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Several People have requested the script of the December 11th, 2024 program. I had intended to post the audio, but the file I got was damaged, so here's the original script/transcript.
Good evening today is Wednesday, December 11th, 2024, and this… is the Struggle.
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Thank you, once again, for lending us your ears for the next hour. I’m Dr. Michael Eissinger from the department of History and Political Science at Fresno City College. Tonight, I’m going to throw a few items your direction.
We’re going to start with a pledge break…
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COVER PLEDGE
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We’re back with the Struggle at 88.1 KFCF, I’m Dr. Michael Eissinger, or as my students call me, Doctor E. and tonight I want to continue to mull over my thoughts about the Struggle and resistance before we get to the new year.
I need to start where I find myself post-General Election 2024: Hyper aware that the inclusive America that we tried to build for half a century, starting in the mid-1950s was always an illusion – always a lie and that Trump is succeeding in what he and his white American followers have always set out to do, maintain a country founded in genocide and slavery and built upon a caste system based on race and ethnicity. That tiny historical blip that happened between Brown v. Board and Dobbs let liberals in this country believe that we were winning. We may have been winning the high ground. We may have even been winning in the court of public opinion, but in the court of electoral politics, the other side has been out maneuvering the left for decades. I’ve been looking at the political landscape and find the GOP organized with hundreds of groups focusing on their agenda, while the dems sit around and smugly share their moral superiority and intellectual rigor. We’ll talk about that more and more, as time goes on, but I wanted to share an interesting observation.
As an Anthropologist and Historian, I am curious, by nature, and trained to observe and analyze the human interactions around me and to try to put them within, as Franz Boaz would have called it, their “historical particularity.”
This past weekend is a prime example, and one that has had me really thinking about everything. Last week was the final week of instruction at City College. I gave my last lectures on Wednesday and Thursday – Finals are today and tomorrow – grades are due Monday at noon. Because I had most of the grading done (I design the last couple of weeks of the semester to be as stress-free for me and my students as possible), this past weekend was perfect for a quick, out-of-town trip. Kim and I try to do one road-trip each month, finding plenty to do the rest of the time in and around the hood. Most weekends, you’ll find us at local concerts, Gazebo Gardens, Goldstein’s, the Howlin’ Wolf, the Crest Theater, or one of the other local venues checking out the amazing amount of local talent and varied entertainment that’s available in our little corner of paradise.
But, this past weekend was also going to be the last road-trip of 2024. I still had a one-day pass to the two Disney parks that needed to be used or it would expire at the end of the year, so a Southern California trip was planned. A few years ago I had discovered the Long Beach Arts District – a community revitalized by the City of Long Beach as an arts and entertainment district – similar to the Tower, although a little more gentrified – and I had wanted to spend some time checking it out, so we decided to stay at the Historic Broadlind hotel, in the heart of that district – a uniquely renovated historical building with charming rooms and a quirky attitude.
We drove down on Friday and found a lovely local spot for dinner where I had some amazing fish and Kim had probably the best quiche I’ve ever experienced. Dinner alone justified the trip. It was a block and a half from our hotel.
While we were settling into the room, I remembered that Rocky Horror Picture Show had been playing, non-stop, every Saturday at midnight at the Nuart in Westwood since 1976 and we should go. We’ve been trying to see it, again, with a live audience, and why not see it where it originated. I have seen it at that theater many times since 1976 and hope it keeps playing forever. We checked on times and decided to reserve some seats (just in case).
Before booking, I asked Kim if she thought her daughter and son-in-law would like to join us. They were going to be with us in the park, so it would be polite and possibly fun to have them come along.
Just for context, they love Disney and do two or three ocean cruises each year. That is a very broad, but to a certain extent, accurate description of them as a couple and possibly a window into their world view. Lovely people. I enjoy their company, but we do move in different circles.
We checked and they were up for it, so it was decided Disneyland during the day, and we’d end at the Nuart around 2am.
The next morning, we headed to Disneyland, and the day turned out to be the most perfect example of what America really is – and, I’ll explain.
Of course, to do that, I’ll have to give the historical context and try to place my observations and experience within that – what we call in Anthropology, Participatory Observation.
When Walt Disney envisioned the park, he had several criteria behind everything that he wanted included.
First of all, he wanted the park to be affordable to everyone. That’s a dream that died many year ago and gets buried deeper every year. Now, they have an additional four hundred dollars a year pass to use the real line, while regular park visitors use the so-called stand-by line. Lines designed to keep you occupied for up to an hour or more while you await your 7-to-15-minute ride. That has brought to the surface a two-tiered system based on haves and have-nots that’s always existed for VIPs and other celebrities, but wasn’t available just to those who were willing to just shell out some more cash for it. Now, the rest of us look on enviously, as we refuse to pay even more money to stand in yet another line.
The second thing that Walt wanted, in addition to the entertainment value of the rides and the publicity of his commercial properties, was to provide educational enrichment throughout the park. That’s why Mr. Lincoln is still on Main Street. Tom Sawyer’s Island, the train ride, Columbia and the Steam ship, along with major portions of adventure and frontier lands were all conceived containing educational aspects.
For decades my favorite rides were the Carousel of Progress and the Monsanto ride – both of which have been gone for a long time. They weren’t exciting, but they were really interesting.
I’ll come back to expand on my thoughts about Disneyland, in a bit… but, first…
Rocky Horror Picture Show. Here’s a blast from the past that I still think is crucial to understanding the present. The play hit London and Los Angeles while I was living in LA in 1975 – the posters for the play were all over Hollywood and the West Side, where I lived and it had a long residency at the Roxy theater in West Hollywood. The following year, the film was released and began playing at the Nuart on Santa Monica Blvd on the border between Westwood and Santa Monica. It was the place where I first saw Rocky Horror, and I originally experienced it with all the toast, rice, water, and toilet paper one can imagine. The Nuart, having been one of the original theaters in the Pantages chain, was old and showing its age, and a little food sticking to the screen added to the ambiance. I’ve seen it in that theatre multiple times over the years and enjoyed the evolution of the audience participation aspects of the movie, as well as appreciated what is ultimately a positive message about sexuality, gender, and identity – in fact, I credit it as one of the most powerful cultural aspects to break down some of the barriers that the queer community has experienced and even incorporate it in my lectures about the seventies and social change.
So, it was fitting, forty-eight years later, to be able to catch a midnight showing of Rocky Horror Picture Show at the Nuart. This was going to be fun. I’d taken Kim to see Rocky Horror a few times before, once in Hanford where the audience did NOT know the participation portion of the program and once in the now closed Labyrinth Collective, here in the Tower, but the Nuart is THE ORIGINAL and it’s always a treat.
Kim’s daughter and son-in-law were both virgins – in fact, they were such virgins they didn’t even bother to acknowledge they were virgins in the run up to the Virgin Game Show prior to the film.
I hate to say it, but neither of them danced the time warp, either.
What is this world coming to? Again, however, these are straights in every sense of the word. These lovely people are a UPS driver and a high school teacher. These guys are the white American dream. These guys are Disney.
So, you’re asking yourself, what the hell is Doctor E going on about? This is the Struggle. We’re supposed to be talking politics, organizing, and Activism (with a little local arts thrown in for good measure). We don’t want to hear about your Southern California mini-vacation. Tell us about the world!
I’m getting to that.
So, I said at the outset that this past weekend – in fact, just Saturday – was a perfect illustration as to where we are as a country and how I think we need to position ourselves moving forward.
So, let me see if I can explain…
We left our quirky little hotel in the Arts District in Long Beach before eight and headed to Orange County. We had agreed to meet our party around 9 in the semi-public area between the two parks – Disneyland and California Adventure. Now, I have a mountain of thoughts and observations about California Adventure. You’ll need to take my California History class to get most of those. For now, we’ll just lump the two parks and the shopping area into a generic Disneyland bucket.
From the moment we pulled off the Five at Ball, we were routed, herded, funneled and controlled from the entrance to the structure to the parking stall, from the escalators to the security gates, and then the shuttles to the parks, where we stood in line to get our coffee at the starbucks before getting into line to go into the park. We were set to, once again, suffer line after line, control after control.
Every person in the entire Disney complex conforms to that control. But, not everyone follows blindly or completely.
I was probably among that two or three percent of attendees not wearing any Disney paraphernalia or clothing – I wasn’t paying Disney for the privilege of advertising Disney products and identify as part of the Disney family. For full disclosure, I have some t-shirts with Disney themes, purchased by myself or others at the park, so I’m not completely blameless or pure, here – I just refuse to conform in the park itself. One time, I got some Bugs Bunny ears and wore those, rather than conform to everyone in Micky or Minny ears and hats.
Consider the money spent by most of the revelers in the park, just on ears, shirts, and backpacks, let alone the high-end items like thousand-dollar light sabers or jewelry by Tiffany.
Even before entering the park, it’s easy to realize that it’s all about just two things: control and the extraction of every last penny that they can drag out of you.
I’ll come back to that, but the day had two planned events, Disney during the day, and Rocky at the Nuart at Midnight.
The Rocky Horror Show, the play, opened in London in 1974 and at the Roxy, in Los Angeles, in 1975. It was an interactive play, where the audience shouted back at the actors on stage, and it quickly became the hottest show around. I remember living in Hollywood, at the time, and you could not escape the posters, the adverts, or the buzz. Everyone was talking about this crazy play that not only challenged the entire idea of a night in the theatre, but it was about bisexuality, had references to pots, and showed a little bit of nudity.
Of course, it was snatched up (no pun intended) by the major studios and made into a film, which debuted in 1975. In 1976 it began playing at the Nuart on Santa Monica Blvd., and it’s still playing there every Saturday night at midnight. There is no parallel in cinema history. Possibly the closest thing to this amazing run is Agatha Cristy’s long-running “Ten Little Indians” in London’s West End.
In many ways, it’s a silly movie. It’s a musical with some great rock and roll tracks. It’s slightly dirty because everyone is having sex with everyone else – and you get to see a nipple or two -- and, by the end, most of the cast is wearing corsets and black stockings – everyone, male and female. Because of the intimate nature of the event, many of the audience also dress as their favorite characters, usually in some combination of women’s underwear to make it work.
In other words, in many ways, Rocky Horror is the antithesis of Disneyland. Instead of meekly standing in line for an hour for a ten-minute ride, those attending Rocky Horror shout at the screen, throw stuff around the theater and get up and dance at their favorite songs. You’d get thrown out of Disney for that behaviour. Instead of searching your purse for drugs, they told us to not smoke in the theater, but we were free to use the alley and come back in to enjoy the festivities after using the drugs.
But, Doctor E, you say, trying to call me back to reality, even those attending the movie at the Nuart are ultimately conforming to the norms within their community, to which I will say you are correct – because, that’s what we all do, we try to fit in, and there’s a certain amount of that. There’s pressure to get the audience response lines correct and with the group. There are certain memes that regularly crop up in the audience costumes and actions – you’re encouraged to participate and to try to get it right.
But, I would contend that it is the conformity of resistance.
There’s a strange combination of words – conformity of resistance. In fact, I think that may be the main thesis of the show, tonight, Conformity of Resistance – conforming to resistance doesn’t seem possible as a concept, does it? I mean if you’re conforming are you actually resisting.
I think it comes down to drawing a thin line between the words conform and commune.
Conforming means that one adheres, broadly, to the ideals, ideas, and norms of the group, whether or not one fully buys into all of it.
Communing or joining a community means that you may embrace the norms and standards of the group, but you do so willingly and with understanding, maintaining distance and separation from those very same standards.
Let me give you an example.
At the Nuart, the other evening, there were several audience members dressed in full costume – Magenta’s maid costume, Columbia’s shorts and top hat, Janet’s pinafore and hat – all the standard, stereotypical cosplay elements of Rocky Horror.
But – the gentleman working the door and making sure that everyone new the rules and was safe wasn’t wearing street clothes. He wasn’t wearing a costume from the movie – NOPE, he was wearing a full-body, head-to-toe hamster costume, while his assistant was a plus dinosaur.
As we move into these next four years, we need to be the hamster and the dinosaur, and we need to find our own midnight movie. We’ll be back with more of this insanity, right after these messages on 88.1 KFCF.
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We’re back with the Struggle on 88.1 KFCF and before the break I was talking about my adventure, this past Saturday in SoCal. Spending the day at Disneyland and then hitting up the midnight showing of Rocky Horror at midnight at the Nuart theatre, where it’s been playing since 1976, and I suggested that we need to be more Rocky Horror and less Disney.
I’m sure you’re thinking that I’ve lost it. This is the Struggle. This is a show where we’re supposed to be discussing the resistance to the rise of Fascism and finding ways to prevent the country to returning to what it always was – a nation founded on genocide and built on the backs of enslaved people, that exploits migrant and foreign labour to enrich those at the top while working hard to convince those at the bottom and middle that they’re still better off that women or people of color, so they shouldn’t complain.
Well, dammit, that’s what I’m doing, I’m just not doing it by freaking out over every potential Trump nominee or executive order. We’ve done that for more than a decade and all it did was make him and his fascist movement stronger. There has to be another way, and I’m beginning to see one such possible way. It won’t be a quick fix. It won’t save some of us from horrible abuse at the hands of our neighbors or our government, but it’s the type of change that is necessary if we’re ever going to save ourselves from ourselves. Knee jerk reactions to each and every outrage just keep us angry and does nothing. It reinforces their side, as they double down and revel in the knowledge that, once again, they owned the libtards.
I’m done playing that game. I’m done being manipulated by the politicians. I’m tired of being played by the media. I refuse to conform. I refuse to give in.
I want to take a few minutes to digress, here, and discuss Walt Disney and his vision for his park, because it’s crucial to understand those areas in which Disney, the company, has abandoned Disney, the man.
Let’s start with cost. Walt wanted the park to be affordable to all families. Gradully, over time, the cost of admission has risen and the cost of everything within the boundaries of the parks has gone up, significantly.
But, the park, itself, reflects a world view that was natural to Walt, based on his own past. His version of main street, the hub of the park, was a nostalgic recreation of small-town, mid-west America at the end of the 19th century. Besides the architecture, originally, main street had numerous enterprises that you would have found on that street in the eighteen hundreds. The Ice Creame Parlor may still be there, but not in the configuration that Walt had it. For that you’d have to go to Hanford and Superior Dairy, until a few years ago – a true ice cream parlor. The penny arcade had hand cranked nickelodeons, pinball machines, and other late 19th and early 20th Century mechanical entertainments.
The mad hatter was a haberdasher.
The Kodak shop sold cameras and film.
Today, if you walk into the shops on either side of main street where it begins at the circle inside the front gate, you’ll notice that all of the interior dividing walls have been removed. Today, both sides of main street are nothing more than two large Disney stores selling every sort of paraphernalia to get your money.
It’s all about your money. The latest thing is to take all the lines, rename them “stand by” and charge extra for each ride, if you don’t want to stand in line for very long, thus making the regular lines even longer – all for a few more bucks. In fact, for just four hundred dollars a year, you can skip the stand-by (read that poor people’s line) and simply skip ahead. Yes, Disney now allows you to pay to line jump. In fact, they love it because it takes their overpriced park and provides one more avenue through which they can extract your cash.
So, main street has its own issues, while the iconography of the typical Midwest, white, small town of more than a century ago remains on the surface, if you scratch just below that, you’ll find nothing but crass commercialism and raw capitalism.
Other parts of the park also reflect on Walt the man, and the world from which he came and into which the park was created.
While the most racist aspects of the park have been eliminated, perhaps it’s worth remembering some of them.
Remember the so-called settler’s cabin on Tom Sawyer’s island burning while quote-unquote native savages whooped and hollered in glee. That scene was included in the Disneyland Train, on both Columbia and the Steamship rides, and was visible from New Orleans Square.
FrontierLand comes right out of colonialism, the White Man’s Burden, and the age of exploitation or exploration, depending on your point of view. The entire concept of the Frontier was popularized by historians in the early 20th Century as a framing mechanism for American history. Jackson Turner posited that the American spirit was at it’s best when it was at the edge of civilization – the Frontier – where it could transform the landscape and the people on it, usually by destroying what was already there. That view of history justifies the subjugation and destruction of indigenous peoples and the environment. Kipling’s White Man’s Burden turned into an amusement park.
The jungle cruise glorifies the great white hunter (originally having black animatronic natives attack the boat, before they were reprogrammed to waive at the boat, before ultimately being removed). The shops in that area were designed to look like trading posts on the African coast or the Amazon jungle, with people roaming around in pith helmets looking like Jungle Jim or Tarzan’s cousin. If you’re going to promote white supremacy, you have to have a great white hope, like Tarzan or Donald Trump.
The Silver Dollar Saloon and the surrounding area was developed to compete directly with Knott’s, which had preceded Disneyland’s opening. Like Knott’s, this section of the park centered around a western street, with gun fights and obedient Indians – even cigar store Indians. Harkening back to a so-called golden age centered on the cowboy and the trapper.
I honestly believe that Walt saw Main Street, as well as Frontierland within the same context into which he put the Carousel of Tomorrow, the Monsanto Ride, Circarama (the single most vomit-inducing amusement park ride ever devised) and Mister Lincoln as educational features, not just raw nostalgia or white propaganda.
But, what about Disney being so woke? There’s the Small World ride, plus all those inclusivity policies that pissed off Ron DeSantis and the rest of the Florida GOP.
Hunny, Disney only let in queer folks when they realized just how much money could be brought in by selling Mickey for Pride.
They’re not woke because they believe it. They’re woke because it’s profitable.
Disneyland being woke is like Whole Foods being liberal – I’ll come back to that.
Now, before I go off on Whole Foods, don’t get me wrong. I like Disneyland. As an amusement or theme park, it’s probably the best. They are the best at crowd control. They have the cleanest park, especially when compared to places like Magic Mountain or Great America, but it is what it is. A park designed originally to glorify a vision of America that hasn’t existed for almost a century and has become a huge profit center for corporate America.
But it is fun. I’m willing to go with friends and family, and I’ll have a good time while doing it. And that’s why this is starting to represent such a huge analog for me – America is DisneyLand – Walt has gotten his dream. It has a lot of things to offer – especially on the surface, but underneath, just like the behind the scenes areas of Disneyland, it’s really about profit and control.
For most of our lives, we have to live within this world that might look bright and shiny on the surface, but that has dark, deep underpinnings that we might not be comfortable with.
You and I have to live in this contemporary world, but my plan is to make the most of the best parts, fix what I can, and ignore the rest.
But, in reality, while having to spend most of my time being controlled and routed from que to que, I want to be Rocky Horror. After spending most of my life in our shared Disneyland, I want to find that midnight movie – out of the mainstream, out of normal time, out of step.
But then, I am out of step. Most of my life I’ve been out of step. I’ve rarely held a typical 9-5 job. For more than sixty-five years, I’ve been out of the loop. I’ve been living in an alternate world of my own choosing. I can’t say making, because that’s not accurate. It takes more than one person to create an entire world, so each of us has to find and help build our reality, with the hope that, ultimately, that reality will spill out and over into the rest of the world.
Finding and building that reality isn’t going to happen if I just spend all my time worried about what Donald Trump and the Magats are doing. They’re going to do their thing, regardless. People will suffer – hell, I might suffer. Who knows.
I’m not sure how or what it’s going to look like, but I want to build a world in opposition to the vision shared by most Americans. I reject a dark place where immigrants and women have to beg for equal rights, or where people have to hide whom they love or what they value. If I can legally keep that world at bay, I will. If I can’t I will do everything I can to connect with and to protect them, as much as my privilege can provide.
The voters have decided. Once again, I disagree, wholeheartedly with their decision. I think it’s dangerous. I think it’s morally wrong. I think this is a disaster for the country and the world.
So, what can I do? I’ll never impact the leaders in the Republican Party or convince Donald Trump to stop being the white supremacist, antisemite, misogynist that his card-carrying Klan father raised him to be.
But, I can work on developing safe spaces where hamsters and plush dinosaurs can be comfortable next to men in corsets and straights in street clothes. I want to help build something, and that’s not possible on a national scale. I said for many years that a portion of this country had a nervous breakdown with the election of our first black president and I knew there’d be a black lash – I just didn’t expect it to be this severe.
But it is possible to build the community, no the communities, in which we want to live. Start with your family and circle of friends. Gather around you all those with whom you see eye-to-eye, as well as those who you can truly reach – ignore the rest.
Then we can tackle the neighborhood and the city, even the county and the state. But, it starts with you and me. Just us. We have to decide to be different. I know it’s a cliché, but we have to be the change we want to see. We have to decide how to navigate the upcoming storm without compromising ourselves, our values, or our goals, while understanding that many of us could be up against some major bad stuff coming down the road. We need to be able to stand patiently in the queue to space mountain or the gas station. We need to put up with the crass commercialism of the world around us, taking advantage of those things that make our lives better, while avoiding, fighting, or otherwise, eliminating from our reality those aspects that don’t.
While we need to let Jeff Besos know that his decision to pull any endorsement from the Post in the last election was inappropriate and that we’ll no longer purchase his newspaper, we need to acknowledge that, from time-to-time, Amazon is the only place to purchase certain things and that Prime and the Firestick, at the present, may be the best option for our streaming services (of course, your mileage may vary), but that brings me back to Whole Foods, the relationship between it and white liberals being indicative of the actual problem.
Whole Foods was founded by and run until 2022 by anti-union, Texan libertarian John Mackey, who denies that climate change is caused by human behaviour. Not exactly a flaming liberal. Since 2022, Whole Foods has been owned as part of Amazon by Jeff Bezos, and we know how his takeover of the Washington Post has impacted liberal political coverage at that paper, yet I know many well-meaning white liberals will ONLY shop at whole foods, even when there are other alternatives that might be more aligned with their stated goals and ideals.
Bezos sided with Trump, this time around. I won’t pretend that I can, single handedly, make him feel any pain. In fact, collectively, if every listener to this station were to simply stop providing Jeff Bezos with another Amazon or Prime dollar, he’d never feel it. My boycott of Chick’filet and Hobby Lobby won’t impact their bottom line, but it makes me feel better. Are there going to be times when I have to order stuff from Amazon – probably. I did set up a Chewy account so I won’t be getting my pet food from Amazon, and I’m going to search alternatives for CD, DVDs and books. I’ll stop ordering clothes through Amazon. I’m sure the companies that print the silly t-shirts I buy have their own websites and I can get 501s just about anywhere.
So, I may still have to spend much of every day living in Disneyland, with all the conformists and the fascists, but, little by little, I will build my Rocky Horror – a world filled with local musicians and artists. A world where people feel safe being themselves where they don’t have to wear a corset and black stockings – unless they want to. Likewise, they won’t need to wear a baggy blue suit with a red tie hanging to their knees, either.
On December 5th, Marc Elias of Democracy Docket (a publication you need to read regularly) wrote the following. I think this sums up my current state of mind…
I’m reading directly from Elias, here…
After the 2016 election, a movement that would become known as “the resistance” quickly emerged to protest and confront Donald Trump and his incoming administration. The hope was that if Trump could simply be held back — resisted — for four years, politics would go back to normal. A Democrat would retake the White House and Trump would be viewed as an unfortunate aberration.
Since Election Day, it has become fashionable in some circles to view that effort as a failure. The cynics dismiss the grassroots energy and the hard work of so many as naïve and without impact.
As usual, they are wrong. The resistance movement helped protect the Affordable Care Act from repeal and lead to bold policies at the state and local level. It built new pro-democracy institutions that challenged Trump in the courts and in the streets. It inspired thousands of new candidates to run for office and contributed to a successful mid-term election. Most importantly, in 2020 it helped defeat Donald Trump
Republicans used that time fruitfully. They built new ideological organizations, new campaign structures, new media outlets and new leaders. Even as they suffered losses in the midterms, they were undeterred from their mission of fleshing out what a second Trump term would look like. For all of Trump’s disavowals of Project 2025 during the campaign, that effort and other, equally extreme measures were being planned.
MAGA was not focused specifically on resisting Biden. It had a bolder agenda. It wanted to build an opposing ideological and political movement to win elections and govern over the long term. It prioritized hate over hope, cronyism over competence and retribution over reconciliation.
As we head towards January, it is our turn to use this period productively. Hoping that Trump fails is not a plan. We must develop and foster new movements, structures, tactics, platforms and leaders to oppose Trump and articulate a positive vision.
In most democratic political systems, this is referred to as the opposition. Rather than a resistance, the concept of an opposition is more comprehensive and durable. It recognizes that there are no time limits to the effort.
In some systems the opposition entails an entire shadow government, in others it focuses on specific platforms. I don’t pretend to know the exact form it will take in this country, but I do know some of the basic principles it must embrace.
The success of our democracy rests on an effective opposition movement.
First, we must prioritize effective electoral campaigns that maximize the chances of electing Democrats and defeating Republicans. Obtaining power in our system of government means running well-funded and professionalized campaigns. Now is not the time to unilaterally disarm in the service of some higher principles. All legal tactics must be on the table. Ideological fights must yield in service of winning. We must recruit and fund candidates who can win their state or districts.
Second, we must be a big tent full of diversity of new policy ideas and approaches to governing. Political movement must be about big ideas. New Deal liberalism was a big idea. So was the Great Society, neo-liberalism and populism. But the leaders who embraced and implemented these ideas were not dismissive of other, competing visions.
A strong opposition movement needs to allow for people within it to exchange, debate and even disagree over the best way to solve problems. Failed oppositions seek to impose purity tests and purge dissent. Successful movements incorporate ideas from across the spectrum of its participants.
Third, we need new and existing institutions to bolster the opposition, not work against it. We cannot be afraid to let new institutions rise, and others fall. The only litmus test for groups is whether they help the opposition effort. Republicans and their conservative allies have spent years investing billions in a range of civil society and political groups. Building and funding pro-democracy opposition groups needs to be a critical priority for years to come.
Fourth, we must cultivate and amplify new communication methods and messengers. We need to identify and promote our best messengers and pair them with the most influential platforms, period. This means ending our reliance on credential-based legacy media. These high prestige outlets command very small audiences and that audience is shrinking. They speak to almost no persuadable audience. The goal should be to reach voters, period.
Finally, we must be comfortable using every legal tool available to challenge Trumpism in court. One of the most important lessons from the last eight years is that the courts matter. Many of the resistance’s successes were fueled by lawsuits. And when Biden took office, conservatives ruthlessly used the courts to block his agenda. More than half of federal judges were appointed by Democratic presidents. Many state courts are controlled by liberals. Litigation is one of the most important tools to protect democracy and we must use every tool we have.
I know that these ideas are just a starting point. The success of our democracy rests on an effective opposition movement. We all must play a part in offering additional ideas and approaches and not being afraid to take risks. I plan to be a part of that effort. I hope you will too.
I wanted to share that article, in full, because while its focus is a little different, it does kinda sum up where we currently sit.
Each of his five points needs to be considered. Point one, is electoral politics. I’ll cover that, but I’m not going to put all my hope in short-term traditional partisan politics. Although it’s a big part of the problem, it will, ultimately, have to be part of the solution, as well.
Secondly, he mentions big ideas, big goals. While understanding that big goals are often achievable only with small steps, Elias acknowledges that without the bold vision, the little steps have nowhere to go – again, this is politics at the state and federal level, all of which is important, but still falls within the Disneyland portion of the world – everyone’s there, everyone is conforming and being controlled, but as long as you acknowledge those things, there are still benefits to participation.
Third is what I’ve been asking for the past few weeks – the organizations and leaders that will work diligently and systematically to implement, one step at a time, a bold vision for the future. It has to start at the grass roots, because it always has. It has to start at the dinner table, the coffee shop, and the park bench. Organize and tackle one part of the problem, because the problem is so much bigger than each of us, all we can do is band together. I want to restate what he wrote, when he said, “Building and funding pro-democracy opposition groups needs to be a critical priority for years to come.” Let me repeat the last bit of that quote – FOR YEARS TO COME!
This is why we need each find our Rocky Horror Picture Show. We have to swim in the Disneyland of our regular, day-to-day lives, but we need to be looking forward to that midnight movie and the chance to break out, to be in a different community, one that the cherishes our differences, not one that seeks to destroy those differences, even at the risk of destroying me.
Finally, which is to be expected coming from the most successful litigator against Donald Trump and the MAGA movement over the last decade, Elias suggests using the courts. If your rights are violated by MAGA, contact lawyers like Elias and tie them up in court.
We have to use every tool within our means to oppose, to resist, and to keep up the struggle. We may have to swim in the sea that is Disneyland – and for many of us it is still beneficial be part of that vast ocean – but we need to find our Rocky Horror Picture Show. And, then once we’ve found that venue, we need to be the hamster.
For the next four years, I seek to be the hamster. I’m going to do everything I can to bolster my communities, my friends, my colleagues, my students, and my home. I’m done pointing fingers and feeling superior because I know better. While the facts and reality may matter to me, I need to realize that facts and reality mean little to most of our neighbors. They’re looking for Tinkerbell to solve all their problems. One more thing with the right logo, the right branding, the right style, and their problems will be gone, right? No, but it’ll take a long time, if ever, for them to figure out that they’re working against their own best interests. You and me telling them over and over just how stupid and wrong they are, isn’t going to convince them of anything – if anything, it’ll just make them double down and make the entire situation worse.
So, make your choice – Disneyland, Rocky Horror, or the Hamster – which one are you going to inhabit
You’re listening to the struggle on 88.1 KFCF, when we return, KFCF General Manager, Rychard Withers will be joining us.
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Good evening today is Wednesday, December 11th, 2024, and this… is the Struggle.
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Thank you, once again, for lending us your ears for the next hour. I’m Dr. Michael Eissinger from the department of History and Political Science at Fresno City College. Tonight, I’m going to throw a few items your direction.
We’re going to start with a pledge break…
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COVER PLEDGE
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We’re back with the Struggle at 88.1 KFCF, I’m Dr. Michael Eissinger, or as my students call me, Doctor E. and tonight I want to continue to mull over my thoughts about the Struggle and resistance before we get to the new year.
I need to start where I find myself post-General Election 2024: Hyper aware that the inclusive America that we tried to build for half a century, starting in the mid-1950s was always an illusion – always a lie and that Trump is succeeding in what he and his white American followers have always set out to do, maintain a country founded in genocide and slavery and built upon a caste system based on race and ethnicity. That tiny historical blip that happened between Brown v. Board and Dobbs let liberals in this country believe that we were winning. We may have been winning the high ground. We may have even been winning in the court of public opinion, but in the court of electoral politics, the other side has been out maneuvering the left for decades. I’ve been looking at the political landscape and find the GOP organized with hundreds of groups focusing on their agenda, while the dems sit around and smugly share their moral superiority and intellectual rigor. We’ll talk about that more and more, as time goes on, but I wanted to share an interesting observation.
As an Anthropologist and Historian, I am curious, by nature, and trained to observe and analyze the human interactions around me and to try to put them within, as Franz Boaz would have called it, their “historical particularity.”
This past weekend is a prime example, and one that has had me really thinking about everything. Last week was the final week of instruction at City College. I gave my last lectures on Wednesday and Thursday – Finals are today and tomorrow – grades are due Monday at noon. Because I had most of the grading done (I design the last couple of weeks of the semester to be as stress-free for me and my students as possible), this past weekend was perfect for a quick, out-of-town trip. Kim and I try to do one road-trip each month, finding plenty to do the rest of the time in and around the hood. Most weekends, you’ll find us at local concerts, Gazebo Gardens, Goldstein’s, the Howlin’ Wolf, the Crest Theater, or one of the other local venues checking out the amazing amount of local talent and varied entertainment that’s available in our little corner of paradise.
But, this past weekend was also going to be the last road-trip of 2024. I still had a one-day pass to the two Disney parks that needed to be used or it would expire at the end of the year, so a Southern California trip was planned. A few years ago I had discovered the Long Beach Arts District – a community revitalized by the City of Long Beach as an arts and entertainment district – similar to the Tower, although a little more gentrified – and I had wanted to spend some time checking it out, so we decided to stay at the Historic Broadlind hotel, in the heart of that district – a uniquely renovated historical building with charming rooms and a quirky attitude.
We drove down on Friday and found a lovely local spot for dinner where I had some amazing fish and Kim had probably the best quiche I’ve ever experienced. Dinner alone justified the trip. It was a block and a half from our hotel.
While we were settling into the room, I remembered that Rocky Horror Picture Show had been playing, non-stop, every Saturday at midnight at the Nuart in Westwood since 1976 and we should go. We’ve been trying to see it, again, with a live audience, and why not see it where it originated. I have seen it at that theater many times since 1976 and hope it keeps playing forever. We checked on times and decided to reserve some seats (just in case).
Before booking, I asked Kim if she thought her daughter and son-in-law would like to join us. They were going to be with us in the park, so it would be polite and possibly fun to have them come along.
Just for context, they love Disney and do two or three ocean cruises each year. That is a very broad, but to a certain extent, accurate description of them as a couple and possibly a window into their world view. Lovely people. I enjoy their company, but we do move in different circles.
We checked and they were up for it, so it was decided Disneyland during the day, and we’d end at the Nuart around 2am.
The next morning, we headed to Disneyland, and the day turned out to be the most perfect example of what America really is – and, I’ll explain.
Of course, to do that, I’ll have to give the historical context and try to place my observations and experience within that – what we call in Anthropology, Participatory Observation.
When Walt Disney envisioned the park, he had several criteria behind everything that he wanted included.
First of all, he wanted the park to be affordable to everyone. That’s a dream that died many year ago and gets buried deeper every year. Now, they have an additional four hundred dollars a year pass to use the real line, while regular park visitors use the so-called stand-by line. Lines designed to keep you occupied for up to an hour or more while you await your 7-to-15-minute ride. That has brought to the surface a two-tiered system based on haves and have-nots that’s always existed for VIPs and other celebrities, but wasn’t available just to those who were willing to just shell out some more cash for it. Now, the rest of us look on enviously, as we refuse to pay even more money to stand in yet another line.
The second thing that Walt wanted, in addition to the entertainment value of the rides and the publicity of his commercial properties, was to provide educational enrichment throughout the park. That’s why Mr. Lincoln is still on Main Street. Tom Sawyer’s Island, the train ride, Columbia and the Steam ship, along with major portions of adventure and frontier lands were all conceived containing educational aspects.
For decades my favorite rides were the Carousel of Progress and the Monsanto ride – both of which have been gone for a long time. They weren’t exciting, but they were really interesting.
I’ll come back to expand on my thoughts about Disneyland, in a bit… but, first…
Rocky Horror Picture Show. Here’s a blast from the past that I still think is crucial to understanding the present. The play hit London and Los Angeles while I was living in LA in 1975 – the posters for the play were all over Hollywood and the West Side, where I lived and it had a long residency at the Roxy theater in West Hollywood. The following year, the film was released and began playing at the Nuart on Santa Monica Blvd on the border between Westwood and Santa Monica. It was the place where I first saw Rocky Horror, and I originally experienced it with all the toast, rice, water, and toilet paper one can imagine. The Nuart, having been one of the original theaters in the Pantages chain, was old and showing its age, and a little food sticking to the screen added to the ambiance. I’ve seen it in that theatre multiple times over the years and enjoyed the evolution of the audience participation aspects of the movie, as well as appreciated what is ultimately a positive message about sexuality, gender, and identity – in fact, I credit it as one of the most powerful cultural aspects to break down some of the barriers that the queer community has experienced and even incorporate it in my lectures about the seventies and social change.
So, it was fitting, forty-eight years later, to be able to catch a midnight showing of Rocky Horror Picture Show at the Nuart. This was going to be fun. I’d taken Kim to see Rocky Horror a few times before, once in Hanford where the audience did NOT know the participation portion of the program and once in the now closed Labyrinth Collective, here in the Tower, but the Nuart is THE ORIGINAL and it’s always a treat.
Kim’s daughter and son-in-law were both virgins – in fact, they were such virgins they didn’t even bother to acknowledge they were virgins in the run up to the Virgin Game Show prior to the film.
I hate to say it, but neither of them danced the time warp, either.
What is this world coming to? Again, however, these are straights in every sense of the word. These lovely people are a UPS driver and a high school teacher. These guys are the white American dream. These guys are Disney.
So, you’re asking yourself, what the hell is Doctor E going on about? This is the Struggle. We’re supposed to be talking politics, organizing, and Activism (with a little local arts thrown in for good measure). We don’t want to hear about your Southern California mini-vacation. Tell us about the world!
I’m getting to that.
So, I said at the outset that this past weekend – in fact, just Saturday – was a perfect illustration as to where we are as a country and how I think we need to position ourselves moving forward.
So, let me see if I can explain…
We left our quirky little hotel in the Arts District in Long Beach before eight and headed to Orange County. We had agreed to meet our party around 9 in the semi-public area between the two parks – Disneyland and California Adventure. Now, I have a mountain of thoughts and observations about California Adventure. You’ll need to take my California History class to get most of those. For now, we’ll just lump the two parks and the shopping area into a generic Disneyland bucket.
From the moment we pulled off the Five at Ball, we were routed, herded, funneled and controlled from the entrance to the structure to the parking stall, from the escalators to the security gates, and then the shuttles to the parks, where we stood in line to get our coffee at the starbucks before getting into line to go into the park. We were set to, once again, suffer line after line, control after control.
Every person in the entire Disney complex conforms to that control. But, not everyone follows blindly or completely.
I was probably among that two or three percent of attendees not wearing any Disney paraphernalia or clothing – I wasn’t paying Disney for the privilege of advertising Disney products and identify as part of the Disney family. For full disclosure, I have some t-shirts with Disney themes, purchased by myself or others at the park, so I’m not completely blameless or pure, here – I just refuse to conform in the park itself. One time, I got some Bugs Bunny ears and wore those, rather than conform to everyone in Micky or Minny ears and hats.
Consider the money spent by most of the revelers in the park, just on ears, shirts, and backpacks, let alone the high-end items like thousand-dollar light sabers or jewelry by Tiffany.
Even before entering the park, it’s easy to realize that it’s all about just two things: control and the extraction of every last penny that they can drag out of you.
I’ll come back to that, but the day had two planned events, Disney during the day, and Rocky at the Nuart at Midnight.
The Rocky Horror Show, the play, opened in London in 1974 and at the Roxy, in Los Angeles, in 1975. It was an interactive play, where the audience shouted back at the actors on stage, and it quickly became the hottest show around. I remember living in Hollywood, at the time, and you could not escape the posters, the adverts, or the buzz. Everyone was talking about this crazy play that not only challenged the entire idea of a night in the theatre, but it was about bisexuality, had references to pots, and showed a little bit of nudity.
Of course, it was snatched up (no pun intended) by the major studios and made into a film, which debuted in 1975. In 1976 it began playing at the Nuart on Santa Monica Blvd., and it’s still playing there every Saturday night at midnight. There is no parallel in cinema history. Possibly the closest thing to this amazing run is Agatha Cristy’s long-running “Ten Little Indians” in London’s West End.
In many ways, it’s a silly movie. It’s a musical with some great rock and roll tracks. It’s slightly dirty because everyone is having sex with everyone else – and you get to see a nipple or two -- and, by the end, most of the cast is wearing corsets and black stockings – everyone, male and female. Because of the intimate nature of the event, many of the audience also dress as their favorite characters, usually in some combination of women’s underwear to make it work.
In other words, in many ways, Rocky Horror is the antithesis of Disneyland. Instead of meekly standing in line for an hour for a ten-minute ride, those attending Rocky Horror shout at the screen, throw stuff around the theater and get up and dance at their favorite songs. You’d get thrown out of Disney for that behaviour. Instead of searching your purse for drugs, they told us to not smoke in the theater, but we were free to use the alley and come back in to enjoy the festivities after using the drugs.
But, Doctor E, you say, trying to call me back to reality, even those attending the movie at the Nuart are ultimately conforming to the norms within their community, to which I will say you are correct – because, that’s what we all do, we try to fit in, and there’s a certain amount of that. There’s pressure to get the audience response lines correct and with the group. There are certain memes that regularly crop up in the audience costumes and actions – you’re encouraged to participate and to try to get it right.
But, I would contend that it is the conformity of resistance.
There’s a strange combination of words – conformity of resistance. In fact, I think that may be the main thesis of the show, tonight, Conformity of Resistance – conforming to resistance doesn’t seem possible as a concept, does it? I mean if you’re conforming are you actually resisting.
I think it comes down to drawing a thin line between the words conform and commune.
Conforming means that one adheres, broadly, to the ideals, ideas, and norms of the group, whether or not one fully buys into all of it.
Communing or joining a community means that you may embrace the norms and standards of the group, but you do so willingly and with understanding, maintaining distance and separation from those very same standards.
Let me give you an example.
At the Nuart, the other evening, there were several audience members dressed in full costume – Magenta’s maid costume, Columbia’s shorts and top hat, Janet’s pinafore and hat – all the standard, stereotypical cosplay elements of Rocky Horror.
But – the gentleman working the door and making sure that everyone new the rules and was safe wasn’t wearing street clothes. He wasn’t wearing a costume from the movie – NOPE, he was wearing a full-body, head-to-toe hamster costume, while his assistant was a plus dinosaur.
As we move into these next four years, we need to be the hamster and the dinosaur, and we need to find our own midnight movie. We’ll be back with more of this insanity, right after these messages on 88.1 KFCF.
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We’re back with the Struggle on 88.1 KFCF and before the break I was talking about my adventure, this past Saturday in SoCal. Spending the day at Disneyland and then hitting up the midnight showing of Rocky Horror at midnight at the Nuart theatre, where it’s been playing since 1976, and I suggested that we need to be more Rocky Horror and less Disney.
I’m sure you’re thinking that I’ve lost it. This is the Struggle. This is a show where we’re supposed to be discussing the resistance to the rise of Fascism and finding ways to prevent the country to returning to what it always was – a nation founded on genocide and built on the backs of enslaved people, that exploits migrant and foreign labour to enrich those at the top while working hard to convince those at the bottom and middle that they’re still better off that women or people of color, so they shouldn’t complain.
Well, dammit, that’s what I’m doing, I’m just not doing it by freaking out over every potential Trump nominee or executive order. We’ve done that for more than a decade and all it did was make him and his fascist movement stronger. There has to be another way, and I’m beginning to see one such possible way. It won’t be a quick fix. It won’t save some of us from horrible abuse at the hands of our neighbors or our government, but it’s the type of change that is necessary if we’re ever going to save ourselves from ourselves. Knee jerk reactions to each and every outrage just keep us angry and does nothing. It reinforces their side, as they double down and revel in the knowledge that, once again, they owned the libtards.
I’m done playing that game. I’m done being manipulated by the politicians. I’m tired of being played by the media. I refuse to conform. I refuse to give in.
I want to take a few minutes to digress, here, and discuss Walt Disney and his vision for his park, because it’s crucial to understand those areas in which Disney, the company, has abandoned Disney, the man.
Let’s start with cost. Walt wanted the park to be affordable to all families. Gradully, over time, the cost of admission has risen and the cost of everything within the boundaries of the parks has gone up, significantly.
But, the park, itself, reflects a world view that was natural to Walt, based on his own past. His version of main street, the hub of the park, was a nostalgic recreation of small-town, mid-west America at the end of the 19th century. Besides the architecture, originally, main street had numerous enterprises that you would have found on that street in the eighteen hundreds. The Ice Creame Parlor may still be there, but not in the configuration that Walt had it. For that you’d have to go to Hanford and Superior Dairy, until a few years ago – a true ice cream parlor. The penny arcade had hand cranked nickelodeons, pinball machines, and other late 19th and early 20th Century mechanical entertainments.
The mad hatter was a haberdasher.
The Kodak shop sold cameras and film.
Today, if you walk into the shops on either side of main street where it begins at the circle inside the front gate, you’ll notice that all of the interior dividing walls have been removed. Today, both sides of main street are nothing more than two large Disney stores selling every sort of paraphernalia to get your money.
It’s all about your money. The latest thing is to take all the lines, rename them “stand by” and charge extra for each ride, if you don’t want to stand in line for very long, thus making the regular lines even longer – all for a few more bucks. In fact, for just four hundred dollars a year, you can skip the stand-by (read that poor people’s line) and simply skip ahead. Yes, Disney now allows you to pay to line jump. In fact, they love it because it takes their overpriced park and provides one more avenue through which they can extract your cash.
So, main street has its own issues, while the iconography of the typical Midwest, white, small town of more than a century ago remains on the surface, if you scratch just below that, you’ll find nothing but crass commercialism and raw capitalism.
Other parts of the park also reflect on Walt the man, and the world from which he came and into which the park was created.
While the most racist aspects of the park have been eliminated, perhaps it’s worth remembering some of them.
Remember the so-called settler’s cabin on Tom Sawyer’s island burning while quote-unquote native savages whooped and hollered in glee. That scene was included in the Disneyland Train, on both Columbia and the Steamship rides, and was visible from New Orleans Square.
FrontierLand comes right out of colonialism, the White Man’s Burden, and the age of exploitation or exploration, depending on your point of view. The entire concept of the Frontier was popularized by historians in the early 20th Century as a framing mechanism for American history. Jackson Turner posited that the American spirit was at it’s best when it was at the edge of civilization – the Frontier – where it could transform the landscape and the people on it, usually by destroying what was already there. That view of history justifies the subjugation and destruction of indigenous peoples and the environment. Kipling’s White Man’s Burden turned into an amusement park.
The jungle cruise glorifies the great white hunter (originally having black animatronic natives attack the boat, before they were reprogrammed to waive at the boat, before ultimately being removed). The shops in that area were designed to look like trading posts on the African coast or the Amazon jungle, with people roaming around in pith helmets looking like Jungle Jim or Tarzan’s cousin. If you’re going to promote white supremacy, you have to have a great white hope, like Tarzan or Donald Trump.
The Silver Dollar Saloon and the surrounding area was developed to compete directly with Knott’s, which had preceded Disneyland’s opening. Like Knott’s, this section of the park centered around a western street, with gun fights and obedient Indians – even cigar store Indians. Harkening back to a so-called golden age centered on the cowboy and the trapper.
I honestly believe that Walt saw Main Street, as well as Frontierland within the same context into which he put the Carousel of Tomorrow, the Monsanto Ride, Circarama (the single most vomit-inducing amusement park ride ever devised) and Mister Lincoln as educational features, not just raw nostalgia or white propaganda.
But, what about Disney being so woke? There’s the Small World ride, plus all those inclusivity policies that pissed off Ron DeSantis and the rest of the Florida GOP.
Hunny, Disney only let in queer folks when they realized just how much money could be brought in by selling Mickey for Pride.
They’re not woke because they believe it. They’re woke because it’s profitable.
Disneyland being woke is like Whole Foods being liberal – I’ll come back to that.
Now, before I go off on Whole Foods, don’t get me wrong. I like Disneyland. As an amusement or theme park, it’s probably the best. They are the best at crowd control. They have the cleanest park, especially when compared to places like Magic Mountain or Great America, but it is what it is. A park designed originally to glorify a vision of America that hasn’t existed for almost a century and has become a huge profit center for corporate America.
But it is fun. I’m willing to go with friends and family, and I’ll have a good time while doing it. And that’s why this is starting to represent such a huge analog for me – America is DisneyLand – Walt has gotten his dream. It has a lot of things to offer – especially on the surface, but underneath, just like the behind the scenes areas of Disneyland, it’s really about profit and control.
For most of our lives, we have to live within this world that might look bright and shiny on the surface, but that has dark, deep underpinnings that we might not be comfortable with.
You and I have to live in this contemporary world, but my plan is to make the most of the best parts, fix what I can, and ignore the rest.
But, in reality, while having to spend most of my time being controlled and routed from que to que, I want to be Rocky Horror. After spending most of my life in our shared Disneyland, I want to find that midnight movie – out of the mainstream, out of normal time, out of step.
But then, I am out of step. Most of my life I’ve been out of step. I’ve rarely held a typical 9-5 job. For more than sixty-five years, I’ve been out of the loop. I’ve been living in an alternate world of my own choosing. I can’t say making, because that’s not accurate. It takes more than one person to create an entire world, so each of us has to find and help build our reality, with the hope that, ultimately, that reality will spill out and over into the rest of the world.
Finding and building that reality isn’t going to happen if I just spend all my time worried about what Donald Trump and the Magats are doing. They’re going to do their thing, regardless. People will suffer – hell, I might suffer. Who knows.
I’m not sure how or what it’s going to look like, but I want to build a world in opposition to the vision shared by most Americans. I reject a dark place where immigrants and women have to beg for equal rights, or where people have to hide whom they love or what they value. If I can legally keep that world at bay, I will. If I can’t I will do everything I can to connect with and to protect them, as much as my privilege can provide.
The voters have decided. Once again, I disagree, wholeheartedly with their decision. I think it’s dangerous. I think it’s morally wrong. I think this is a disaster for the country and the world.
So, what can I do? I’ll never impact the leaders in the Republican Party or convince Donald Trump to stop being the white supremacist, antisemite, misogynist that his card-carrying Klan father raised him to be.
But, I can work on developing safe spaces where hamsters and plush dinosaurs can be comfortable next to men in corsets and straights in street clothes. I want to help build something, and that’s not possible on a national scale. I said for many years that a portion of this country had a nervous breakdown with the election of our first black president and I knew there’d be a black lash – I just didn’t expect it to be this severe.
But it is possible to build the community, no the communities, in which we want to live. Start with your family and circle of friends. Gather around you all those with whom you see eye-to-eye, as well as those who you can truly reach – ignore the rest.
Then we can tackle the neighborhood and the city, even the county and the state. But, it starts with you and me. Just us. We have to decide to be different. I know it’s a cliché, but we have to be the change we want to see. We have to decide how to navigate the upcoming storm without compromising ourselves, our values, or our goals, while understanding that many of us could be up against some major bad stuff coming down the road. We need to be able to stand patiently in the queue to space mountain or the gas station. We need to put up with the crass commercialism of the world around us, taking advantage of those things that make our lives better, while avoiding, fighting, or otherwise, eliminating from our reality those aspects that don’t.
While we need to let Jeff Besos know that his decision to pull any endorsement from the Post in the last election was inappropriate and that we’ll no longer purchase his newspaper, we need to acknowledge that, from time-to-time, Amazon is the only place to purchase certain things and that Prime and the Firestick, at the present, may be the best option for our streaming services (of course, your mileage may vary), but that brings me back to Whole Foods, the relationship between it and white liberals being indicative of the actual problem.
Whole Foods was founded by and run until 2022 by anti-union, Texan libertarian John Mackey, who denies that climate change is caused by human behaviour. Not exactly a flaming liberal. Since 2022, Whole Foods has been owned as part of Amazon by Jeff Bezos, and we know how his takeover of the Washington Post has impacted liberal political coverage at that paper, yet I know many well-meaning white liberals will ONLY shop at whole foods, even when there are other alternatives that might be more aligned with their stated goals and ideals.
Bezos sided with Trump, this time around. I won’t pretend that I can, single handedly, make him feel any pain. In fact, collectively, if every listener to this station were to simply stop providing Jeff Bezos with another Amazon or Prime dollar, he’d never feel it. My boycott of Chick’filet and Hobby Lobby won’t impact their bottom line, but it makes me feel better. Are there going to be times when I have to order stuff from Amazon – probably. I did set up a Chewy account so I won’t be getting my pet food from Amazon, and I’m going to search alternatives for CD, DVDs and books. I’ll stop ordering clothes through Amazon. I’m sure the companies that print the silly t-shirts I buy have their own websites and I can get 501s just about anywhere.
So, I may still have to spend much of every day living in Disneyland, with all the conformists and the fascists, but, little by little, I will build my Rocky Horror – a world filled with local musicians and artists. A world where people feel safe being themselves where they don’t have to wear a corset and black stockings – unless they want to. Likewise, they won’t need to wear a baggy blue suit with a red tie hanging to their knees, either.
On December 5th, Marc Elias of Democracy Docket (a publication you need to read regularly) wrote the following. I think this sums up my current state of mind…
I’m reading directly from Elias, here…
After the 2016 election, a movement that would become known as “the resistance” quickly emerged to protest and confront Donald Trump and his incoming administration. The hope was that if Trump could simply be held back — resisted — for four years, politics would go back to normal. A Democrat would retake the White House and Trump would be viewed as an unfortunate aberration.
Since Election Day, it has become fashionable in some circles to view that effort as a failure. The cynics dismiss the grassroots energy and the hard work of so many as naïve and without impact.
As usual, they are wrong. The resistance movement helped protect the Affordable Care Act from repeal and lead to bold policies at the state and local level. It built new pro-democracy institutions that challenged Trump in the courts and in the streets. It inspired thousands of new candidates to run for office and contributed to a successful mid-term election. Most importantly, in 2020 it helped defeat Donald Trump
Republicans used that time fruitfully. They built new ideological organizations, new campaign structures, new media outlets and new leaders. Even as they suffered losses in the midterms, they were undeterred from their mission of fleshing out what a second Trump term would look like. For all of Trump’s disavowals of Project 2025 during the campaign, that effort and other, equally extreme measures were being planned.
MAGA was not focused specifically on resisting Biden. It had a bolder agenda. It wanted to build an opposing ideological and political movement to win elections and govern over the long term. It prioritized hate over hope, cronyism over competence and retribution over reconciliation.
As we head towards January, it is our turn to use this period productively. Hoping that Trump fails is not a plan. We must develop and foster new movements, structures, tactics, platforms and leaders to oppose Trump and articulate a positive vision.
In most democratic political systems, this is referred to as the opposition. Rather than a resistance, the concept of an opposition is more comprehensive and durable. It recognizes that there are no time limits to the effort.
In some systems the opposition entails an entire shadow government, in others it focuses on specific platforms. I don’t pretend to know the exact form it will take in this country, but I do know some of the basic principles it must embrace.
The success of our democracy rests on an effective opposition movement.
First, we must prioritize effective electoral campaigns that maximize the chances of electing Democrats and defeating Republicans. Obtaining power in our system of government means running well-funded and professionalized campaigns. Now is not the time to unilaterally disarm in the service of some higher principles. All legal tactics must be on the table. Ideological fights must yield in service of winning. We must recruit and fund candidates who can win their state or districts.
Second, we must be a big tent full of diversity of new policy ideas and approaches to governing. Political movement must be about big ideas. New Deal liberalism was a big idea. So was the Great Society, neo-liberalism and populism. But the leaders who embraced and implemented these ideas were not dismissive of other, competing visions.
A strong opposition movement needs to allow for people within it to exchange, debate and even disagree over the best way to solve problems. Failed oppositions seek to impose purity tests and purge dissent. Successful movements incorporate ideas from across the spectrum of its participants.
Third, we need new and existing institutions to bolster the opposition, not work against it. We cannot be afraid to let new institutions rise, and others fall. The only litmus test for groups is whether they help the opposition effort. Republicans and their conservative allies have spent years investing billions in a range of civil society and political groups. Building and funding pro-democracy opposition groups needs to be a critical priority for years to come.
Fourth, we must cultivate and amplify new communication methods and messengers. We need to identify and promote our best messengers and pair them with the most influential platforms, period. This means ending our reliance on credential-based legacy media. These high prestige outlets command very small audiences and that audience is shrinking. They speak to almost no persuadable audience. The goal should be to reach voters, period.
Finally, we must be comfortable using every legal tool available to challenge Trumpism in court. One of the most important lessons from the last eight years is that the courts matter. Many of the resistance’s successes were fueled by lawsuits. And when Biden took office, conservatives ruthlessly used the courts to block his agenda. More than half of federal judges were appointed by Democratic presidents. Many state courts are controlled by liberals. Litigation is one of the most important tools to protect democracy and we must use every tool we have.
I know that these ideas are just a starting point. The success of our democracy rests on an effective opposition movement. We all must play a part in offering additional ideas and approaches and not being afraid to take risks. I plan to be a part of that effort. I hope you will too.
I wanted to share that article, in full, because while its focus is a little different, it does kinda sum up where we currently sit.
Each of his five points needs to be considered. Point one, is electoral politics. I’ll cover that, but I’m not going to put all my hope in short-term traditional partisan politics. Although it’s a big part of the problem, it will, ultimately, have to be part of the solution, as well.
Secondly, he mentions big ideas, big goals. While understanding that big goals are often achievable only with small steps, Elias acknowledges that without the bold vision, the little steps have nowhere to go – again, this is politics at the state and federal level, all of which is important, but still falls within the Disneyland portion of the world – everyone’s there, everyone is conforming and being controlled, but as long as you acknowledge those things, there are still benefits to participation.
Third is what I’ve been asking for the past few weeks – the organizations and leaders that will work diligently and systematically to implement, one step at a time, a bold vision for the future. It has to start at the grass roots, because it always has. It has to start at the dinner table, the coffee shop, and the park bench. Organize and tackle one part of the problem, because the problem is so much bigger than each of us, all we can do is band together. I want to restate what he wrote, when he said, “Building and funding pro-democracy opposition groups needs to be a critical priority for years to come.” Let me repeat the last bit of that quote – FOR YEARS TO COME!
This is why we need each find our Rocky Horror Picture Show. We have to swim in the Disneyland of our regular, day-to-day lives, but we need to be looking forward to that midnight movie and the chance to break out, to be in a different community, one that the cherishes our differences, not one that seeks to destroy those differences, even at the risk of destroying me.
Finally, which is to be expected coming from the most successful litigator against Donald Trump and the MAGA movement over the last decade, Elias suggests using the courts. If your rights are violated by MAGA, contact lawyers like Elias and tie them up in court.
We have to use every tool within our means to oppose, to resist, and to keep up the struggle. We may have to swim in the sea that is Disneyland – and for many of us it is still beneficial be part of that vast ocean – but we need to find our Rocky Horror Picture Show. And, then once we’ve found that venue, we need to be the hamster.
For the next four years, I seek to be the hamster. I’m going to do everything I can to bolster my communities, my friends, my colleagues, my students, and my home. I’m done pointing fingers and feeling superior because I know better. While the facts and reality may matter to me, I need to realize that facts and reality mean little to most of our neighbors. They’re looking for Tinkerbell to solve all their problems. One more thing with the right logo, the right branding, the right style, and their problems will be gone, right? No, but it’ll take a long time, if ever, for them to figure out that they’re working against their own best interests. You and me telling them over and over just how stupid and wrong they are, isn’t going to convince them of anything – if anything, it’ll just make them double down and make the entire situation worse.
So, make your choice – Disneyland, Rocky Horror, or the Hamster – which one are you going to inhabit
You’re listening to the struggle on 88.1 KFCF, when we return, KFCF General Manager, Rychard Withers will be joining us.
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Join Professor Eissinger every Wednesday evening at 5pm for an hour-long discussion about the big-picture issues and how to mount an effective, purposeful, and lasting resistance to racism, bigotry, and misogyny. In the new era of the so-called Alt-Right (MAGA Republicans, white supremacists & neo-Nazis), every voice matters. This program is designed to address the local impact of national policies, as well as explore all the ways that everyday people, like you, can resist and keep up the STRUGGLE. Articulate and interesting guests dedicated to the resistance, combined with insightful commentary promise an hour of information you can use, every week.
Our mission is to resist -- to resist power and abuses of power. The first step in resisting power and its abuses is to deal in and with facts. This program is to give voice to the silenced and reveal the hidden. Topics will always focus on human and civil rights. We seek to protect the women's rights, LTBTQ rights, those of the disabled and the immigrant. We seek to expose racism, defeat bigotry, and eliminate hate. |
Fresno Indivisible
PUSH: Progressives United for Social Justice and Human Rights
Facebook Group
Website
Showing Up for Racial Justice Fresno
Closed Facebook Group
Fres.co
grassroots space for conscious cultural workers, movement builders, entrepreneurs, and artists
CRPE
Center of Race, Poverty & the Environment
Political Revolution Volunteer Toolkit
Online tools to help progressives win
In These Times
Progressive Magazine -- part of Act Blue
(not-for profit, progressive organization)
The Nation
One of the Oldest Progressive US Publications
(not-for profit)
Mother Jones
Another Long-Established Progressive Publication (not-for-profit)
Grab Your Wallet
List of businesses selling Trump branded products. Make your voice heard by hitting their pocketbooks.
PUSH: Progressives United for Social Justice and Human Rights
Facebook Group
Website
Showing Up for Racial Justice Fresno
Closed Facebook Group
Fres.co
grassroots space for conscious cultural workers, movement builders, entrepreneurs, and artists
CRPE
Center of Race, Poverty & the Environment
Political Revolution Volunteer Toolkit
Online tools to help progressives win
In These Times
Progressive Magazine -- part of Act Blue
(not-for profit, progressive organization)
The Nation
One of the Oldest Progressive US Publications
(not-for profit)
Mother Jones
Another Long-Established Progressive Publication (not-for-profit)
Grab Your Wallet
List of businesses selling Trump branded products. Make your voice heard by hitting their pocketbooks.