Rage Against Fox News
“A good friend of ours said that if the same laws were applied to U.S. Presidents as were applied to the Nazi’s after World War II, then every single one of ’em, every last rich white one of ’em from Truman on would have been hung to death, and shot. And this current administration is no exception. They should be hung, and tried, and shot. As any war criminal should be. But the challenges that we face, they go way beyond administrations. Way beyond elections. Way Beyond every four years of pulling levers. Way beyond that, because this whole rotten system has become so vicious and cruel, that in order to sustain itself, it needs to destroy entire countries, and profit from their reconstruction, in order to survive, and that’s not a system that changes every four years, it’s a system that we have to break down generation after generation after generation after generation after generation. Wake up.” – Rage Against the Machine frontman Zach de la Rocha @ Coachella 2007
[“A good friend of ours” = Noam Chomsky (one of the most outspoken critics of the current administration’s foreign policy). See the full text of the interview that Zach de la Rocha refers to here.]
I know that we’re a few weeks removed from Coachella, so I’m a bit late on this one, but it’s really too relevant to simply let die down just because the concert is over.
Below are the print and video versions of a Hannity & Colmes episode on Fox News, in reaction to Rage‘s performance at Coachella. The focus is primarily on the speech from above, which was delivered during the song “Wake Up.” Well, just one fragment of one sentence of the speech, really.
For a quick visual response to some of the comments about Rage’s lack of popularity, click here.
Here’s a thread on the Coachella message board reacting to that same Hannity & Colmes episode.
An interesting excerpt from that thread:
Quote:
Originally Posted by Down Rodeo 
Did you like the way they framed the debate on that show? Let’s get Ann Coulter, who’s a Nazi, Ted Nugent, because he’s a rock star and also a redneck bigot, and a Democrat who basically agreed with the other conservatives. Wow, what a brilliant diversity of political opinion there. God, Fox News is leading this country straight to hell.
Watch Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War on Journalism. It’s a fantastic documentary on how Fox News works, and one of the things it points out is how the conservative pundits are always forceful personalities, and the liberals are either weaselly little guys like Colmes, or centrist Dems who essentially agree with the GOP position. This piece on RATM is a textbook example of that formula.
I’ve seen Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War on Journalism – I’d highly recommend it for anyone who hasn’t.
In response to criticisms of de la Rocha, I feel that the important distinction to be made in what he said is that “if the same laws were applied to U.S. Presidents as were applied to the Nazi’s after World War II,” we would be forced to prosecute our own presidents as war criminals because actions of theirs have led to death and destruction in same vein as what the Nazis wrought on Europe. The Fox News panel missed this, jumping right to the “tried, hung, and shot” part…
The idea here was to point out a double standard in international politics where Americans are justified because their actions are always in the interest of “preserving freedom and democracy” whereas actions with similar destructive consequences on the part of other nations would not be looked at in the same light by the international community.
It’s an extreme way of proving the point; something valid and logical can get lost in the anger of a band like Rage Against the Machine and mistaken for blind Bush-hating. The message in the song “Wake Up” concerns how dangerous this country becomes to itself and other nations when Americans blindly accept the actions and viewpoints of the President and the administration on the notion that their power gives them the appropriate degree of responsibility and forethought when choosing a course of action.
I think that the clip itself really speaks the loudest and clearest regarding the utter irrelevance of the opinions expressed. The very first insinuation of “using hyperbole to prove a point” is the only thing resembling higher-level intellectual thought. The rest is a pompous mess of dialogue, purported by people with inflated senses of self-importance, or simply no sense at all (Nugent – what is up with that look in his eyes?).
So instead of continuing to beat the long-dead horse of skewing Fox News, I’d like to focus a bit more on de la Rocha’s comments and how they reflect the general mood of the center and left-leaning public (ok ok, and the anarchists).
Right or wrong, the Bush Administration has made it extremely easy to question their motives since the invasion of Iraq. Sentiments like those in Rage‘s performance are simply a by-product of the Bush bravado – the gunslinger, shoot first and ask questions later approach to foreign policy that the neo-conservative core of Cheney and Rumsfeld have crafted, intending it to be the cornerstone of their “legacy.”
No matter what good intentions they may have had amidst the vindictive avarice, and no matter what favorable side-effects of the Iraq invasion materialize in the Middle East ten or twenty years down the road, Bush and all of his people did not succeed in sustaining an intelligent dialogue with the citizens of this country when making decisions that affected all of us.
In fact, one could make a very strong case that the Bush Administration has dealt a serious blow to American security worldwide by taking such an extremely unilateral approach to foreign policy during the past 6 years, and that we are much less safe both abroad as well as on our home soil as American citizens than we were before they took power.
I know that every administration is shady – it’s the nature of politics. I don’t know how the revisionists rewrote the books on Clinton so quickly, but he seems to walk on water between million dollar speaking engagements while Hillary is the frontrunner for the Democrat’s presidential nomination.
The difference is that the Bush Administration seems to think they could get away with flaunting their unprecedented authority over the judiciary and legistlative branches, stumbling through scandal after scandal. That post-September 11th blank check didn’t quite stretch as far as they thought.
What we can take away from 8 years of Bush, from Rage’s performance, and from reactions such as those found in the Fox News clip is the reiteration of one solitary fact: the true beauty of our country is the right of every citizen to open question those in power.
Furthermore, we should be able to do so without being attacked for a lack of patriotism or appreciation of core American values. I’m just another armchair general, calling it from the comfort of my own home, so I won’t pretend to know what it was like in Iraq. But I don’t think Rage should censor themselves simply because they have a similar lack of experience – because they can so easily be classified as millionaire entertainers living in a reality vacuum.
Most of the Presidents we have had fall into the same category of rich guys with a privileged life that have never seen the front line of any battle, yet they are the ones with the power to send hundreds of thousands of people over to fight for what they believe to be right. We better be sure there are as many checks and balances as we can afford as a society, whether through activism or commentary, to ensure that they are making the right decisions when hundreds of thousands of lives are at stake.
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