Matthew
Hello and welcome to this episode of Superhero Ethics. Today I am back with my original co-host, Paul Christopher Hoppe, here as a guest. And we’re kicking off a new series today. You’ll be kind of shaping it as we go today because I am in Minnesota, as many of you know. We’ve been having — winter is always a problem, but the ice has been particularly bad this year. And I’m involved with a lot of people who are taking actions against it and talking about what else we can do. One thing that’s happened here in Minnesota is that one of the symbols that’s become really important to the people who are working against ICE and against Trump and things like that is what is being called the Minnesota Rebel, or the Rebel Loon, which is the phoenix symbol of the Star Wars Rebel Alliance — the rebellion that you probably know quite well — and that will be somewhere in the art for this show, mixed with the loon, which is the state bird of Minnesota.
Because it’s a phoenix originally, and so turning it into a bird makes a lot of sense, and I’ll make sure we have both of those pictures in the show notes or at least links to them. And so, to me, as a Star Wars fan who often doesn’t think Star Wars is that culturally relevant, it’s been kind of awesome to see how many people have adopted this. I was having a conversation with someone recently who said he loved that symbol, but for him, Star Wars wasn’t really what got him thinking about working to make the world a better place, about being a rebel. It was Lord of the Rings — talking about fighting against Sauron. And that got into this conversation, and someone else had chimed in about Star Trek and other things. And it got me thinking about two questions, really.
By the end of this podcast, I hope I’ve decided which is the question that’s going to be the name of this series. One of them is: what made you a rebel? And the other: who was your first rebel? The idea here is to explore with a couple of different people what the relationship is between how we feel about wanting to take action against sometimes the ruling authorities to make the world a better place, and watching and consuming a lot of media that’s about doing something fairly similar. Is it that our ideals shape the media we like? Has the media shaped our ideals, or at least given us inspiration and hope in doing the kind of resistance work? How does it all fit together?
Paul is someone who he and I have been talking about these kinds of topics for literal decades. I’m not going to tell you how many because I’m rebelling against ageism — most of which is in my own head when it comes to my age. We’ve talked about the kind of media we discuss, and we’ve also talked a lot about how we want to see the world become a better place and the actions we’re taking, and how things like this podcast or protests or marches or civil disobedience or any of those things can help to make that happen. So Paul, let me just say welcome, and start by asking you a question that I think is going to be broadly similar but different for each person. How do you define being a rebel?
Paul Hoppe
That’s a good question. I will lead with saying that I don’t necessarily think of myself as a rebel. If I had to choose an R word to communicate an idea very similar to what I think you’re communicating, I would say that being a rebel essentially entails a rejection of authority — in my own case, I would say it’s a rejection of the concept of authority by and large. I mean, I think there are some exceptions where authority is voluntarily given. Like, if I go to a martial arts school and I say I want to learn from you, I am giving that person a level of authority to basically tell me what to do, to instruct me to do the thing I want them to teach me how to do.
Which is very different — especially if you’re an adult and you go in and do it yourself — compared to a child whose parents send them there, and then you have this person telling you what to do and you didn’t really have any agency. So for me, being a rebel is at least the rejection of the prevailing authority, or in some specific context. You can be a rebel in one area of life but not necessarily all. It doesn’t have to be political. It can be social. And for me, the word I alluded to would be revolutionary, which I think goes a step further. The idea of being a rebel involves defining yourself as being against a thing. And I would say one reason I resist that notion myself is I don’t want to define myself by the thing I disagree with.
I want to define myself on my own terms. So the idea of revolutionary isn’t perfect either, but I prefer it a little bit because I feel like there’s an implication that if there’s a system and you don’t like it, it’s one thing to reject it — and I’m fully on board with that. You don’t need this second thing to say, hey, I reject that and I don’t really know what I want in its place, but I know I don’t want that. But to me, the idea of being a revolutionary goes a step further and says, not only do I not want that, but this is my solution.
Matthew
What comes next. After this revolution. Well, there’s a lot of great things you bring up there. And that topic of — okay, the Emperor is dead, the Death Star has been blown up, what do we do next — is one we’ve touched on a number of episodes and will continue to touch on. And also, as you’re talking, I’m realizing I maybe should have clarified my own terms a little more, because rebel has a general context of someone who rebels against things, someone who’s part of a rebellion. I was in my head thinking of it — because I think if you asked me to pick a term to describe myself, I’m not sure rebel would be the term, but I’m definitely rebel scum. What I mean by that is it’s a part of Star Wars. A lot of it’s coming out of that — the Alliance is now the term a lot of us are using here, like the Rebel Alliance. How do we define what that means and what it means to be?
So rebel scum may be the term I use going forward. But I like what you’re saying there, and especially this idea that — for me, one of the things I’m always most afraid of in myself and in others, and most inspired by the media that really pushes against this, is complacency. The idea of, well, this is how things are, and so I’m mildly comfortable — or even very comfortable, or even I’m not very comfortable — and I’m not really going to think about whether it could be better. I think it’s a very understandable mindset. If your father was ruled by a king, and his father was ruled by a king, and going back ten generations all you’ve known is a king, thinking seriously about something different is a pretty strange thought. And if you’ve always been taught to obey the police and accept whatever the police say, or if the government says we’ve always been at war with Oceania or whatever it is — I think I just got the names from 1984 wrong, so forgive me there — but yeah. Stories about people who start to say, wait a minute, it doesn’t have to be like this, it can be different, it can be better, and I want to be a part of making that happen — that’s really at the heart of what being a revolutionary, what being rebel scum, means to me.
Paul Hoppe
Yeah, I like that a lot. The core idea that’s most compelling to me, whatever word we want to use for it, is that things don’t have to be the way they’ve been. Just because something has been done a certain way for however long doesn’t mean we have to keep doing it that way. And there’s a level of energy involved in evaluating everything on its own merits rather than just taking someone’s word for it. I think it can be tiring and lead to fatigue — rebellion fatigue, essentially — where it’s much more stressful to oppose the machine compared to just going with the flow, swimming against the current.
Matthew
But that’s why being able to, at times, decide to respect someone else’s authority and voluntarily place yourself under it makes a lot of sense. I really like the martial arts example you used. There’s an extent to which I’m kind of the host, and so you’re letting me decide what topic we’re going to cover. My child is sick right now, and the doctors are talking to us about a procedure called inserting tubes into his ears. This sounds horrific to me. But I know — I did some research, I checked the credentials of the doctors, I checked some credentials of the hospital. But the idea that every time a doctor says something I’m going to say, okay, give me your proof on that, and Google it myself and do all the research to question the authority of this medical figure — I think a little bit of that is warranted. But going through life constantly saying I don’t trust your authority to tell me what medical advice I should be getting, or I don’t trust your authority to tell me to kick in this particular way and not that one, or I don’t trust you to tell me to walk on this part of the trail and not that one because bears are out there — well, the bear is going to tell you the camp guide was right. And thinking in those terms really helps me with the idea of: who are the people I don’t trust? Either because they’re not proven trustworthy, or because I think they have different goals, or because I think they’re abusing that power, or because I just didn’t have any choice in picking them in the first place.
Paul Hoppe
Yeah, absolutely. Essentially delegating authority is kind of what we’re talking about, right? For a lot of things, I want to understand how the technology works, how the medicine works, why the bears go a certain way. I want to learn about things and then be able to say, okay, what this person’s saying makes sense to me, because I’ve tried to get some context and find a level of understanding. But once I’ve found somebody I have a level of trust in, I do want to be like — I’m not going to try to tell them how to do surgery. That’s what this person does. I’m sure they’re not perfect at it, but as long as I believe they’re qualified, they’re the one who’s going to do it.
Matthew
And so if they tell you don’t have any food or water after midnight, you’re going to listen to that directive.
Paul Hoppe
Yeah, I’m not going to be like, oh, well, what do they know — they’ve just been doing this for years. And again, they might not be perfect, but they probably have a better idea of what’s going on here than I do. They are well informed and there’s a good reason for most of these things. But then if they’re like, oh, I need you to cut off your pinky toe before you come in — I’m going to ask more questions. Maybe that wasn’t the best example to summon, but —
Matthew
I think I can give a similar one. When we’re young, we’re taught to respect a number of authority figures. Listen to the doctor, the doctor knows what they’re talking about. Listen to the martial arts instructor, they know what they’re talking about. And one of those I was also told was: listen to the cop, the cop knows what they’re talking about. And I think for myself — and I believe for you and for probably most of our listeners — some combination of personal experience and what we see and read on television and in the news, and listening to the personal experiences of others, has convinced us that actually, a lot of cops are not really very reasonable people to put trust in. There’s a lot of institutional bias, personal bias, and covering-your-ass behavior. Cops are one of the easiest to point out, but the same thing applies to — not that anyone ever tried to tell me to trust a salesman, but if someone comes to my door and says hey, I think your roof needs to be fixed and my people can fix it, I believe that person knows more about my roof than I do. I believe they know more about the potential damage from the hail last week. I absolutely do not believe that person is giving me information in my own best interest. They’re probably trying to do anything they can to get a sale. So I’m going to question their authority. And yeah, we’re going off on this authority tangent, but I think it’s an important framing — part of the process is figuring out what authorities do you want to trust.
Paul Hoppe
Yeah, for sure. And I mean, if you want to get into the idea of where did that idea of being a rebel or revolutionary or not accepting all authority come from — I feel like there’s a pretty good segue here.
Matthew
I have a segue I was going to use, and there’s a good time for it, but you feel free to reject the premise of this. I think that for a lot of people — not all, by any means — one of the first authorities that we get some practice pushing against, and depending on how you’re raised you maybe push against a lot or a little, is your parents. Often our first rebellions are against our parents. And I think a lot of people in these kinds of movements see themselves as a lot more liberal, or a lot more progressive or whatever word you want to use, than their parents. For me, sure — but as I’ve heard, that’s not necessarily the case with you. Your parents were already pretty much rebels themselves.
Paul Hoppe
Yeah. My mom was basically a hippie before there were hippies. And my dad had more of a beatnik vibe, but I definitely wasn’t raised to trust and respect the police. The word pigs got thrown around, the fuzz — not like my parents went around doing a ton of illegal things, besides maybe certain recreational drugs. But they came of age in the 60s and were a part of that whole idea of not trusting authority. I remember having a conversation with a good friend of mine who went to your high school, actually, about how, as teenagers, we had this sort of feeling of rebellion, but our parents were kind of cool. We didn’t really have that moment where we were like, my parents are so uncool. I mean, there were things my mom wanted me to do that I didn’t do, and you could say I sort of rebelled against those very mild restrictions. But I was very angry as a teenager — just not angry at my parents.
Matthew
Your parents were like, you have to be home at this time, you can never drink. So we didn’t have that feeling of, ha, I’m getting one over on dad or mom by getting blitzed.
Paul Hoppe
Yeah, it was almost like not drinking or doing drugs was rebelling more than the alternative, because we hung out with whatever counter-culture group of kids you want to call it — the intersection of a few different peripheral groups. And most everybody was doing certain things, and I was just like, no thanks. We’ll hang out, it’s cool. Maybe I’ll try and catch you before you fall off the roof. But that was in a way my own rebellion — just like, peer pressure, no thanks. I’m not going to do what you think everybody else is doing, because everybody’s doing it, even when that’s the thing people do to not do what other people want them to do. And maybe that comes back to the whole thing about not defining myself through doing something different. When there’s a mainstream and you feel like you have to do something not in the mainstream so you’re not conformist — well, then you’re kind of conforming to non-conformism, as opposed to just picking your own thing.
Anyway, so my parents were a big influence in terms of not discouraging me from questioning people in positions of authority. There certainly was a general sense of listen to your teachers — but not like you must show respect to your teachers. When I was a little kid, all my teachers were friends of my parents. I went to a preschool in my building, and the three teachers were three of my best friends’ parents. They were all teachers and or performing artists. So I was able to develop a respect for teachers in terms of the act of teaching while rejecting the disciplinary aspects of school, if that makes sense.
Matthew
It really does. I mean, we could talk about our childhood histories for hours, and that’d be interesting to at least three of our listeners — but we should maybe connect this to media at some point. It sounds like a lot of your ideas didn’t start because you watched a movie that made you think maybe your parents were wrong. A lot of this you were getting from home. But do you remember what were some of the first movies that either helped shape your feelings, or reinforced them, or gave you a sense of, I can point to this person and feel like that’s kind of a role model?
Paul Hoppe
You know what, I don’t remember a moment like that. I mentioned this when we were talking about the topic and how I might be able to fit in with it. For me, it was more that I gravitated toward fiction that reinforced that worldview. I always loved Star Wars, and the Rebel Alliance — at its core it’s about opposing evil authority. That’s the authority, it has tons of power, and we have to resist it, we have to revolt against it. And if we don’t, they’re going to blow up planets. Maybe that’s more of a metaphor — but it’s almost literal. I mean, we have world governments that could blow up the planet.
Matthew
And our childhood years were certainly at the height of the Cold War. We’re both children of the late 70s. And the idea that Russia, America, or China could go to war and literally blow up the world was very much a part of our childhood.
Paul Hoppe
Yeah, exactly. And I remember going to Return of the Jedi — we’ve talked about this many times — at the Ziegfeld with my dad and my mom, and that whole feeling of that movie, seeing it when I was five. Then the next year I remember seeing the presidential election and just seeing the whole map turn red. I didn’t really understand any of the nuances of politics. I had already made major life decisions that can be viewed as political in nature — like I was vegetarian, because I just decided, oh, people eat animals, yeah, I’m not going to do that. And maybe that ties in with my cat a little bit, who was also totally a rebel, by the way.
Matthew
I want to hear about the cat eventually for sure.
Paul Hoppe
Yeah, we’ll talk about Paul Christopher Hoppe Cat at some point.
Matthew
The fact that you named your cat after yourself is the most Paul thing I’ve ever heard.
Paul Hoppe
It really is. I named my female cat after myself because I was both narcissistic and projecting gender roles at the age of three. And I wore mismatched socks, because I was like, well, I want a red one with a yellow one today. What do you mean I have to wear two red ones? And my parents were like, yeah, okay, that’s fine. Express yourself.
But yeah, watching movies like Star Wars, and also heist films — my parents were both really into crime-type things. Even when it came to a cop, it was like Dirty Harry. And my dad was a big Clint Eastwood fan — the Man with No Name in the spaghetti westerns. I do think watching something like Ocean’s Eleven — I know it’s just a heist, they’re doing it for the money, but the casino is like this authority that has all this money. Why did they get all this money? And when I think about childhood heroes, a lot of which I got from my mom — my dad died when I was eight, so probably less from him — my mom’s big hero that she loved the most was Robin Hood. Robin Hood is obviously a legendary figure, but it’s not King Arthur — it’s Robin Hood. I was always into the medieval stuff, but the rogues as opposed to the knights. If it was a knight, it was a dark knight. And I remember seeing Batman in the theater and having this kind of reaffirming feeling — aside from just feeling like, hmm, I think black’s a cool color to wear, maybe I’ll start doing that again — but the idea of: if you don’t like the way things are, you can do what you can to change it.
So there wasn’t a single piece of media that had that effect on me. I’ve always been into characters that are outside of the system. I loved Superman when I was really little — he was my first superhero. But as I got older, not even that much older, I gravitated toward Batman. And now I love both of them and the interplay, things like Public Enemies — or is it World’s Greatest Heroes? Is that what it’s called? You know what I’m talking about — the one in the animated series where the two of them are together. Not so much Batman versus Superman. But I certainly ended up where — watching something like the Justice League series where Superman’s like, oh, we should turn ourselves in to the authorities, because it’s the right thing to do, and Batman’s like, if you want to clear your name, do it yourself, don’t sit there on the sidelines, get it done yourself — because you can’t necessarily trust the authorities to do everything right.
Matthew
Yeah. Well, I love that story, and for me it opens up a couple of things. First, I was very much with you. I think — as I’ve said before, and I think you may have said something similar — I don’t remember the first time I saw Star Wars. It was just always a part of my childhood life, not because my parents loved it, though my mother especially did. I would apparently, from before I could remember, say this is the movie I want to watch again and again and again.
But I definitely remember watching Return of the Jedi and having a lot of those same feelings, especially this idea of someone like Luke — a total nobody — who could be the one to make the change. And the Ewoks really pushing this idea that even if you’re not the ones with the power, if you’re not the ones with all the technology, if you’re the ones that others look down on, you can still come together.
But really, what your story points me toward is this idea that when we think about the influence media can have on us, there are a number of different ways that can take shape — a number of steps toward becoming rebel scum that media can influence, from zero to all of them. I just think about memories of the first time I saw a homeless person in wintertime in New York, and they were cold. And I didn’t understand because I knew I had friends who had country houses. And I said to my mom, wait a minute, Billy has two houses, that guy has none. Why don’t they just give him one of their houses? What is it that teaches you that not only do things not have to be this way, but you can be a part of making them better?
Yeah — there’s the stuff that inspires you in terms of here’s a possible role that you could play, what’s the part of being a rebel or what’s the part of the revolution that fits you best. There are the things that give you hope — and I think I may be a lot more susceptible to this than you are. There are certainly a lot of times where it’s kind of hard to think that the revolution is going to win. When Trump got elected first once and then twice. Even years before that, after 9/11, when we were looking to go to war in Iraq — I remember being part of so many protests, and the weekend before the attack started, there were protests around the world and there were so many people and it was all being documented on the very beginnings of the internet. And I remember thinking there’s no way they can go to war now, the world has spoken. And they did. And then we got into a horrible war in Iraq for multiple years. I remember just having this sense of hopelessness, and so I went home and binge-watched Star Wars and then The West Wing. So that’s another thing that media can do — it can re-inspire you. Not what first taught you, but it reminds you that there can be hope, we can believe this kind of thing can happen.
Paul Hoppe
Yeah, The West Wing, a show that reminds us all that maybe the United States can have a Latino president.
Matthew
There’s a lot of things in The West Wing that at the time felt like a liberal fantasy of what we wished Bill Clinton could be. And now we look and go, oh, you remember when Republicans were sort of, kind of, possibly a little bit reasonable, even if we just disagreed with them.
Paul Hoppe
Yeah, it feels like so long ago. I was just going to say I really like the idea of having something you can watch that is inspiring or hopeful. That’s something we’ve actually talked about a lot. And maybe it’s a little too on the nose with Star Wars, but George Lucas said to Dave Filoni when he was doing the Clone Wars — don’t forget to give them some hope. And they’re not Hawkeye after all.
Matthew
The first movie is literally called A New Hope.
Paul Hoppe
Exactly. But that’s one of the things I loved about that series. There are things made today that seem largely lacking in hope and that paint a very bleak picture. I’ve said this before: I would probably describe myself as a cynical optimist. I’m very cynical about the way things are, but on some level I never believe that that’s the way things have to be. And I think that’s a very optimistic viewpoint. If you look at human history, there are horrible things that happen over and over and over. But things change a lot as well, and they don’t generally change all at once for everyone. There’s always someone left behind, someone under the new boot or whatever. But I feel like I almost have to believe that things can get better — because if not, then what’s the point? Which is different from feeling like, what’s the point if things won’t be better if I make this effort? Give me the one-in-a-hundred chance. I’ll take it. That’s better than zero in a hundred.
Matthew
So one of my favorite lines from one of these movies is in some ways one of the least hopeful lines, but the most cynical-optimist or realist-optimist. In Rogue One, when Jyn is explaining what the plan is going to be. She says, we’re going to take this thousand-to-one chance, and then we’ll take the next chance until we win the day or the chances are spent. She’s basically saying we’re going all in on every bet.
Paul Hoppe
She’s describing a poker tournament.
Matthew
Yeah, exactly — when you’re very short-stacked.
Paul Hoppe
And the way she acknowledges that — she doesn’t say because I know we’ll win. She says, yeah, this might not work, the chances might be spent, but we’re going to go out fighting. And to me that kind of like — yes, it’s really dark and we have a small chance, but we’ve got to take that small chance.
Matthew
It’s optimistic and hopeful in a very dark way, but it’s believable. Much more so than, oh, I know that the good people will rise up with us because we have God on our side, or justice on our side, or the Force on our side.
Paul Hoppe
Yeah, exactly. And I feel like in fiction, sometimes you have to lose in order to make the winning feel convincing, feel earned. Not everything can work. Generally narrative structure is: it starts with a problem, the characters try to solve the problem, and by trying to solve it they’ve created a bigger problem, and then they try to solve that and create a bigger problem, and then eventually they get it right — or sometimes they don’t.
Matthew
And so this is a whole other topic that you and I have been discussing for 20 years, and for eight years online on these podcasts. But I think it’s kind of relevant here. Because in part it shows the way different media can help different people. I know that for the most part you don’t like stuff that doesn’t have much hope. And for me, I love a lot of that stuff — I don’t want it all to be like that, but in part because one of the things that really bothers me is Pollyannaism. Both from people who say the system is fundamentally fine, it’s going to be okay — and from people who say, look, as long as we just get more people registered to vote, or find that one piece of news that truly convinces everyone that Trump is bad or whatever, then everything’s going to be okay. When I watch something that’s like, no, this is all broken, and there’s a lot of good reason to be cynical, it validates me — like, I’m not going crazy for thinking that it’s not going to be that easy. And I kind of interject my own hope into that. But I think that speaks to a very specific need I have sometimes. Different things speak to you in different ways.
Paul Hoppe
I’ll actually give you an interesting example that runs counter to what I said generally. I do want things to work out in my stories. I want the characters I like to overcome the characters I don’t like. I often want there to be heroes and villains — not unflawed heroes and worthless villains, but just heroes who are genuinely heroic.
But when I read Lord of the Rings — I read The Hobbit when I was about 13 and I loved it. I actually made a board game of The Hobbit for a school project. And I know you were talking about something related to that recently. But I got all three books of Lord of the Rings and I could not get past the first hundred pages of The Fellowship of the Ring. I just couldn’t.
Matthew
There were a lot of exclamation points in the dialogue.
Paul Hoppe
Yeah. And then I read the R.A. Salvatore books that we may talk about at some point, with Drizzt Do’Urden, and I loved those. And I ended up going off on that, which is funny because those borrow some elements from Tolkien. But then when the movie came out for The Fellowship of the Ring, I watched it and I loved it. And then I read The Two Towers and Return of the King — and spoilers for this book from the 50s and movie from the aughts — but when the Ents go on their march and they say, we are marching perhaps for the last time, maybe to our doom, I kind of had this feeling like they were just all going to die. And I was okay with that. There’s something interesting about the idea that they are going to go do this thing and it might not work, or it will work but it ends in their doom. And because I kind of view Lord of the Rings as a fable about stuff that happened on Earth millennia ago — if it is, then where did the elves go? Where did the halflings go? Where did the Ents go? And maybe that’s where the Ents went. I kind of thought that’s where it was going to go. And then it didn’t. And I was — I don’t want to say super disappointed, but I was like, oh, I kind of thought that’s what was going to happen.
And to bring it back to Rogue One — when I saw the preview for Rogue One and understood what its concept was, I was like, oh, they’re all going to die. None of the main characters are going to survive this movie, because if they do, people are going to be like, well, why weren’t they in A New Hope? Why weren’t they in Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi? I know there are some characters who do make it. But in terms of the main group, they didn’t make it. And but they still succeeded. They achieved their mission, which essentially turned out to be a suicide mission. And apparently there was an ending where they did escape, but they ended up going with this — and this is just a rare case where I’m like, yeah, I prefer this. This feels like the right ending. There is still hope. And I think sometimes that feels like the right ending, and I’m okay with that.
And that’s fine. The same way that — if I spent my whole life fighting for something and didn’t achieve everything I wanted to achieve — it’s kind of like leaving it all on the field. In sports, the idea is you give it everything you have, and if you’ve done that, you have to be happy with your effort.
Matthew
And I think the sports metaphor is really helpful there. But I would say instead of it being a, so it’s okay that you lost — it’s more, I know I did the best I could as I hand this off to the next person in the relay race. Because here’s where I was going with this: part of why I really love Rogue One, and a general movement in a lot of that kind of rebels-fighting-against-authority storytelling, is that there has been a move away from what was termed the great man of history toward the team effort, the larger effort. I love Star Wars, I love Luke Skywalker in A New Hope. But one of the things I’m sometimes frustrated by is when things make revolution look too easy and too simple. And I think when you grow up on that, and then someone says oh yeah, if you want a revolution you’re going to have to pay a high price, they’re like, what do you mean? Luke and Han and Leia, they all live, so who cares. And so on one hand, I love that in Rogue One they die. I think it would have been much worse if they hadn’t. But also I love that this was about — but Luke couldn’t have done it without all these other people that you don’t think about.
Right, and some of them you do think about — like without Han coming out of the sun to knock out Darth Vader, in a scene that doesn’t really make any sense —
Paul Hoppe
Out of the sun, Matthew, out of the sun, exactly.
Matthew
And without R2-D2 doing what he did, and C-3PO doing what he did. But also they couldn’t have done it without Jyn and Cassian and all these people whose names Luke Skywalker will never know. And for me, that also gave me a lot of hope, because having spent most of my life in the nonprofit industrial complex — a lot of people never thought they were going to fix one problem, none of them think the others are good enough to do it. Twenty people working against each other instead of working as a team. And being able to say, look, I’m not going to do everything, but if I can do this one little piece, and I can know that someone else is going to take my little piece and build on it and build on it — that’s really good. And that’s a lot more hopeful than thinking I’m going to be the one to run for president and fix everything one day. So that’s another way in which — but we’re talking about Rogue One, and I wanted to take that tangent anyway.
Paul Hoppe
Yeah, you used the word alliance before, and obviously the Rebel Alliance ends up making a lot more sense in Andor than in the original trilogy, where it’s just like, yeah, it’s the rebels — but in Andor it’s actually an alliance of all these groups that don’t necessarily want the same thing, but they definitely don’t want one particular thing. And I think that’s a powerful concept as well, where a lot of people are pulling on the same rope for different reasons. Okay, we know this is bad, so let’s end this, and then let’s figure it out later — that’s also okay. There’s nothing wrong with that. And sometimes you get problems when, in opposing the fascists, the anarchists and the communists end up not getting along, and then a civil war —
Matthew
Yeah. And I feel like I really like that some parts of Star Wars — now more in TV and especially in the books — have started to explore: okay, well, it was great that we had this big Rebel Alliance, but once the Empire is gone, the fact that we all don’t agree on what comes next actually poses some problems. Maybe we should have talked about this along the way.
And for me, there’s a real-life example of this happening right now. I’m not going to claim to be an expert on Iranian politics, but I think most people on most parts of the political spectrum could agree that the Iranian government was not really very good — religious totalitarianism, incredible oppression of women, and quite recently the murder of thousands, if not tens of thousands, of protesters. If you want to say that was an evil empire that needed to be overthrown, I’m with you on some level. But I certainly don’t trust the motives of the people who did it. And I certainly don’t think there’s an actual alliance here of everyone talking to each other and listening to each other about what’s going to be best, and certainly the people of Iran themselves are being completely left out of those equations. So yeah, I think you’re right that the alliance becomes important.
Paul Hoppe
And I felt the same about Iraq, by the way, 20 —
Matthew
Yeah. I think I was like, I don’t think the right person should be in power running that country, but I don’t think the US should be running another country either. To me, the most horrifying thing is that we’re doing the exact same thing we did there, which is also what we did in however many left-wing governments we overthrew —
Paul Hoppe
In Africa and Asia, almost always getting much worse results. Yeah. Anyway, that’s all a thing. And it’s about an hour. I want to kind of flag two things quickly — I’ll probably talk more in another episode. Give you a quick chance to respond and then we can talk about your cat and wrap up.
Matthew
One of which I mean to get someone on — possibly Matthew Carroll — to talk about is Star Trek, which has been a huge inspiration to me but from a very different perspective. Star Wars is really about look, they’re pretty clearly evil — there’s the Emperor, there’s the stormtroopers, and so on, and they’ve played with that some, particularly in Andor. Whereas in Star Trek, so much of the story is about the people you think are your enemy are actually people you just have a misunderstanding with. Can we learn new ways to communicate? And for me, that’s actually been really helpful as well. I love Star Wars, but if I approach every problem as a fight — looking for who’s the Emperor here, who do I need to fight against — yeah, that’s not great either. There’s some need for that.
And what was the second thing I was going to talk about. Oh, and just that I think a lot of the media that I really love is the stuff that challenges me about what kind of a rebel I want to be — that takes an idea I hold and says, okay, well, what if we take it to this extreme, do you still hold it? Give you a chance to comment on either one of those.
Paul Hoppe
Yeah, in terms of what kind of rebel do you want to be — do you want to be Luthen, do you want to be Cassian, do you want to be Luke, do you want to be Leia — there are a lot of different examples just in Star Wars.
In Star Trek — I know I’m sorry, I’ve never really loved Star Trek, but I feel like it is actually possibly more in line with things I’m interested in. When people talk to me about the Federation, I’m like, oh, that sounds interesting. But I just like glowing swords and telekinesis and mind control and space battles. Star Wars captured my imagination through visuals as much as anything, and the music — oh man, the music.
But there are a lot of Star Trek things I find really fascinating, and I often find myself in sort of a mediator standpoint online — not in polarized political debates, just in normal discussions about like sports or whatever — where I try and get into both positions and find the common ground. Like, okay, well, if you soften that statement to something you actually believe instead of this ridiculous hyperbole, and you soften your statement to something not quite so hyperbolic, can we find some common ground where it’s like you disagree, but not really as much as you’re making it out to be?
Matthew
Someone might think Soto is the best player on the Mets. Someone else might think Lindor. But we’re both Mets fans, so let’s not —
Paul Hoppe
Exactly. Or in 2024, people pretending like — obviously this guy should be MVP, no, this guy — when you could start by saying, hey, at least it’s close, right? Both of these people are worthy of consideration. Then you can say why you prefer one or the other, as opposed to pretending there’s some vast chasm and it’s not even close. That’s just true with so many disagreements people have — people exacerbate things by indulging in hyperbole.
Matthew
Yeah. It’s a lot more emotionally satisfying to pick a fight than it is to agree.
Paul Hoppe
Exactly. Deescalation is not exciting. It’s just good.
Matthew
It doesn’t make a good movie, but it does make some really good TV.
Paul Hoppe
Exactly. And then I have a sort of Trekkie-derived t-shirt idea I’ve always wanted to make, since 2016 or so. Everybody was saying resist, resist, resist — and I wanted to make a t-shirt that said, resistance is futile, the only solution is revolution. Because I do think one of the problems with opposition to the modern-day Republican Party is just saying, that’s bad, that’s bad, that’s bad — and not saying, this is what we’re presenting that will actually help people. Right.
Matthew
Yeah.
Paul Hoppe
And that’s a whole other topic we can get into, but I think it’s a very important one here.
Matthew
All right. Well, we’re just about at time. Tell us about one of the first rebel scums that you encountered — your cat.
Paul Hoppe
So when I was three years old, my neighbors Warren and Jennifer found a cat somewhere in New York — apparently in an alley, although where I lived near Times Square, there weren’t really alleys per se, but I like to consider her an alley cat. She was about three-ish and had been living on the streets for who knows how long. They found her and brought her to us and said, do you guys want a cat? And I was like, yeah, we want a cat. And my parents were like, I guess we want a cat, sure. We had had — my mom and dad had had a dog and a cat who had died when I was about two, maybe three. So we hadn’t been long without a cat. But those were their pets who I grew up with, you know, they were 17 and 18, and then they died. And then we got this cat who was just such a badass — this black-and-white tabby cat who was huge. And I named her Paul Christopher Hoppe Cat, because of course I did. And I would call her PCH Cat, and then I just called her Cat eventually.
But she was Paul Christopher Hoppe Cat. And I remember being in Kansas City with my family — we were upstairs in my grandparents’ house, and my uncle was up there, but then my aunt and other uncle had these dogs they’d brought from Florida. And one of their dogs was trying to come up the stairs. And PCH Cat was just like — bam — just smacked the dog right across the face. Not scratched her, just a slap.
Matthew
The goal is not to do harm, it’s to show disrespect.
Paul Hoppe
Exactly. And the dog just went running. This dog was like three feet long, two feet high — a mid-to-large dog — and Cat was just like, no, this is my place, you go downstairs. That to me is kind of rejecting the order of: dogs chase cats. She was like, nah, you run from me.
And then the only other story I’ll tell is she used to sleep on my bed, and one morning I woke up and went to get out of bed. And she took her paw and just batted at me. And I sat back down and looked at her, and went to stand up again, and she batted at me again. I’m like, what, I have to stay here? So, despite being a rebel myself, I did bow to the authority of my cat.
Matthew
In Andor, one of the things they talk about is the mask of fear — it’s not that the ruling authority actually has power, it’s that it acts like it does, and so we all act accordingly. I don’t think your cat was a rebel. I think she was more like a petty dictator.
Paul Hoppe
You might be right. You might be right. She was willing to use violence, so I guess we’re conceding that.
Matthew
Two quick things. I’m going to bookmark these just to say I’m aware of them and that we did discuss them, but I’m going to make sure they come up in another discussion. One is that for myself, as someone who’s autistic and neurodivergent, I’m well aware that a conversation about how much do you or do you not accept the authority of others is often very tied to that. And I think that’s an important aspect of this conversation. I want to make sure it gets raised — it just wasn’t part of the scope of what we could do today.
And the second thing — and Paul, I’ll probably have you back on to discuss this at some point — is that I think there’s a very interesting question about the fact that a lot of the media we watch about revolution is fundamentally violent. There are a couple of good movies about people who organize marches and rallies and strikes and go to court and things like that. But blowing up the Death Star is generally a lot more successful on film than filing a court brief.
Paul Hoppe
Yeah. I think the last thing I’d say is something I wrote down when we were going to do this episode — just got some ideas out of my head. And one of them was that I’ve always felt like there’s something wrong with the world, and never felt like there’s something wrong with me. I think a lot of people let the world tell them that there’s something wrong with them because they don’t like the way it is, or because it does certain things to them. I’m not trying to say I’m without faults. But I think an aspect of being a rebel or a revolutionary or rebel scum is a level of self-acceptance — just like, I’m okay. And it’s okay for me to want things to be different than they are, and to fight for that on behalf of myself and others.
Matthew
No, I think it’s true. And I think you are unburdened by self-doubt in many aspects in ways that I think are mostly to your good, and at times deeply frustrating. But that’s maybe part of why I said sometimes I want to watch the movie that just wallows in how broken things are, so I know I’m not crazy. And if you don’t worry about that, then that movie isn’t going to be nearly as appealing. So yeah, that makes sense.
Anyway, thank you so much. Obviously, check out the Star Wars podcast I do, where we’re going to be talking about a lot of similar issues. We’re also probably going to be covering — actually, by the time this episode comes out, we may already be covering — Maul: Shadow Lord, a new show. He is rebelling against the order of Palpatine and Darth Sidious, so maybe not quite the example of the kind of rebellion we want to look to, but there could be some lessons there. Check that out at some point soon.
Although we’ve been saying this for five to ten to twenty years, Paul and I are going to come out with a writing podcast. I’m sort of naming it here for the first time, throwing our hats over the wall so we have to follow through to some extent. When it actually happens, who the hell knows. But yeah, and also as part of that, Paul, you now have a writing blog you’re putting out. Tell people where they can find that.
Paul Hoppe
ZenMadMan.com. And yeah, currently it’s mostly poker related, but I’m looking to write some more stuff about writing and other things as well.
Matthew
Awesome. Yeah, I’ve been really enjoying those. Sign up — they’re definitely worthwhile. Thank you all so much for listening. Let us know: who was your first rebel? What made you rebel scum? I think that’s actually going to be the title of this series, so write in, let us know. All the ways to do that are in the show notes or on the webpage. But most importantly, we have spoken.
