So I left an extra bone at the bottom of my object thinking I was being clever and giving the lamp base its own bone. Didn’t seem to any detriment until this lecture. The bottom bone is unparented to anything, and my base doesn’t have a bone at all because I forgot to do that. So if I parent the rig to the base I can drag the whole thing around for keyframes, but my base doesn’t animate and my lamp stem moves through it. I can’t parent the bone at this point because Blender doesn’t like the “parent loop” it creates. Is there a way to fix this or do I just need to recreate the rig?
Unparent your armature then add a bone on the top end. Pose the bones as you want, then parent your meshes properly, starting from the bottom.
No need to redo the entire thing, but it still might take a bit. 
Thanks for the reply!
I ended up limping my way through by moving the armature for my animation and then fixing everything at the end of the section.
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