Rage Guitarist Talks Presidential Election
Nov. 30 -- After performing a renegade concert for protesters at the Democratic National Convention last August in Los Angeles, Rage Against the Machine guitarist Tom Morello says that he is getting a chuckle out of the post-election shenanigan in U.S. presidential politics.
But at the same time, he notes, it’s a matter of laughing to keep from crying. “The underreported crisis of American democracy came long before the hanging-chad debacle in Florida,” says Morello, who’s preparing for the Dec. 5 release of Renegades, the Rage set of cover versions that marks recently departed frontman Zack de la Rocha’s last studio work with the band.
“The fact that both of the major parties are in a large measure owned, controlled, and leashed by corporations is a bigger problem, and the fact there is such agreement on issues such as NAFTA, the WTO, the IMF, the death penalty.
“It seems to me we live in basically a one-party system with two factions; that, combined with the fact that more than 50 percent of eligible voters still stay away from polls, means that no matter which of the pro-big business candidates is eventually anointed, 75 percent of Americans don’t want them. So I think that there are more fundamental sort of crises in American democracy that need to be examined beyond the minutiae of pregnant-chad legalities.”
Future Uncertain for Band, CountryMorello calls the low voter turnout “tremendously shameful,” but he adds that he’s not quite ready to beat people up just for not going to the polls. “You can ask people who don’t vote; they don’t believe that it matters,” says the Harvard-educated guitarist.
“If there were a candidate who was running, say, for a six-hour work day at full pay, you might get more people going to the polls. But the vast majority of Americans clearly do not feel represented, especially when you have the threshold of having to raise hundreds of millions of dollars in order to run for president, in order to purchase the advertising time and whatnot. That very much narrows the class strata that will be represented by the candidates. The deck’s stacked; I mean, Ralph Nader couldn’t even get a seat to sit in one of the debates.”
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