Hopping Mad September 2015

Episode 1 – “HoppingMad” Debuts!

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.

So, here it is, the very first Hopping Mad…

Episode 2 – Podcast for 28 September 2015 – Challenges Abound

28 September 2015 – This podcast was tough. The combination of our learning curve and strange technical issues were exhausting. Eventually, we both ran out of time and 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.