There are so many different ways to practice political improv. Here are two examples of Resistance Tricksters who are consistently Acting Up.
The Big Easy's very own, Tim Miller, recently interviewed Amanda Litman on his Bulwark podcast. Amanda is the co-founder and executive director of Run for Something, a PAC that helps recruit and support young, diverse progressives running for down-ballot office. She's the author of Run for Something: A Real-Talk Guide to Fixing the System Yourself (2017).
At 6:30 in this video, Amanda says:
"I think we've still got a wide open field for people to step up. Chaos is a ladder; climb it."
Tim and Amanda then discuss the political nuts & bolts and electioneering mechanics of what makes wave elections happen, citing concrete examples of past successes --- not only at the Congressional level, but --- down ballot. More importantly, they address how people can prepare mentally & practically right now to win big in 2026.
Stephen Pavey of Hope in Focus is an artist, a witness, a photographer, a contemplative activist – all of which come together in the vocation of cultivating a way to see, in order to bear witness to the world both as it is, and as it could be.
Stephen offers inspiration from the Prophet Amos, who begins a lament, or cry of sorrow, against a way of life that's reminiscent of the times we are presently living through: “There will be wailing in all the streets” (5:16).
Stephen tells of how, in our own day, the prophet Callie Greer, who lives in Selma, Alabama, and organizes with the Poor People’s Campaign, tells the nation, “You must let me wail.”
Stephen writes: "In February 2020, she testified to her pain and oppression at a public gathering in Selma: years earlier, her daughter had died in her arms due to poverty and lack of health care. Callie cried out, 'You must let me wail for the children I’ve lost to poverty and will never get back, wail for all the children we mothers have lost. I won’t waste my pain. I hope I make you feel uncomfortable. I hope I make you feel angry. I’m wailing because my babies are no more.' ”
Great post, John. I love Tim Miller's podcast. I'd love to meet him. Thanks for calling attention to Amanda's Run for Something. It inspires me: just what the world needs, a Get the Gorilla campaign 2.0. No, wait, we have a gorilla in the white house, with an orange tan. Maybe I'll run for Gorilla Catcher. ;)
I think there's a connection between Callie Greer's “You must let me wail” and my next substack coming tomorrow where i explore the need to embrace our righteous anger. There's time for compassion and a time for throwing the moneylenders out of the temple. In *Winging It,* i make a commitment to overcoming the tribalism that infects our political culture. but this must not prevent carefully focussed anger at the tribe's chief and his henchmen. it's only by overcoming their control over the tribe that we begin to end tribalism.
Oh, dear, I have so much to say to you! I am enamored of your premises, first of all. Improv is your Muse, yes. Oh, hell's bells you write so damn well, Randy!
Improv... I'm pretty sure you know a so fine book called "Free Play" written by my old friend Steve Nachmanovitch.
"Lila", the Sanskrit art of improvisation that keeps our world, our multiverse, in motio... for Dionysis, for Hermes, for Apollo driving his chariot across the sky.
And Trickster, oh, so much to say, say!
Ayah! I have to go do stuff....
I greatly appreciate you. I am currently an 81 year elder in Canada, Toronto. I have improvised with some of the greatest in a kind of amazing theatre jourmey.
Improv theory suggests that, in Randy's words, "improvisation is, like chaos apparently carefree and random and yet it is both deterministic and free.”
The deterministic aspect, in my view, reflects the roles that beauty, truth & goodness play in regulating our spontaneity in a manner which holistically integrates our shared aesthetic pursuits, criteria for truth & ethical norms.
This is to recognize that life's tehomic & formless voids, in which we are to be about playing, are not wholly nondeterminate spaces that existentialists are invited to define de novo, but rather are structured (indeed, some more so & some less so) fields of activity with varying degrees of in/determinedness. In a word, improvisation plays upon --- not some absolutely nihilistic abysm, but --- a radically fecund prevenient chaos.
Integrally related to a modicum of public order, grounded in shared, albeit often minimalistic, conceptions of what's beautiful, good & true, our improvisations can enjoy an abyssal freedom that, many would suggest, is in infinite potency to the divine. So derive our best societal, civil & political norms. Such are the grounds of our international declarations of human rights and various national constitutions.
There's another approach to improvisation that's unburdened by truth, unfettered by norms and unhinged from any shared aesthetic. It's spontaneity plays from a freedom that's not generatively abyssal but, instead, degenerately abysmal.
FOR EXAMPLE
Trump is the consummate self-promoter. His chief business instrument is branding. His primary mode of operation is transactional deal-making. In every transaction, Trump is the predator and all of the different counterparties are his prey.
Trump doesn't really produce. He only promotes. That's to say that he doesn't place any personal resources or capital at risk to manufacture goods or services. Rather, he leverages others' wealth and takes a cut, whether as equity or fee for service, primarily in a match-making role. Substantially, those others are the real counterparties, e.g. banks, suppliers & contractors.
Generally, he privatizes any profits & socializes all losses. Specifically, in order to claim his share of any spoils, Trump will assert the prerogatives of equity stakeholders, acting as an owner-operator, but only when an enterprise is successful. When an enterprise fails, he abuses the legal system to disclaim responsibility & assert victimhood by alleging tort claims against suppliers, vendors & contractors & lender liability against financial parties.
Trump's primary aesthetic pursuit is staring at his own reflection with which he long ago fell deeply in love & by which he's fixately mesmerized.
His sole criterion for truth is governed by a vulgar pragmatism, which is to say that if the belief is useful, then and only then is it true.
His guiding ethic is that all which benefits him is good & all else is bad. Ergo, all who promote his agenda are friends. All others are foes. Friends & foes change moment to moment based only on the current transaction. He thus neither holds grudges nor owes loyalty, attending only to those expediences presently at hand.
The above profile describes his business acumen, the ways & means of his self-promotional genius. Politically, this Trump-gun is for hire. He's willing to put his deal-making talents for use in order to take personal fee for service cuts from the spoils of geopolitical transactions of enormously larger magnitudes than Fred's legacy could ever afford him.
Essentially, then, he offers the same services as that all too common breed of lobbyists who operate free of scruples, unfettered by norms & unburdened by truth. Pennsylvania Avenue becomes - not a seat of governance, but - a mean back alley of K Street.
That's all to recognize that there's no Trumpian ideology to decipher!
He's not a foreign policy isolationist, adventurist or realist.
He's not a social conservative moralist, libertarian personalist or social engineering statist.
Economically, he's not a committed laissez-faire capitalist, Keynesian economist, trickle-down supply-sider or Scandanavian socialist.
He's neither reading nor burning the white papers from American Enterprise, Cato, Heritage, Brookings or Center for American Progress in order to construct a coherent governing platform. He's only ever playing these competing constituencies one against the other, alternately demonizing them as scapegoats or valorizing them to exploit their allegiance toward the end of using their support solely in order to secure & maintain an extremely raw, very naked & exclusively self-serving personal power.
In the political arena, Trump's primary aesthetic pursuit remains staring at his own reflection, imagining that self growing ever more rich & powerful, but not so much concerned with popularity as an end, but rather as an indispensable means to cling to power.
His sole criterion for truth remains that vulgar pragmatism, which works overtime manufacturing lies about elections, immigrant crime rates, perpetrators of war, defenders of democracy, racial inequities, deep state conspiracies, national debt levels, budget deficit spending, social safety net security ad in finitum. Some lies are big; some little; all are vicious demagoguery preying on the gullible. That's all toward the means of staying in power & ends of personal enichment, always relying on the mirages of his pyramid scams as grounded in the time-honored greater fool theory that underwrites his meme stocks, cryptocurrencies & cult merch collectibles.
His guiding ethic is that all which benefits him is good & all else is bad; all who promote his agenda are friends. All others are foes. Cross him and you'll get primaried. Reject the deal he's trying to bully you into and he'll mercilessly sully your reputation.
Some support him in the vulgarly transactional sense of a protection racket. Others support him solely for policy outcomes, so - not because of, but - in spite of who he is. I'm not totally unsympathetic to those buying protection or those who vote holding their nose, but am saying they should be clear-eyed about whom they've designated as the lesser evil.
Don't look for international conspiracies. He's not that sophisticated.
Don't look for ideological signals. His only beacon is his own reflection.
Don't even use chess vs checkers metaphors. There are never sophisticated cognitive machinations in play.
Trump's not Machiavellian. He's PTBarnumian.
He's not a modern Al Capone. He's an insidious blend of Eddie Haskel & Chauncey Gardiner. A true Hocus POTUS.
Wow, someone has been paying attention. Both to my explorations and to Trump’s depredations. And to learn at the end that Джон is you John, from Udstad Lane, Happy Jack absolutely makes my day. And proves that not one but two geniuses came from the birdsfoot delta. Thanks, John. Great to hear from you. in this Attention Economy you have filled my coffers.
Thanks, my friend. My response may have been a bit much. It's just that your ongoing reflections finally pulled the stopper of what's been too long bottled up inside. I'm so deeply grateful that you have both a voice & an audience.
While the treacherous jester engages the abysmal freedom of improv's degenerate dark side, just you wait, for we can be emancipated if we, as friendly jesters, are willing to plumb the abyssal freedom of improv's generative shadows.
This above, roughly translated into Yoruba/Creole, might read like this: enòn enòn, Aìku Aìku nde, Jacouman Fi na
ida – n – de, Jacouman Fi na dè.
Or, more simply put, colloquially, like this: God is watching. The jester causes it; we will be emancipated. The jester urges it; we will wait.
Sing it with us: Iko iko un day. Jockomo feeno aah na nay. Jockomo feena nay.
Thanks, Pinocchio. BTW, my best friend has a Pinocchio obsession. /Users/rfertel/Library/Messages/Attachments/db/11/B337FF61-DE8B-4181-B92F-BFE3C0667977/IMG_8059.HEIC
Don’t you love it when people fly their true colors? I’ve recommended that Mr Stahl run for Nazi-in-chief. I’ll run his campaign the way the Black Cat LaComb, racetrack tout, ran my dad’s Get the Gorilla campaign. We’ll call ours the Get the Goebbels campaign.
"Chaos is a ladder; climb it." ~ Amanda Litman
There are so many different ways to practice political improv. Here are two examples of Resistance Tricksters who are consistently Acting Up.
The Big Easy's very own, Tim Miller, recently interviewed Amanda Litman on his Bulwark podcast. Amanda is the co-founder and executive director of Run for Something, a PAC that helps recruit and support young, diverse progressives running for down-ballot office. She's the author of Run for Something: A Real-Talk Guide to Fixing the System Yourself (2017).
At 6:30 in this video, Amanda says:
"I think we've still got a wide open field for people to step up. Chaos is a ladder; climb it."
Tim and Amanda then discuss the political nuts & bolts and electioneering mechanics of what makes wave elections happen, citing concrete examples of past successes --- not only at the Congressional level, but --- down ballot. More importantly, they address how people can prepare mentally & practically right now to win big in 2026.
https://youtu.be/4gfpflLP0tg
Stephen Pavey of Hope in Focus is an artist, a witness, a photographer, a contemplative activist – all of which come together in the vocation of cultivating a way to see, in order to bear witness to the world both as it is, and as it could be.
Stephen offers inspiration from the Prophet Amos, who begins a lament, or cry of sorrow, against a way of life that's reminiscent of the times we are presently living through: “There will be wailing in all the streets” (5:16).
Stephen tells of how, in our own day, the prophet Callie Greer, who lives in Selma, Alabama, and organizes with the Poor People’s Campaign, tells the nation, “You must let me wail.”
Stephen writes: "In February 2020, she testified to her pain and oppression at a public gathering in Selma: years earlier, her daughter had died in her arms due to poverty and lack of health care. Callie cried out, 'You must let me wail for the children I’ve lost to poverty and will never get back, wail for all the children we mothers have lost. I won’t waste my pain. I hope I make you feel uncomfortable. I hope I make you feel angry. I’m wailing because my babies are no more.' ”
https://www.stevepavey.com/p/bio
Great post, John. I love Tim Miller's podcast. I'd love to meet him. Thanks for calling attention to Amanda's Run for Something. It inspires me: just what the world needs, a Get the Gorilla campaign 2.0. No, wait, we have a gorilla in the white house, with an orange tan. Maybe I'll run for Gorilla Catcher. ;)
I think there's a connection between Callie Greer's “You must let me wail” and my next substack coming tomorrow where i explore the need to embrace our righteous anger. There's time for compassion and a time for throwing the moneylenders out of the temple. In *Winging It,* i make a commitment to overcoming the tribalism that infects our political culture. but this must not prevent carefully focussed anger at the tribe's chief and his henchmen. it's only by overcoming their control over the tribe that we begin to end tribalism.
I don't kid myself that any of this will be easy.
Oh, dear, I have so much to say to you! I am enamored of your premises, first of all. Improv is your Muse, yes. Oh, hell's bells you write so damn well, Randy!
Improv... I'm pretty sure you know a so fine book called "Free Play" written by my old friend Steve Nachmanovitch.
"Lila", the Sanskrit art of improvisation that keeps our world, our multiverse, in motio... for Dionysis, for Hermes, for Apollo driving his chariot across the sky.
And Trickster, oh, so much to say, say!
Ayah! I have to go do stuff....
I greatly appreciate you. I am currently an 81 year elder in Canada, Toronto. I have improvised with some of the greatest in a kind of amazing theatre jourmey.
I offer you one more quote about improv:
"There is a moment, before which it is too soon,
and after which it is too late" __Joseph Chaikin
With respect, Michele George
Yours was right on time. Many thanks. Steve is a friend. Lila is new to me. I need to look her up. Did you study with Keith Johnstone?
Bannon adds: “This is not about persuasion. This is about disorientation.” Yes, and... we are living in cruel and unmoored times.
It's painful to use Bannon as a Rosetta Stone, but, damn, he says it right.
my thanks, buddy. With some apologies for the glee i feel being handed such rich material by the Orange Trickster on a daily basis.
Improv theory suggests that, in Randy's words, "improvisation is, like chaos apparently carefree and random and yet it is both deterministic and free.”
The deterministic aspect, in my view, reflects the roles that beauty, truth & goodness play in regulating our spontaneity in a manner which holistically integrates our shared aesthetic pursuits, criteria for truth & ethical norms.
This is to recognize that life's tehomic & formless voids, in which we are to be about playing, are not wholly nondeterminate spaces that existentialists are invited to define de novo, but rather are structured (indeed, some more so & some less so) fields of activity with varying degrees of in/determinedness. In a word, improvisation plays upon --- not some absolutely nihilistic abysm, but --- a radically fecund prevenient chaos.
Integrally related to a modicum of public order, grounded in shared, albeit often minimalistic, conceptions of what's beautiful, good & true, our improvisations can enjoy an abyssal freedom that, many would suggest, is in infinite potency to the divine. So derive our best societal, civil & political norms. Such are the grounds of our international declarations of human rights and various national constitutions.
There's another approach to improvisation that's unburdened by truth, unfettered by norms and unhinged from any shared aesthetic. It's spontaneity plays from a freedom that's not generatively abyssal but, instead, degenerately abysmal.
FOR EXAMPLE
Trump is the consummate self-promoter. His chief business instrument is branding. His primary mode of operation is transactional deal-making. In every transaction, Trump is the predator and all of the different counterparties are his prey.
Trump doesn't really produce. He only promotes. That's to say that he doesn't place any personal resources or capital at risk to manufacture goods or services. Rather, he leverages others' wealth and takes a cut, whether as equity or fee for service, primarily in a match-making role. Substantially, those others are the real counterparties, e.g. banks, suppliers & contractors.
Generally, he privatizes any profits & socializes all losses. Specifically, in order to claim his share of any spoils, Trump will assert the prerogatives of equity stakeholders, acting as an owner-operator, but only when an enterprise is successful. When an enterprise fails, he abuses the legal system to disclaim responsibility & assert victimhood by alleging tort claims against suppliers, vendors & contractors & lender liability against financial parties.
Trump's primary aesthetic pursuit is staring at his own reflection with which he long ago fell deeply in love & by which he's fixately mesmerized.
His sole criterion for truth is governed by a vulgar pragmatism, which is to say that if the belief is useful, then and only then is it true.
His guiding ethic is that all which benefits him is good & all else is bad. Ergo, all who promote his agenda are friends. All others are foes. Friends & foes change moment to moment based only on the current transaction. He thus neither holds grudges nor owes loyalty, attending only to those expediences presently at hand.
The above profile describes his business acumen, the ways & means of his self-promotional genius. Politically, this Trump-gun is for hire. He's willing to put his deal-making talents for use in order to take personal fee for service cuts from the spoils of geopolitical transactions of enormously larger magnitudes than Fred's legacy could ever afford him.
Essentially, then, he offers the same services as that all too common breed of lobbyists who operate free of scruples, unfettered by norms & unburdened by truth. Pennsylvania Avenue becomes - not a seat of governance, but - a mean back alley of K Street.
That's all to recognize that there's no Trumpian ideology to decipher!
He's not a foreign policy isolationist, adventurist or realist.
He's not a social conservative moralist, libertarian personalist or social engineering statist.
Economically, he's not a committed laissez-faire capitalist, Keynesian economist, trickle-down supply-sider or Scandanavian socialist.
He's neither reading nor burning the white papers from American Enterprise, Cato, Heritage, Brookings or Center for American Progress in order to construct a coherent governing platform. He's only ever playing these competing constituencies one against the other, alternately demonizing them as scapegoats or valorizing them to exploit their allegiance toward the end of using their support solely in order to secure & maintain an extremely raw, very naked & exclusively self-serving personal power.
In the political arena, Trump's primary aesthetic pursuit remains staring at his own reflection, imagining that self growing ever more rich & powerful, but not so much concerned with popularity as an end, but rather as an indispensable means to cling to power.
His sole criterion for truth remains that vulgar pragmatism, which works overtime manufacturing lies about elections, immigrant crime rates, perpetrators of war, defenders of democracy, racial inequities, deep state conspiracies, national debt levels, budget deficit spending, social safety net security ad in finitum. Some lies are big; some little; all are vicious demagoguery preying on the gullible. That's all toward the means of staying in power & ends of personal enichment, always relying on the mirages of his pyramid scams as grounded in the time-honored greater fool theory that underwrites his meme stocks, cryptocurrencies & cult merch collectibles.
His guiding ethic is that all which benefits him is good & all else is bad; all who promote his agenda are friends. All others are foes. Cross him and you'll get primaried. Reject the deal he's trying to bully you into and he'll mercilessly sully your reputation.
Some support him in the vulgarly transactional sense of a protection racket. Others support him solely for policy outcomes, so - not because of, but - in spite of who he is. I'm not totally unsympathetic to those buying protection or those who vote holding their nose, but am saying they should be clear-eyed about whom they've designated as the lesser evil.
Don't look for international conspiracies. He's not that sophisticated.
Don't look for ideological signals. His only beacon is his own reflection.
Don't even use chess vs checkers metaphors. There are never sophisticated cognitive machinations in play.
Trump's not Machiavellian. He's PTBarnumian.
He's not a modern Al Capone. He's an insidious blend of Eddie Haskel & Chauncey Gardiner. A true Hocus POTUS.
Take care, Randy.
Be Happy, Jack.
Yours on Udstad Lane,
john
Wow, someone has been paying attention. Both to my explorations and to Trump’s depredations. And to learn at the end that Джон is you John, from Udstad Lane, Happy Jack absolutely makes my day. And proves that not one but two geniuses came from the birdsfoot delta. Thanks, John. Great to hear from you. in this Attention Economy you have filled my coffers.
Thanks, my friend. My response may have been a bit much. It's just that your ongoing reflections finally pulled the stopper of what's been too long bottled up inside. I'm so deeply grateful that you have both a voice & an audience.
Well, glad you’re in that audience, or, as we say, in that number.
While the treacherous jester engages the abysmal freedom of improv's degenerate dark side, just you wait, for we can be emancipated if we, as friendly jesters, are willing to plumb the abyssal freedom of improv's generative shadows.
This above, roughly translated into Yoruba/Creole, might read like this: enòn enòn, Aìku Aìku nde, Jacouman Fi na
ida – n – de, Jacouman Fi na dè.
Or, more simply put, colloquially, like this: God is watching. The jester causes it; we will be emancipated. The jester urges it; we will wait.
Sing it with us: Iko iko un day. Jockomo feeno aah na nay. Jockomo feena nay.
I give you the multitalented John. Thanks, John. Where do I get more of that creole trickster?
I was riffing (improv-ising) off of Sybil Kein: “Interpreting Indian Chants”—a study of New Orleans Black “Indian” Mardi Gras
chants, based on the Yoruba tradition of voodoo, Social Science History Association, New
Orleans (1991). It's just one of many linguistic hypotheses re Iko Iko.
Oh, my, I have so much to say t
Another positively incredible post Randy.
Very stimulating and wide-ranging, RANDY! For nuts-and-bolts, please see--https://donpaul.substack.com/p/trumpmusk-and-2025-the-cleansing
thanks, Paul. Doing what i can.
Randy Fertel is THE king of improvisation’s political messages.
I really treasure that remark.
Thanks, Pinocchio. BTW, my best friend has a Pinocchio obsession. /Users/rfertel/Library/Messages/Attachments/db/11/B337FF61-DE8B-4181-B92F-BFE3C0667977/IMG_8059.HEIC
Don’t you love it when people fly their true colors? I’ve recommended that Mr Stahl run for Nazi-in-chief. I’ll run his campaign the way the Black Cat LaComb, racetrack tout, ran my dad’s Get the Gorilla campaign. We’ll call ours the Get the Goebbels campaign.