Paul Ryan may be a fan of Rage Against the Machine, but the band’s guitarist Tom Morello is not a fan of Paul Ryan.
Rage Against The Machine guitarist and frontman, Tom Morello, slammed Paul Ryan in an August 2012 Op-Ed for Rolling Stone Magazine entitled: Tom Morello: ‘Paul Ryan Is the Embodiment of the Machine Our Music Rages Against.’
Morello’s Op-Ed was prefaced by a statement by Rolling Stone editors to provide background:
Last week, Mitt Romney picked Paul Ryan, the Republican architect of Congress’s radical right-wing budget plan, as his running mate. Ryan has previously cited Rage Against the Machine as one of his favorite bands. Rage guitarist Tom Morello responds in this exclusive op-ed.
Morello began his piece, writing of his amusement:
Paul Ryan’s love of Rage Against the Machine is amusing, because he is the embodiment of the machine that our music has been raging against for two decades. Charles Manson loved the Beatles but didn’t understand them. Governor Chris Christie loves Bruce Springsteen but doesn’t understand him. And Paul Ryan is clueless about his favorite band, Rage Against the Machine.
He continued, writing:
Ryan claims that he likes Rage’s sound, but not the lyrics. Well, I don’t care for Paul Ryan’s sound or his lyrics. He can like whatever bands he wants, but his guiding vision of shifting revenue more radically to the one percent is antithetical to the message of Rage.
The op-ed continued for several more paragraphs, concluding with a message of hope:
My hope is that maybe Paul Ryan is a mole. Maybe Rage did plant some sensible ideas in this extreme fringe right wing nut job. Maybe if elected, he’ll pardon Leonard Peltier. Maybe he’ll throw U.S. military support behind the Zapatistas. Maybe he’ll fill Guantanamo Bay with the corporate criminals that are funding his campaign – and then torture them with Rage music 24/7. That’s one possibility. But I’m not betting on it.
Below is a segment on the Op-Ed from Hardball with Chris Matthews.
Image 1: Day 28 Occupy Wall Street Tom Morello, is copyright (c) 2011 by David Shankbone and made available under an Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-SA 2.0) license.
Image 2: Paul Ryan, is copyright (c) 2013 by Gage Skidmore and made available under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license.
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