Bauer, Keyes, and the Mosh Pit
PODHORETZ, JOHN
Keyes, Bauer, and the Mosh Pit The hard right, stuck between hard rock and a hard place. BY JOHN PODHORETZ IT MAY NOT RIVAL Quemoy and Matsu or even Willie Horton in the annals of campaign...
...In the past two months, the band has come under fire from the Fraternal Order of Police for its heated defense of Mumia Abu-Jamal, the Black Panther who gunned down Officer Daniel Faulkner on a Philadelphia street in 1981...
...Rage Against the Machine is one of the most successful rock acts of the past decade—its third album, The Battle for Los Angeles, debuted at No...
...So this was the backdrop to Gary Bauer's frontal attack on Alan Keyes last week...
...Whereupon Republican voters turned to their loved ones and spake thus: "Huh...
...They've written two numbers ("songs" hardly seems the right word for them) about Mumia, whom they consider a "political dissident," just as they consider Indian activist Leonard Pelti-er—who killed two FBI agents in 1975—an American Sakharov...
...Plus which, Moore played a dirty trick on Keyes by using as accompaniment to his mosh-pit stunt a song by that seven-million-selling band known to no adult, Rage Against the Machine...
...On the one hand, Keyes's response was appropriate and proper: "When you can't control things, Gary, you're not morally responsible for them...
...The parlor Marxist in question is rabble-rousing documentarian and professional conservative-hater Michael Moore...
...The "machine" against which they "rage" is capitalism, and their goal is its overthrow, though it's hard to say these days who would do the overthrowing...
...But forget aesthetics for a moment...
...Here's what they were wondering: (1)What on earth is a "mosh pit...
...This incomprehension in the midst of a presidential debate is not, in and of itself, a bad thing...
...Don't you think you owe an apology to parents and policemen on that one...
...And then, showing the improvisatory skill that has made him the most entertaining figure in the pre-primary season, Keyes reached into his bag of rhetorical tricks and found an epiphany straight outta Tocqueville: "Admittedly, I was willing to fall into the mosh pit, but I'll tell you something...
...While de la Rocha was prattling on, hundreds of police officers marched in protest, and a week later the Fraternal Order of Police called for a boycott of the First Union Center, which had booked the concert...
...The FOP has asked the Republican National Committee to move the convention unless the First Union Center's name is changed to the Daniel Faulkner Memorial Center...
...The First Union Center is the venue for the Republican National Convention, to be held in August...
...And weeping—though whether from laughter or despair, it would be impertinent to hazard a guess...
...You know why I did that...
...3)Isn't Michael Moore the lawyer in Mississippi who sued the tobacco companies...
...The term "moshing" refers to a charming form of interpersonal conduct at hard-rock concerts where audience members—mostly white teenage boys with no rhythm and a lot of hostility—smash their bodies into one another in lieu of actual dancing...
...At a benefit concert in Philadelphia's First Union Center on December 6, de la Rocha demanded of his audience, "Shouldn't political dissidents in this country enjoy the same rights that the U.S...
...The band's music amalgamates rap and hard rock in a particularly harsh way, producing the sort of earsplitting sound that hits 15-year-olds in some sweet spot that vanishes right around the time these same kids have to start paying their own bills...
...The band's second album, Evil Empire, and its DVD offer detailed reading lists for fans intended to wake them up, lists that include Das Kapital, Lenin's State and Revolution, The Anarchist Cookbook (with its notorious "how to make a Molotov cocktail" recipe), not to mention works by Che Guevara, Herbert Marcuse, Frantz Fanon, Noam Chomsky, and Huey Newton—and my personal favorite, Chicana Lesbians: The Girls Our Mothers Warned Us About...
...Moore's purpose was clear: Embarrass Keyes by associating him with the band that, more than any other, represents everything cultural conservatives fear and revile...
...BY JOHN PODHORETZ IT MAY NOT RIVAL Quemoy and Matsu or even Willie Horton in the annals of campaign sensations, but rarely has such an incomprehensible issue been raised during a presidential debate...
...government demands for political dissidents in China or Iran...
...Forget even the band's liberal use of profanity, although Keyes made a point of attacking John McCain a few weeks earlier after the Arizona senator said something positive about the hard-rock band Nine Inch Nails, whose lyrics rival anything McCain ever heard aboard an aircraft carrier...
...But one gets the distinct sense that somewhere in the empyrean, Lincoln and Douglas were watching as well...
...And when you trust them, they will in fact hold you up, whether it's in terms of giving help to you when you're falling down or caring for their own children...
...by a system that would rather see all of you at that bar . . . being put to sleep with beer or with drugs, rather than acting against it and fighting a system which has been perpetrating imperialist lies and other f—ing bulls— for five hundred years...
...The RNC has not responded...
...Alan Keyes agreed to participate in Moore's stunt—and for being such a good sport got called "certifiably insane" by Moore, who told the press he had "never seen anything this bizarre...
...McCain apologized...
...On the other hand, Keyes once again showed he was not above playing the race card whenever it suits his fancy: "Accusing me of having some complicity in that music would be accusing me of, I don't know, being responsible for the color of my skin...
...It's the kind of music that the killers at Columbine High School were immersed in...
...Indeed, you could almost say that after five content-challenged GOP debates, it had finally happened—two candidates had begun to discuss the sort of policy arcana once reserved during Cold War days for foreign-policy and defense discussions about the relative throw-weights of intercontinental ballistic missiles and the illegality of the phased-array radars around Krasnoyarsk...
...That band is anti-family," Bauer said to Keyes...
...What's he got to do with this...
...The entire exchange may have puzzled the nation—or the fragment of the nation that was watching the debate...
...Alas, Gary Bauer and Alan Keyes had not ascended to matters of the highest national import...
...All the candidate had to do was stand on a flatbed truck and fall backward onto the upraised arms of a crowd of 50 people behind him...
...Because I think that exemplifies the kind of trust in people that is the heart and soul of the Keyes campaign...
...Lead guitarist Tom Morello graduated from Harvard in 1986 and worked as scheduling secretary for then-senator Alan Cranston of California...
...For a segment on his latest cable show, The Awful Truth, Moore announced he would endorse any Republican candidate who agreed to enact a common piece of rock-concert stagecraft called "stage diving" for his cameras...
...And I was not morally responsible for the music that was playing as I stepped out of my rally and faced Michael Moore, whatever his name was, doing whatever he was doing...
...panied by Rage Against the Machine in the service of Michael Moore...
...At an actual concert, the area into which rock performers and audience members alike do their stage diving is known as the "mosh pit...
...Midway through last week's Republican set-to in New Hampshire, Gary Bauer turned to Alan Keyes and asked a challenging question that basically went as follows: Just what do you think you were doing in that mosh pit accomContributing editor John Podhoretz's column on the 2000 campaign appears Tuesdays and Fridays in the New York Post...
...More to the point, Rage Against the Machine comprises four guys who are—let me be precise here—commies...
...It's pro-cop killer, and it's pro-terrorist...
...Says lead singer Zack de la Rocha, "We've all been put to sleep...
...It's about time we got back to the understanding that we trust the people of this country to do what's decent...
...Instead, they had descended together into the fever swamps of American pop cul-ture—which are so vast and powerful these days that a band no adult has ever heard of can sell seven million albums, and a parlor Marxist with a flop cable television show can talk the most intellectually severe GOP presidential candidate into a publicity stunt whose sole purpose was to make the candidate in question look like a fool...
...2)Rage against which machine...
...1 on the Billboard charts the week it was released in November and has already gone double platinum...
...And until you told me this fact, I had no idea what that music was...
Vol. 5 • February 2000 • No. 20
