#Patt Morrison

[lenbryant]

Here's a great interview with Patt Morrison of the Los Angeles Times speaking with law professor Rick Hasen about current events and the plight of voting rights. Fascinating.

[xtruss]

The "Daylight," which carried passengers on a 13-hour trip between Los Angeles and San Francisco, was sometimes called the "most beautiful train in America." This vintage postcard from Patt Morrison's collection shows a train on a coastline stretch of track.

Is California About To Lose Its Most Beautiful Train Ride?

— By Patt Morrison | July 07, 2023 | Los Angeles Times

The tale of California’s railroads is a tale of beauties and beasts.

The beasts are the muscle machines, the workaday haulers chuffing to and fro with the takings of forests and mines, fields and factories.

The beauties are the glamor routes, the passenger trains that, whatever shabbiness may have befallen their interiors, more than make up for it with the grandeur of what lies outside their windows.

In 1882, not quite 15 years after the Golden Spike married the nation’s eastern and western rails, the enticing views of the California coast begat the “Surf Line,” starting with the National City-to-Oceanside route in San Diego County — one of the earliest of the lines that would be laid not just for getting passengers from points A to B, but from “aaah!” to “beautiful!”

President Lincoln, a-slog in the Civil War in the summer of 1862, was still farsighted enough to sign the Pacific Railway Act for building the transcontinental railway.

He did not live to ride aboard it. But he would have liked to; California was to him an El Dorado of prodigious promise and beauty, and he often spoke to the Sacramento Union correspondent Noah Brooks about moving here, “to afford better opportunities for his two boys.” At the White House, hours before he was assassinated, he bade farewell to House Speaker Schulyer Colfax, who was heading to California for his own journey. Lincoln told him upon their parting, “How I would rejoice to make that trip!”

Once Americans had supplanted plodding wagon trains with swift rail travel, the drama and the grandeur of the California coast were irresistible for railroads and passengers. By 1893, The Times was promoting the ocean and mountain vistas of the “kite-shaped” route aboard “panorama trains.”

A map published in The Times in 1893 shows the various train routes around Southern California. (Los Angeles Times archive)

But now — here’s that phrase that signals a change in fortunes — but now, what man hath joined by steel I-beams, climate change may put asunder. Along the gorgeous coastal rail ride through Orange and San Diego counties, the “Lossan” corridor train tracks are taking a pounding. (“Lossan” is brief for Los Angeles-San Diego-San Luis Obispo.) The bluffs are melting away like sand castles. The beach is receding like the Windsors’ hereditary hairline.

It’s an enormously popular route for commuters and leisure riders alike, as well as an indispensable corridor for moving freight. Anyone who’s been aboard knows there’s nothing as satisfyingly smug as flying along this rail route next to the frothy Pacific on a Sunday evening, and seeing miles of cars backed up on the 5 Freeway, trying to return home.

And still, humiliatingly, for almost 10 months now, the train service has been suspended off and on. At times the most scenic parts of the train route have been served by buses — buses! Some civic and transportation voices are saying perhaps the moment is here to move parts of the rail line inland, sacrificing beauty for safety and scheduling.

If it happens, it will have been a long time coming. The coast-flirting train lines have been beset by uncooperative nature almost from their inaugural runs. In the epochal storms of February 1914, the Lark — a swanky overnight train between Los Angeles and San Francisco — had to stop running for a time because of washouts, The Lark began in 1910 and made its last trip in 1968, by which time the commuter airline PSA had laid on a full schedule of commuter flights between Southern California and the Bay Area.

In March of 1906, a washout above Oceanside stranded about 150 northbound passengers. First a rescue ship tried to get them aboard in strenuous seas, but “the work of transferring the people to the [boat] was fraught with so great peril that after 18 had been dragged, wet and frightened, through the surf to the boat, the plan was abandoned.” The one hotel in town was taken over by the women passengers, and the men slept on the train, eating cream puffs and fudge for breakfast and dinner.

The peril has not always come from nature. Thirty years ago — and maybe even before and since — the boys of Carlsbad made a sport of defying death and the wrath of railroad law. They crouched on the wooden trestle’s inner rail and jumped away at the right moment as the train bore down on them. When the railroad put up fences to stop them, the boys tore them down and even dumped the debris on the tracks.

This country didn’t invent trains, but regards them as wholly American, from the plundering railroad robber barons of the Gilded Age to the notion that steel and steam can master a continent, no matter who or what had to give way. The great age of rail lasted until the greater age of the automobile, and the airplane, but even as we abandoned the train for our own wheels, we romanced it in our imaginations.

In 1978, Los Angeles County Supervisor Baxter Ward got his quixotic way: He persuaded the county and Amtrak to put eight 1940s railroad cars into regular service as the “El Camino,” along the San Diego-Orange County-L.A. run. It was called “El Camino” because, with some liberties, the path supposedly followed the camino, the route, of the mission-building Franciscan priest Junipero Serra.

Everyone professed to love the cars, and ridership took a happy 75,000-passenger bump. But it wasn’t enough to keep the old stock up and rolling, and six months later Amtrak put the cars into storage and put the modern “San Diegan” train cars back on the route.

Our excellent Times librarian Scott Wilson pointed out to me that the stories of coastal trains can be divided between the northbound from L.A. and the southbound from L.A.

Like many California trains, the San Diego-area Surf Line grew into its full length only by bits and fits, finally connecting San Diego to L.A. around 1888.

A train steams down an attractive track on this vintage postcard from Patt Morrison's collection.

Fifty whole years later, the diesel-powered San Diegan, blurbed as the “first streamline train service” between the two cities, made its maiden voyage in March 1938. Curiously, there seemed to be no VIP or movie star ballyhoo; instead, as The Times wrote, the inaugural passengers on the north-to-south trip were 150 L.A.-area schoolkids.

In 1971, Amtrak took over the San Diegan, and around 2000 replaced it with the Pacific Surfliner, a train that — with asterisk exceptions for interruptions such as landslides — makes its way through Ventura and Santa Barbara into San Luis Obispo County, 350 or so miles in total, above and below L.A.

Railroads were nothing if not ambitious. Tracks and routes came together piecemeal — railroad buffs know these by heart, every bend and curve of track, every name change and route alteration. By 1922, the triumphant Daylight Limited service between Los Angeles and San Francisco offered travelers a short-order diner, open throughout its 13-hour trip.

The more streamlined version, the Coast Daylight, hit the tracks in 1937 and called itself, with reason, the “most beautiful train in the West,” and even “in America.” (In 1999, the “Daylight” got its own 33-cent stamp as part of a postal series of legendary American trains.)

A display ad that ran in The Times in March 1937 shows a $14 round-trip fare between Los Angeles and San Francisco — "the most beautiful train in the West." (Los Angeles Times archive)

Finally, in 1971, Amtrak took it over and it became the Coast Starlight.

Its day-and-a-half-long journey between L.A. and Seattle couldn’t hope to compete with the swiftness of plane schedules or the versatility of a car; the nickname “Coast Starlate” caught on for good reason. So in the 1990s, the Coast Starlight, for too brief a time, offered first-class culinary luxury unmatched even on the Orient Express, and a Vegas array of live music and comedians.

The food — local and regional delicacies, wine tastings to match — earned a rave review from a food magazine for such offerings as halibut in a pesto crust. On one trip in the early 2000s, The Times heard that the Dalai Lama had recently taken the Coast Starlight, with bodyguards and his own chef.

But again, in spite of the Coast Starlight’s popularity and loyal ridership, it had to pool its box office with the entire system, so its success could not save it, and the lavish deluxe trips and the train “experience” went back to the utilitarian.

One coastal train trip the railroads could never offer was a route along one of the most gorgeous pieces of earthly real estate, Big Sur.

The flighty Highway 1 through Big Sur has been vulnerable to the elements since it opened in 1937, and storm damage shut down its trickiest section in January (that bit is unlikely to open until the end of summer). The manager of Deetjen’s Big Sur Inn told SFGate that “we’re America’s most beautiful cul-de-sac right now,”

When a narrow asphalt thread of highway can barely cling to the Big Sur cliffs, a railroad — even a narrow-gauge railroad — would have been logistically impossible and environmentally catastrophic. The best the train can do is to deliver you to a car rental company in San Luis Obispo or Salinas, wish you luck, and await you in the Bay Area to connect up for the rest of the ride north.

Now, back to the frayed Southern California coast, and the fortunes of its surf-skirting trains.

If we must abandon the trains’ coastal beauty trips for sturdier railbeds inland, the least that the disputed new technology of AI can do for us is to give train riders traveling through scrub and subdivisions a real-time virtual reality cruise along the old surf-and-shoreline route.

[merelygifted]

Aunt Mary Harrington, in 1923, sent to her niece Ida, in Portland, Ore., a California card celebrating “Christmas where the roses twine / Christmas where the poppies shine / Christmas where the sunbeams play / Like an Easter morning May. / Christmas where we spend the hours / Basking in the sun and flowers.”

via https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-12-13/patt-morrison-christmas-postcards

[denverworksheet]

Patt Morrison: Is California about to lose its most beautiful train ride?

The beauty of train trips used to be a key selling point. But with the Pacific Surfliner suffering the effects of climate change, safety and reliability may trump the pretty view.

from California https://ift.tt/T5x8qAW

[okclaudy]

Chapter 10- FIELDWORK

Karl Marx- https://socialistworker.org/2009/04/13/marxism-and-the-financial-crash

The article discusses how the 2008 global financial crisis demonstrates the continuing relevance of Marxist theory, particularly in the analysis of the capitalist system's inherent contradictions and the exploitation of the working class. The article argues that the crisis was caused by the greed of wealthy capitalists who prioritized short-term profits over long-term stability and the welfare of the working class. It also suggests that the crisis provides an opportunity for the Left to advance Marxist ideas and promote socialism as an alternative to capitalism.

Max Webber- https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-ol-patt-morrison-jerome-karabel-college-cheating-20190320-htmlstory.html

This story illustrates Weber's concept of social class, particularly his idea that social class is determined by a combination of wealth, power, and prestige. In this case, the wealthy parents were able to use their wealth and power to secure their children's admission to elite universities, regardless of their academic qualifications. This highlights the ways in which social class can influence access to opportunities and resources, and how the wealthy can use their privilege to maintain their position in society.

Bourdieu- https://www.hrw.org/news/2020/03/19/us-address-impact-covid-19-poor?gclid=CjwKCAjwitShBhA6EiwAq3RqAwvnCBJvQtEVGqNqNzEJpvhpGwrGBreDyakDsic04s9ywIwGbubnAhoCpB0QAvD_BwE

This story illustrates Bourdieu's theory because it emphasizes the role of cultural capital in reproducing social inequality, and this is reflected in the COVID-19 pandemic. For example, individuals who have access to cultural capital, such as knowledge of health care systems and information about public health, have been better equipped to protect themselves from the virus. On the other hand, individuals who lack access to cultural capital, such as those who have limited access to health care or who do not have the resources to practice social distancing, have been more vulnerable to the virus. Moreover, Bourdieu's theory of habitus highlights the ways in which social class shapes individuals' perceptions and behaviors. The pandemic has exposed how habitus, or individuals' ingrained habits and dispositions, can be a barrier to addressing social inequality. For instance, individuals who are accustomed to working in low-paying service jobs may not have the cultural capital or the habitus to advocate for better working conditions or to demand protections from the virus.

[bestprintbuy]

Editable Just Sold Postcard Template

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Sainsevain Street was ultimately renamed Commercial Street, and Wine Street you know by the name Olvera Street, for the county’s first elected choose, Agustin Olvera. Bauchet Street — address of the Men’s Central Jail — recollects Louis Bauchet, once a stalwart in Napoleon’s Imperial Guard, who started growing wine grapes in 1831. So is “Mateo,” for Matthew Keller, an Irishman who grew grapes near Vignes’ and Wolfskill’s property. He referred to as his the Rising Sun Vineyard, and in her e-book “Towers of Gold,” Frances Dinkenspiel writes that Keller was all the time taking over new viticulture know-how to make his wine better. In a thank-you letter from “Washington City,” Buchanan thanked the freres Sainsevain and predicted an excellent future for California wine.

For much more just sold postcard templates, check out ProspectsPLUS!. There are tons of of just sold and just listed templates for postcards, flyers, and door hangers. Plus, you can get your whole mail printed and shipped on to the shopper at an reasonably priced worth.

Unlike many news organizations, we have not put up a paywall – we want to keep our journalism as accessible as we will. Our impartial journalism costs time, cash and onerous work to maintain you knowledgeable, but we do it because we believe that it issues. If you respect our reporting and need just sold real estate postcard to help make our future safer, please consider donating. Postcards even helped to document events such because the African American experience in the U.S., the KKK, segregation, and Reconstruction. Patt Morrison explaining the method it works, its history and its tradition in Explaining L.A.

[stillunusual]

Betty Broderick was convicted of killing her ex-husband, Daniel T Broderick III, and his second wife, Linda (Kolkena) Broderick, on 5th November 1989. She was later sentenced to 32-years-to-life in prison, where she remains to this day....

[thecomedybureau]

Basically, any LA appearance of John Hodgman should be mandatory for all Los Angelenos (and Greater Area Angelenos) to attend. 

So, we’re giving you more than ample warning for Hodgman’s latest evening here in LA where he will discuss his book Vacationland with Patt Morrison.

Please get your tickets here. 

The rest of our listings for comedy shows, events, open mics, maps, and more can be found at www.thecomedybureau.com.

[rjzimmerman]

Excerpt from this story from the LA Times:

The Santa Anas are a toll that our putative paradise makes us pay.

They blow hot. They even blow cold. They may or may not incline us to murder, or migraines, or at least a seasonal snappishness. They scour the sky until it’s so high-res that you think you can make out individual pines on the ridgeline at Mt. Wilson, which looks no farther away than the end of the street. What else do you need to know?

Even more, I would suggest. Like a little fact-finding and a little myth-busting as the Santa Ana season begins. At its outermost sprawl, it runs from Labor Day to Lent, but it does its worst in September and October.

Like earthquakes, these winds have built themselves into the mythic landscape of our brains. Writers treat the wind like character. Joan Didion did; Raymond Chandler, James M. Cain, Susan Straight, and María Amparo Escandón in her new novel, “L.A. Weather.”

These are immigrant winds, born in the Great Basin, between the Sierra and the Rockies. From there, they come down upon us, hurtling out of narrow mountain passes that squeeze them into a blowtorch mounted on a rocket.

They are so fast and superheated that in the course of descending a single mile, they can get 25 degrees hotter — an arson wind, a banshee wind, hungering for our crops of desperately dry trees and greenery, for our roof-tile-and-timber neighborhoods, for the arc and spark of our electric lines.

That edge of dread — feeling the wind rise and knowing what might happen next — makes the Santa Anas as wildly unnerving as the first tremor of an earthquake.

Fire and wind outrace water and human wit. In Northern California, where they go by the name “diablo winds,” they have put the Oakland Hills and Paradise to the torch. Here, they have burned through San Diego County and Malibu, and Bel-Air, where, in November 1961, fire burned through 500 houses. Richard Nixon, who had begun the year as vice president, stood in necktie and dress slacks on his shake roof, using a garden hose to soak the shingles.

[swiftsuburbanlegends]

Quincy

Opening Credits: Rollercoaster by the Bleachers (honestly this is Q vibes.) Waking Up: Sadie Hawkins Dance by Relient K (I mean what a morning jam) Falling in Love: PATT by Against the Current... (it's cuz he was listening to Bex's album wasn't he??) Life: I Knew I Love You by Savage Garden (sweet) Mental Breakdown: Anxious by Kate Voegele (relatable) Breakup:  Lights by Ellie Goulding (interesting) Driving: Nothing Ever Hurt Like You by James Morrison (it's because he just broke up right?) Flashback: Trampoline by SHAED (that's sad) Getting Back Together : Better Man by Little Big Town (this is contradictory) Losing Your Virginity : All Your Exes by Julia Michaels (this is perfect) Wedding: Sweater Weather by the Neighborhood (I mean it's your wedding Q, you do you) Birth of Child: I Won't Give Up by Jana Kramer (this doesn't make a lot of sense literally, but the vibe is right. I can't explain that) Death Scene: Ronan by Taylor Swift (fuck you spotify) Funeral Song: Little Bird by Ed Sheeran (This is also depressing so works) End Credits: You'll be in My Heart by Phil Collins (I'm gonna cry)

[mistikfir]

The Jane Austen Book Club Movie Screening Patt Morrison, Robin Swicord, Kathy Baker, Hugh Dancy at Zocalo Public Square, September 18, 2007 at the Harmony Gold Theatre, Los Angeles source: Zócalo Public Square on flickr 

[thweaty]

Literally the man CNN & the DNC want the nominee to be: “The younger generation now tells me how tough things are—give me a break," said Biden, while speaking to Patt Morrison of the Los Angeles Times to promote his new book. "No, no, I have no empathy for it, give me a break."

i got a fun quote too if we wanna start whipping em out as if it’ll make any difference at this point (hint: it won’t)

[quakerjoe]

OLD VIDEOS: Joe Biden vs Bernie Sanders

“Young people have had enough of the "entitled millennial" characterization, so when Joe Biden said that he 'no empathy' for them, they fired back.

In a resurfaced video of his book launch earlier this year, Biden tells Los Angeles Times journalist Patt Morrison:

The younger generation now tells me how tough things are. Give me a break. No, no, I have no empathy for it. Give me a break.

The Democrat, who never took part in anti-Vietnam war demonstrations when he was younger, was comparing the complaints of millennials to his experience of growing up in the 1960s and 1970s. Speaking about the civil rights and women's liberation movement that were, alongside the war, both gaining a lot of attention at the time, the former vice-president said:

Because here’s the deal guys, we decided we were gonna change the world. And we did. We did. We finished the civil rights movement in the first stage. The women’s movement came to be. So my message is, get involved. There’s no place to hide.

He continued by calling on young people to get involved politically rather than to moan, saying:

And so, there's an old expression my philosophy professor would always use from Plato, 'The penalty people face for not being involved in politics is being governed by people worse than themselves.' It's wide open. Go out and change it.”

[denverworksheet]

Patt Morrison: The naked truth about L.A.'s swanky private clubs

An L.A. Times exposé — and in one instance, Gloria Allred quite literally exposing sex discrimination — led the Jonathan Club, the California Club, the Friars Club and others to become less exclusive, if not less expensive.

from California https://ift.tt/NfUqdI8

[weeklyhumorist]

#DrunkFlowers

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— Juliet Rocco (@JulietRocco) April 24, 2019

#DrunkFlowers was originally published on Weekly Humorist

[antoine-roquentin]

You’ve been an activist since you were a teenager. You’ve been very visible in the Occupy movement. When it comes to raising awareness for change, how different are you finding the power of a movie from the power of the street?

With a movie, you have the power of putting out an idea about the world and for people to take it seriously. I think often the stuff that we see just re-situates the status quo and confirms it. But my hope is to talk about things that could be.

I think the movements — even ones that I’ve been involved with — over the last 50 years have been mainly about spectacle, mainly about showing that people are fed up with something and not one that’s power-based, whereas movements of the ’20s and ’30s used the withholding of labor as their power base.

When they came out on the street in the ’20s and ’30s with 50,000 workers, they were able to say, “These are 50,000 people who can shut down your industry.”

And that was just a demonstration — that was a demonstration of power. What are we demonstrating when we get 50,000 people on the street today? We are demonstrating that it’s great for us to talk to each other because it allows us to say, “Well, here are people that are thinking the same thing I am, and people who are fed up.”

But in the end, it doesn't have the ability to exact change. It doesn’t have the ability to exact a demand. And in that way, it’s spectacle.

Therefore, doing a movie is similar in some regard, in the sense it is spectacle. It is talking about ideas. But I was involved in Occupy Oakland. And we have the most people of Occupy [nationally] to show up because we’ve called for a general strike in Oakland. And we got 50,000 people to show up because people were like, “Wow, this is something that might be able to do something.”

We all — even at a base level, even a Republican — understand that the people with the money are the ones with the power. We all learn that.

But what we don’t learn is that we are the ones that give the folks with money their wealth, and that we can cut those purse strings or hold back on them, and therefore have a conversation with power by using our power.

There are many people who, like your character Cassius — Cash — who say, “Look, I agree with you, but I need to pay the bills, and if I have to cross a picket line to do it, so be it. I’ll take whatever they pay me, and I’m happy to get it.” What makes these people feel they have any power?

I think that people end up realizing, in those situations, that they are just pawns as well, and they’re by themselves. You can’t get much done by yourself. Speaking as someone who made a movie — and it took hundreds of people to make it happen — I can say that. And any movement that we see, any big change, does take other people.

I actually don’t think most people would make those decisions [like Cash]. I think some would relate to what he’s saying.

One the one hand, many movements have put being involved in social justice as an extracurricular activity, as something you do when you’re off work or on Saturdays or whatever. And people say, I can’t be involved in it — I got to pay the bills. And we haven’t been organizing in the way that helps people pay the bills.

If there is a different kind of movement, where it is organizing around those things, organizing around putting food on the table, I think we’ll have a whole different look at these movements. People shouldn’t have to get involved after work; they should be able to get involved at work.

In the film, you make a lot of points by exaggeration. But it’s not that much of a stretch. For example, in China, you’ve got suicide nets hanging outside dormitories where workers live. And in your movie — I won’t ruin it for anyone — you make the point about workers being literally dehumanized.

In the movie, there’s [the fictional mega-corporation] Worry Free, which does lifetime contracts; you’re guaranteed housing, employment and food for life, and these things don’t exist in the U.S. It’s not only that they exist in other countries, but they really exist here because [of the overseas corporations] making things for U.S. corporations, so the exaggeration is only of geography.

There are so many things in this movie that, when I wrote them, hadn’t happened yet. For instance, one character in the 2014 version has the line that “Worry Free is making America great again.”

The reason that these things are becoming more and more clear to us now is because it’s connected to our economic system, not just connected to who’s in elected office.

You use humor as a storytelling device. The Coup’s 1993 album, “Kill My Landlord,” made me think of the old Eddie Murphy “Saturday Night Live” sketch “Kill My Landlord.” So the steel wrapped inside the smile seems to work a little better than all steel?

See, I don’t even look at it that way. I came up around organizers, a group of them who had come from the British mining strikes of the ’80s, and then some who were older and had been in the whole CP [Communist Party] days. These are jokesters. They know how to relate to people. They’re full of jokes, and the way that they’re pointing out things is really true.

The reason why it’s funny is this: Analysis is looking at how something works, and when you’re explaining how something works, that means explaining the contradictions in it. That point of contradiction is very similar to irony, and irony and humor go hand in hand.

And so it’s all one thing to me. It’s not like I have to put sugar on it.

When you wrote your screenplay around 2012, Barack Obama was the president and he was being reelected. But you also had Mitt Romney talking about the 47%. What’s changed in those years that your movie now gets made and distributed?

Movements. Movements coming to fruition. There’s been the Black Lives Matter movement, Occupy — all of those things showing that people want something different.

Also there was a [movie] development process that had to happen between then and now. At that time, I hadn’t gone through the Sundance [Institute screenwriting] labs, which gave people a lot more confidence in what I was doing.

There’s just a confluence of so many things that came together for this to happen. And I’m glad it didn’t happen before.

Why?

I probably would have been so eager for it to happen that there may have been other things that I would have compromised about. Through the process of the Sundance lab, I got a lot of good notes [about the screenplay]. I will say that the screenplay was controversial, in the sense that narrative-structure wise, it doesn’t do everything it’s supposed to do — “supposed to” in quotations.

And they’re all giving me advice, some of them that are extremely contradictory to each other. And then at some point, some of them are getting in heated conversations, and then I realized through this that nobody knows what they’re doing, and it’s up for grabs, right? You can do something different and fail, meaning it doesn’t connect to people. Or you could do something different, and it really works.

But it’s true about people wanting a good story, and a good story having to keep people on their toes to a certain extent.

If we were to update a movement anthem — maybe from “We Shall Overcome” — could you write one? What would it sound like? What would it say?

It would probably be a song from my last album, a song called “The Guillotine.” It’s a metaphorical guillotine because [if] you use the guillotine for real, just more of them pop up.

It’s talking about the idea that we have the ability to have a society where the people democratically control the wealth that we create with our labor, so we don’t have someone ruling us in that way.

Is this a system you’d ever take part in by running for office?

Nope. Here’s the thing: I know where the seat of power really is. And it’s not in the elected office.

Where is it?

It’s in the ruling class, the folks that have the money. For lack of a more understandable thing, the 1%, you know. Those are the puppeteers. The folks in office are the puppets. If we can make a movement that can get to the puppeteers, then the puppets will do whatever we want.

Think about it like this: Affirmative action came in under [President] Nixon, and it’s not because he just had one contradiction where he had some progressive idea and was like, “Hey, let’s do this.” No, it’s because the ruling class was afraid of this movement that was building.

Let’s take it back to even the New Deal. It’s the biggest liberal reform we’ve had in the 20th century — that and the civil rights bill. But that didn’t come because of a big campaign to get FDR in office. That came because all throughout the South, and places like Alabama, Utah, Colorado, Oklahoma, there were mining strikes, shutting down mines.

In the Midwest at the same time, in the ’20s and ’30s, there were people occupying factories. On the West Coast, at that time, there were the longshoremen who were shutting down the ports to create there, for the first time, a union.

In that milieu, with revolutions going on all around the world, the ruling class was afraid of an actual movement, perhaps a revolutionary movement happening, and because of that, we’ve got the New Deal, specifically because that’s what the left focused on — movements that were able to withhold labor.

So if we’re looking for extreme changes like that, and we want elected officials to make big changes like that, we’ve got to stop focusing only on elections because then we’re going to get caught in this cycle.

Right now, the next time a Democrat gets in office, all they have to do is be two inches to the left of [President] Trump.

The evil genius of Trump is that he’s already got the Democratic Party and people who want him out to move to the right in order to get him out. You got people cheering on the CIA and the FBI, this false nationalism where people are cheering, “Let’s only use politicians that only take U.S. billionaires’ money.”

There are people that are doing this that know better. But the opportunism of electoral politics makes people lie to each other.

Usually people ask filmmakers, “What do you want the audience to come out of the theater thinking?” But I’d like to know what you’d like the audience to come out of the theater doing.

I’d like people to get involved in campaigns and get involved in organization that can actually effect change. I hope that people are able to be involved in movements that take place at their job, that creates them, all of those things. For that to happen from the movie, that would be a lot, but that would be a great thing if it did happen.

But hopefully what happens is that organizations that are already taking on campaigns to change things, they will use the knowledge — one of the reasons that people like this movie is that it talks about changing the world — to get people involved in what they’re doing.