iTunes. Oh – and I have seen him in concert more than a dozen times. If you could see the iTunes section of my computer you would know that I listen to a LOT of music. So much so that my iTunes music library has to live on its own terra-drive and at any given time I limit myself to a mere 2000ish songs downloaded onto my phone. Even amidst all of that, I listen to John very frequently. His songs Lightning’s Blues and Flying Red Horse feel like old friends. Still, those songs were from early in John’s career and he just continues to get better. The song we are using as an outro is Ignorance and Privilege. It is from John’s 2009 album So Dark You See which, I have to tell you, doesn’t have a weak song on it anywhere. The message of Ignorance and Privilege is both powerful and timely. Please support music, support John and support us by purchasing some of John’s music. It will make your day. – Carrots! Arliss
19 September 2015 – Nothing worth doing just pops into being with a big bang. Well, the entire universe did but other than that nothing else is just suddenly there, fully formed and ready to go. Hopping Mad with Will McLeod and Arliss Bunnycertainly has been and will be in the process of evolving. As I write there is still much to be done and over the next few weeks, as we gain our footing, all manner of things will experience either evolutionary or revolutionary change. Still, we have been on this path for some time so it is probably worth looking at where we are coming from and where we intend to go.
Will and I do not live in the same city. We don’t even live in the same state. We have never met person-to-rabbit. We met on-line as guests on the Netroots Radio program, The After Show. Both Will and I had been on as regular guests for some time already. He generally focused on politics on Monday and I talked about monetary policy and financial news on Thursday. Justice, the host, decided we might be good together, bouncing off of each other (we Rabbit Americans have serious bouncing chops), so we became co-guests on Fridays. We had a great time and as this past year went on we became progressively more comfortable working together. I don’t recall now whose idea it was but all of the sudden I was sitting at my desk trying to think of an appropriate name for a show that Will and I would co-host. We intend to cover not just politics and economics but all of the issues which are priorities to progressives not just in the United States but around the world.
One cannot help but to note the election of Jeremy Corbyn, to lead the Labour Party in the UK, and the strength of the Bernie Sanders campaign here in the US, the battle being waged by the left in Greece against the deadly bullies of the Troika, the growth of the left in Spain, Portugal and even revived whispers in Ireland. It’s a tide. It’s rising. There will be ebb and flow, there always is, but enough is enough and you can’t keep a good rabbit down…or human either. The battle is joined. This isn’t a time to be kicking back on your couch with a bag of kale chips. There is thinking both on the right and even the left that Occupy didn’t matter but you have to ask yourself, would the Sanders campaign be as strong if Occupy hadn’t gone first?
Tune in to Netroots Radio on Mondays at 8AM Eastern or download our podcast from Stitcher, Libsyn or iTunes. You can even listen to the player which will be on our “Hopping Mad Podcasts” tab. It used to be that organizing progressives was like herding cats but lately the GOP has (laughably) picked up that ball and we are moving forward. Social media and the web are integral to our collective success. We at Hopping Mad are doing our part to spread the word (and to laugh and point at the Tea Party but that’s only because they STILL can’t spellcheck their protest signs.) Join us, it’ll be a thumping good time.
