Cross-posted from The Nation
No musician has been more identified than Tom Morello with the uprising against the crony capitalism of Wall Street speculators and Washington pawns like Paul Ryan.
Morello, the Grammy Award-winning guitarist with Rage Against the Machine
and Audioslave who has earned an international following with his
musically and politically charged performances as the Nightwatchman,
followed the wave of protests that swept Egypt and other Mideast
countries at the start of 2011.
A Woody Guthrie-inspired advocate
of mass protests, rallies, marches and in-the-streets campaigning for
economic and social justice, Morello loved the reports from Cairo. And
he kept up with each new report from Tahrir Square.
Then, one night, he and his wife were watching the protests, and he saw something odd. Snow.
It doesn't snow in Cairo.
But it does in Madison, Wisconsin.
"I was watching the demonstrations in Cairo with my then-pregnant
wife," Morello says. "The report went from 100,000 people on the streets
of Cairo to 100,000 people on the streets of Madison. And I remember
saying, What the hell is going on? Where did this come from?"
When he heard it was a union struggle that had brought masses of Wisconsinites to the streets in winter, Morello wanted to grab his guitar and fly immediately from his home in Los Angeles to Madison.
He wasn't at all sure his wife would approve. But, Morello recalls,
she was two steps ahead of him. "She said: "Our sons are going to be
union men. You've got to go.' "
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Morello went, with a crew of fellow musicians that included The Street Dogs and legendary MC5 guitarist Wayne Kramer,
to Madison and on to the Occupy Wall Street protests against corporate
corruption and political abuses that have concentrated power in the
hands of the new-generation robber barons who have occupied the top one
percent of American business and political life.
So you can imagine Tom Morello's response when the New York Times reported
that newly minted Republican vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan
"lists Rage Against the Machine, which sings about the greed of oil
companies and whose Web site praises the anti-corporate Occupy Wall
Street movement, among his favorite bands."
Ryan's a bit of a metalhead, with a taste for Led Zeppelin, Metallica
and -- as he told CNN -- "a lot of grunge" bands that are not frequently
identified with the extreme social conservatism and the free-market
economic theories of Austrian economists. When he was a kid growing up in
Janesville, Wisconsin, he listened to radio rockers like John "Sly" Sylvester, who has since become a Wisconsin talk-radio legend and one of Ryan's edgiest critics.
Rage has for years ranked high on Ryan's playlist. The congressman says he really likes the music -- which he plays loud while working through his daily 90-minute exercise regime -- if not necessarily the seminal band's "fight the power" lyrics.
Morello, for his part, does not really like Ryan.
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John Nichols, a pioneering political blogger, has written the Online Beat since 1999. His posts have been circulated internationally, quoted in numerous books and mentioned in debates on the floor of Congress.
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