Rage Against the Machine was right about everything

We all rebel in our own ways, and for a short time in the 1990s mine was identifying as a Republican. Maybe even as a Libertarian! I found Steve Forbes’ flat tax proposal intriguing. I considered the characters in the play Rent to be deadbeats. I even read Rush Limbaugh’s book The Way Things Ought to Be.

Like most teenaged flirtations with different identities, this one didn’t last. I’m not even sure how serious it was at the time. The first time I was eligible to vote in a Presidential election, I went for Nader in the primary and Gore in the general, so it must have been over with by then. And while my Republican uncle had given me Limbaugh’s book as a gift, my Democrat mother countered with Al Franken’s Rush Limbaugh Is a Big Fat Idiot, which I read many more times.

Nevertheless, by 2003 any sympathy I had for right-wing politics had been quashed. Bush’s misadventures in Iraq didn’t just raze that earth, it salted it so that nothing would ever grow there again. But there were certain identitarian aspects that remained in certain dark and musty corners. During the Obama years, I spent a lot of time on the elliptical machine at the Boston Sports Club, plugged into a dubiously created music video channel. One video that came up pretty often was Rage Against the Machine’s “Sleep Now in the Fire.”

It’s a neat video. The band played a guerrilla show on Wall Street, causing the New York Stock Exchange to be shut down early. But it still struck me as a stunt even then, watching it as I was in the aftermath of the global financial crisis. The video was shot years early, around the time of the WTO unrest — which, if you want to know again how wrong I was about everything, was something else I’d smirked at when I walked by protests in Boston. Not because I didn’t agree with the cause, but because I didn’t know anything about it and wasn’t interested in learning. Protesting, though, that seemed cringe.

Anyway, my point is that Rage had been popular for a long time. Like most other eight graders at the time, I had a copy of their debut album and I approved of its anti-authoritarian message. That’s something I have in common with Paul Ryan. And although I liked the music well enough, I thought the band was silly, because everything was basically fine, and couldn’t they see that, and weren’t they getting rich off their protest music?

It didn’t happen all at once, but at some point in the intervening decades I’ve come to accept, with some chagrin, that Rage Against the Machine was right about everything. They had diagnosed the real problems and offered the correct solutions. Every single data point that’s criticized in the fake gameshow — inequality, poverty, lack of health care —has only gotten worse. My God, there’s a shot in that video of somebody holding up a “Trump for President” sign — in the year 2000!

So consider this my formal apology to Zach, Tom, and the gang. You were right and I was wrong. There isn’t enough rage in the world.