When I heard, a dozen years ago, that Rage Against the Machine was going to be on Saturday Night Live, I was ecstatic--I was a huge fan of the band, and had been ever since I had heard their eponymous debut in 1993.  When I heard that they were going to be sharing the bill with (thankfully) former Republican presidential candidate Steve "Flat Tax" Forbes, I originally thought it was quite a coup.  At a time when it seemed like politics was all keeping away from people you disagree with, here was a show that was willing to present two very starkly different sides of the political spectrum.

Saturday arrived, and I stayed up late and sat through Forbes' awful monologue, and some terrible sketches where he incessantly promoted his viciously anti-poor policies, and too many commercials to count.

Then Rage came out, and played this:

It was one of the most electrifying performances I have ever witnessed--even watching it again, 12 years later, almost to the day, I still get goosebumps by how powerful this band was.  Tim Bob and Brad Wilk were in the pocket the whole time, Tom Morello was the image of the avant-garde guitar virtuoso until the end when he lost his shit and thrashed around the stage, and Zach De La Rocha stalked the space between them all like a panther, waiting to strike, then screamed out the final words as the song reached its climax.

I was so excited by this performance--I couldn't wait to see what they would play for their second song.  And then it didn't arrive.  There were more crappy sketches in the dumping ground second half of the show, and then Steve Forbes and the cast came out and thanked everyone (sans Rage) and the credits rolled. I was disappointed, but promptly forgot about it in the haze of Sunday morning.

It was only later that I found out what happened--SNL had kicked Rage Against the Machine out of the building after their song because the band had dared to unfurl upside-down american flags over their amps.  This from a show that had courted controversy since its inception, a show that was legendary for fighting off network censorship, a show that had always tried to be dangerous. 

Looking back on it, I think this is a good lesson in why "balance" in the abstract always means, in practice, the ceding of the discussion to the powerful.  SNL's producers probably thought it would be a great idea to have an arch-conservative and a radical leftist band on the same bill.  They probably thought that this was the ultimate expression of democracy, and the free exchange of oppositional ideas.  What they forgot (or didn't want to admit) was that, in a stratified society, with unimaginable extremes of wealth and poverty, and unequal power, somebody gets to decide whose ideas are worth exchanging and whose aren't. 

Let that be a warning to all who argue that expanded communication alone will save us from the ails of the world.