[Barack] Obama doesn't disappoint me, because all during the campaign he said, I'm a pragmatic, middle-of-the-road, compromising politician.

One of the things that happened that I think is noteworthy, my parents were pretty tolerant people given their position in society. They were pretty interesting about being interesting able to look at their children and think oh my children know things and they gave us a lot of sense of our own agency, and that may be a kind of a ruling class trait.

[Barack Obama] was running for Senate and he's saying, I'm not for gay marriage because I'm a Christian. Jump off a bridge! I mean what the hell are you talking about? You know, I mean, what's he doing now? He's evolving. Evolving? Well, evolve for Christ's sake! And this is a guy - the whole gay community, and the whole environmental community and all these other people said, he's our guy.

Can we imagine a different world? I can. That's a world where work is rational, it's in the common good, and we're actually producing real things rather than spinning our wheels in dreams of consumer heaven.

My father lived with me the last five years of his life and passed away of Alzheimer's, and at that point he was saying to anyone who would listen, "We all hated the war in Vietnam." Well, it was easy to hate the war in Vietnam 40 years on.

Art and activism can be symbiotic. They don't have to be, of course; they can also be contradictory.

Organizing the working class in England or the U.S. or any other advanced capitalist country has been a daunting challenge.