Playing tunes, calling for bloodbaths: Rage against the Machine

As we reported on Monday, the veteran rock band Rage against the Machine is going on tour next month, making this the perfect occasion for an overview of the band’s politics. We’ve already taken a look at Rage’s afición for the Zapatista Army of National Liberation, which exercises administrative authority over much of the Mexican state of Chiapas.

Rage on SNL

But like every good revolutionary rock group, Rage not only loves but hates. Unsurprisingly, it hates America. The title of its triple-platinum 1996 album Evil Empire, as frontman Zack de la Rocha acknowledged at the time, is a reference to “Ronald Reagan’s slander of the Soviet Union in the eighties, which the band feel could just as easily apply to the United States.” At Woodstock 1999, the band set fire to an American flag. When the band was scheduled to appear on Saturday Night Live in April 1996, its roadies hung two upside-down American flags from the amplifiers seconds before the band was about to play its first song, only to see the flags pulled down instantly by stagehands. When the song was over, the show’s producer cancelled the band’s scheduled second number and threw the guys out of the building. According to a statement issued by the band at the time, bassist Tim Commerford was “so incensed” by this treatment that “he takes one of the torn-down U.S. flags, shreds it up, charges into Steve Forbes’ dressing room [Forbes was that week’s guest host] and hurls it at his entourage.”

Rage performing on the steps of Federal Hall

In January 2000, the band shot the music video for the song “Sleep Now in the Fire” on the steps of Federal Hall in New York and then, along with about 300 fans, stormed the doors of the New York Stock Exchange across the street. The NYSE had to close temporarily and stop trading; Michael Moore, the radical left-wing documentary maker who directed the video, was taken in custody. During this whole drama, the cameras kept rolling, and footage of the fracas was used in the video. “We decided to shoot this video in the belly of the beast,” Moore later said, “and for a few minutes, Rage Against the Machine was able to shut down American capitalism — an act that I am sure tens of thousands of downsized citizens would cheer.”

Zack (second right) in 2008 Denver protest

Rage followed a similar game plan later that year, holding a concert at a Los Angeles venue across the street from the Staples Center, where the Democratic National Convention was underway. During the concert, the band members stirred up the audience’s anger at the political system, and after the concert a group of Rage fans threw rocks and other objects at cops outside the Staples Center, leading to several arrests. Eight years later de la Rocha led thousands of Rage fans in a march from a Rage concert in Denver to the Denver Coliseum, where the DNC Convention was underway; that same year, the band descended on Minneapolis for the Republican National Convention, where “post-concert rioting” by fans led to about 70 arrests. While performing at the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival in 2007, vocalist Zack de la Rocha told the audience that the Bush Administration “needs to be tried, hung and shot…We need to treat them like the war criminals they are.” During a 2008 show in Reading, England, de la Rocha also called for Tony Blair to be executed.

And this is only a brief overview of Rage’s decades of political engagement. (We didn’t even mention the band’s longtime support for Black Panther and cop-killer Mumia Abu-Jamal, for whom they wrote the song “Voice of the Voiceless.”) As Irving Berlin wrote, there’s no business like show business.

Bernie’s economics

The image of Bernie Sanders as a lovable kook – a cranky but harmless Communist grandpa – was perhaps cemented for all time by Larry David’s hilarious impersonation of the Vermont pol on Saturday Night Live on October 17.

But there’s nothing funny about the real Sanders’s politics. He’s been representing the people of the Green Mountain State in Washington for nearly a quarter century – serving as the state’s only House member from 1991 to 2007 and as Senator since 2007. Although he’s running for President as a Democrat, he’s never been belonged to either party, and has served longer on Capitol Hill without a party affiliation than anyone else, ever.

U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-VT, gestures as he speaks at the Californi Democrats State Convention in Sacramento, Calif., Saturday, April 30, 2011. Sanders called on Democrats to work together to stop what he calls the GOP's attack on the middle class.(AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli)
Bernie Sanders

He calls himself a “democratic socialist” and says he admires the political systems in the Nordic countries. We’re not the first observers to point out that his image of the Nordic countries seems hopelessly stuck in the past – but, then, his politics in general seem hopelessly stuck in the past. Although born in 1941, he brings to mind the raving New York Communists of the 1930s, who, from the safety of America, cheered Uncle Joe Stalin, turning a blind eye to the Gulag, the show trials, and the Ukrainian famine, and forgiving him for the shock of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact as soon as Hitler invaded Russia. Listening to Sanders, you’d think socialism had never been tried – you’d think, in fact, that the entire twentieth century had never happened, and its horrific lessons never been learned.

Vermont is a pretty blue state, but Sanders is so far left that one suspects that for many voters there, a vote for him in a House or Senate election may not necessarily represent an affirmation of his entire worldview but may, instead, be a way of getting their little corner of the country noticed, and – just maybe – an attempt to shake things up, to give the two-party system a poke in the eye. One Sanders on Capitol Hill, in any event, doesn’t endanger the prosperity or security of the Republic. But the idea of Sanders as a serious presidential candidate is something else again. And the fact that he’s drawing huge, enthusiastic crowds – and getting standing ovations on programs like Bill Maher’s Real Time – is deeply worrying.

This is, after all, a guy who supported the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, praised their “very deep convictions,” met with their leader, Daniel Ortega, and – while serving as mayor of Burlington, Vermont, before his entry into national politics – arranged for his burg and Nicaragua’s capital, Managua, to be “sister cities.”

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Beautiful downtown Yaroslavl

This is a guy who honeymooned in the Soviet Union – specifically, in the glamorous tourist mecca (not!) of Yaroslavl, which he also made a “sister city” of Burlington. This is a guy who vacationed in Cuba in 1989, met with the mayor of Havana, and tried unsuccessfully to arrange a tête-à-tête with Fidel Castro – whom he admires greatly, insisting “that he educated [Cubans’] kids, gave their kids healthcare, totally transformed the society,” and saying that “just because Ronald Reagan dislikes” Castro and his cronies “doesn’t mean that people in their own nations feel the same way.”

This is a guy who, during his years as mayor, reportedly had “a socialism-inspired softball team…called the ‘People’s Republic of Burlington.’” This is a guy who, before getting into politics, “wrote, produced, and sold ‘radical film strips’ and other education materials to schools about people like Eugene Debs.” (In fact, Sanders “still has a portrait of Debs on the wall of his Senate office, and calls him a ‘hero of mine.’”)

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Empty supermarket shelves in the socialist paradise of Venezuela

At a time, moreover, when chavismo has emptied Venezuela’s supermarket shelves and rendered the bolívar virtually worthless, Sanders has nothing to say about that disaster – which is a direct result of the kind of socialist policies he calls for – but is busy complaining on the campaign trail about the “choice of 23 underarm spray deodorants or of 18 different pairs of sneakers” that America offers at a time when, as he claims, “children are hungry in this country.”

In short, he’s a guy who doesn’t understand economics. He’s a guy for whom the real-world consequences of implementing economic policies matter less than the ideological impulse underlying those policies. And that ideology? It’s an ideology that’s led him, throughout his career, to embrace tyrants and belittle liberty.