When VH1 contacted me and asked if I'd be willing to star in a new reality show in which I'd be forced to move into the home of a divorced mother of two in the Long island suburbs and have my life taped, I was infuriated. I immediately hung up the phone, doused myself in lighter fluid, and set myself on fire in an impassioned protest of the unjust corporate media power structure. But as I sat ablaze in my tiny Manhattan studio apartment, second thoughts crept in...and I hurriedly stopped, dropped and rolled my flaming self until I was extinguished. The lean years after the breakup of Rage Against The Machine had left me without a proper outlet for my anger, which sadly over the course of time had begun to atrophy into more of a mild annoyance with the Machine. The more I thought about it, the more sense it made. Years of performing with Rage had left me with a sense that our music had, in spite of my righteous moral outrage effectively expressed through song, accomplished little more than giving frat boys an opportunity to express their angst towards their parents for making them work summer jobs at Abercrombie and Fitch during break from college. My revolution clearly needed a new strategy. My smoldering hand reached for the phone...it was time to shift my focus from the Powers That Be and strike at the soft underbelly of the Evil Empire- suburban America.

Phase 1: Penetrate Enemy Lines

As a communist, the abolition of private property is a crucial tenet of my ideology. As a result, I initially found it impossible to bring myself to move into the perversely spacious three bedroom capitalist dream home of Belinda Fuddrucker and her two daughters Kimmy and Jon-Benet in Levittown, Long Island. Instead, I slept in the backyard for two entire weeks pretending I was a Zapatista planning an insurgent attack in the jungles of Mexico. After contracting pneumonia and suffering a multitude of insect and animal bites, I decided to alter my ideology slightly- but only on the condition that I be allowed to give the house an Extremist Makeover: Home Edition. The first step was digging an elaborate series of Viet-Cong inspired tunnels running from every room of the house into the backyard in case of an unexpected frontal assault on the domicile by right-wing imperialist storm troopers. I could tell that the family was upset and confused by many of these these alterations, especially the conversion of Belinda's '98 Ford Windstar into a Suburban Justice Mobile Response Unit- but I remained confident that they would come to understand that there was a manifesto to my madness.

Spending my first day of imprisonment in the oppressive confines of the house was a soul-crushing injustice on the level of Mumia Abu-Jamal's incarceration, except with TIVO. Adding insult to injury was the fact that I was being forced to sleep on a musty pull-out coach in the den by that stand-offish ice queen Belinda for the simple fact that I'm the apparently the unfortunate victim of night terrors in which I've been told I scream out bloodcurdling protest chants in my sleep. Apparently some fail to recognize that being a revolutionary is a 24 hour-a-day job.

The next morning began with the heart-stopping revelation that my enlightening History Channel documentary on the struggle of the Nicaraguan Sandinistas has been deleted from TIVO and some force of evil had recorded over it with a Full House marathon. My spirit sank even further as Kimmy and Jon-Benet suddenly scampered into the room and playfully snatched the remote control from my hand and began to view the offensive monstrosity, leaving me frozen in the recliner in transfixed horror feeling like Alex in A Clockwork Orange. As the claustrophobic dread constricted around my heart (this was regrettably an Uncle Jessie-centric episode), I concluded that I has no other choice but to stage a daring escape from the unbearable flickering images before me and take to the streets to survey enemy territory. My patrol of the surrounding neighborhoods in search of social injustice uncovered several travesties, including fact that Target stores have an incredibly hard-line stance on the "12 Items or Less" line, a draconian policy that I discovered grows even more stringent when you threaten to throw a George Foreman Grill through the storefront window and overthrow the store manager. Unfortunately, my fight was cut tragically short as I was forced to prematurely return the Suburban Justice Mobile Response Unit back to the house so Belinda could get to her Jazzercise class on time.

Phase 2: Infiltrate Bourgeoisie Culture

I knew that if I was going to incite a suburban revolution, I would first have to blend into my environment. Volunteering to coach a local Little League team served a dual purpose: 1) subverting the Evil Empire's beloved national pastime of baseball and 2) giving me an opportunity recruit a platoon of able-bodied young comrades for my coming insurrection. Position players for my Levittown Proletarians were carefully selected from the ranks of working class parents of the community. I decided to employ an unorthodox coaching style for my team in which positions were not assigned according to a competitive talent-based system, but rather a communal process of sharing responsibilities. While I found this approach most consistent with my ideology, it admittedly at times put us at a competitive disadvantage, evidenced by the painfully lengthy and costly 5th inning in which it was the mildly retarded kid's turn to pitch. Our first game had a special significance for me, as our opponent was The Ronkonkoma Drunken Indians, an offensive and outdated ethnic stereotype which infuriated me to within inches of doing a war dance and scalping their head coach. The game proved to be a thrilling extra-innings class struggle, ending disappointingly in me being forcefully removed from the ballpark by the power-mad fascist home plate umpire and banned for life by Little League Of America after learning to my astonishment that tossing Molotov cocktails in the opposing team's dugout is- while an amazingly effective strategy in neutralizing the competition- against the rules.

Phase 3: Take Back The Mall

Every revolution needs a spark, and I surmised than there was no better place to start than the local shopping mall, as it boasts all of the evils of capitalism in one convenient, climate-controlled location. I decided to launch my insurgent offensive on the Levittown Mall's Hot Topic, infamous as an epicenter of edgy suburban subculture. After appropriating the American Idol karaoke machine from a display out in front of Spencer's Gifts next door, I announced my arrival and began reading the Communist Manifesto with a really cool reverb echo effect on the microphone. I figured it was only a matter of time before I had amassed an unstoppable guerilla army, but the only person who approached me over the course of my impassioned two-hour reading was a confused suburban goth girl who asked me to validate her parking in return for her purchase of magnetic body jewelry and a $35 Siouxsie and The Banshees t-shirt. As abject despair set in, I could see that the seeds of revolution would have to be planted elsewhere.

The next day, I regrouped and brainstormed a full-scale ideological assault on the Food Court. My initial foray yielded disappointing results when the cashier at Panda Express displayed only lukewarm interest in my ruminations on the influence of Maoism in the context of China's modernization, and kept changing the subject back to whether I wanted brown or white rice with my Mandarin Chicken Bowl. And the employees of Orange Julius were, in spite of being real sweethearts, far too developmentally disabled to function as useful members of any political movement. Just as I was about to abandon hope entirely, I noticed a gaggle of morbidly obese mallgoers encircling an overwhelmed costumed man in front of Pretzel Time. My revolution needed an inspiration, and I instantly knew that I had found a savior in the form of this Pretzel.

I forced my way through the massive, fleshly throng of pretzel sample vultures and pulled him aside. I started by explaining to him that Marx identified the history of all hitherto society as a history of class struggles and that Pretzel Time had passed, and it was now time for an worker's uprising. I realized I was losing him when he immediately walked away and resumed handing out samples. I pulled him back and simplified it terms he could understand by explaining that the history of the Food Court was one of the exploited worker (specifically, men forced to wear giant Pretzel costumes and hand out samples) over bourgeoisie capitalist oppression (specifically Brian, his day shift manager and heartless tool of the tyrannical Pretzel Time empire). I was initially was concerned that his enthusiastic response was somewhat connected to his apparent fleeting grasp on the English language, but I knew I had to run with the opportunity. In the meantime, the free sample scavengers had become extremely irritated with the interruption of their orgy of consumption and alerted mall security. With octogenarian mall gestapos closing in, the time for an emphatic display of dissent had arrived. But what would be our method? A Tiananmen Square-style standoff with mall security golf carts? Not dramatic enough. A vain attempt at self-immolation was frustratingly thwarted by the Pretzel costume's unforeseen composition of flame-retardant materials. Our revolt and dream of a utopian Food Court would have to be deferred to another day, as we craftily escaped the authorities through the Yogurt & Such fire exit.

I've always argued that the imperialist multinational Starbucks conglomerate could be brought to its knees if the proletariat was presented with a viable, socialist-run alternative. I decided to put my theory to the test by sneaking into the mall early the next morning and erecting a Communist Peoples Coffee Collective outside Starbucks, with all profits from my deliciously affordable FrappaChenos going towards airlifting thousands of my hand-sewn hemp hacky sacks to the starving children of EZLN rebels in the Chiapas. My brisk sales were clearly seen as a Vente-sized threat, as it didn't take long for Starbucks corporate clones to descend upon my stand and slap me with a restraining order that stipulates that I am not allowed within a two-mile radius of any Starbucks at any time, which after further investigation I discovered limits me to a rather restrictive 100-square foot patch of land in upstate Montana.

Phase 4: Community Outreach

Kids are always looking for great role models, so I decided to take a day off from intense political struggles and give back to the community, volunteering my time for some charity work with the local Big Brother program. I've always been extremely sensitive to the plight of children growing up without a proper male role model (my absentee father claimed to our family for for years that he was away from home fighting a fierce guerilla war in El Salvador, but later we found out in reality he was cheating on my mother the whole time and actually had a secret family three miles away in El Segundo). I trace much of my current belief system to my childhood experiences with my Big Brother, who took me to a Fugazi show and then abducted me, forcing me to harvest soy on a commune in rural Oregon for the four months it took the authorities to locate me. It was a real growing experience! Likewise, I really felt I made an impact with my "Little Brother" Gary- we played miniature golf, won a potato sack race, and attended an anti-police brutality march. Children never cease to amaze me with their openness to new ideas, limitless imaginations and surprisingly high tolerance to tear gas. I finally returned Gary home to his mother, but not before providing him with a detailed strategy on how to depose her as head of the household in a violent coup d'etat!

Phase 5: Hijack The Media Machine

The use of the news media as a tool of oppressive control by a ruling class to transform the masses into a populace of unthinking reactionary automatons has always, to be blunt- ticked me off. That's why I knew that wresting control of the Long Island propaganda machine would be a crucial step in fomenting a suburban political awakening. Desperate times call for desperate measures, which led me to draw inspiration from Malcolm X's "by any mean necessary" motto- in this case my "means" being not bathing for a week solid, bursting into the Newsday offices, and letting my overwhelming body funk overpower and subdue the workers until they were rendered unconscious and I had seized control of the presses. It was a golden opportunity to, at least for one edition, replace Newsday's reprehensibly jingoistic editorial slant with content highlighting enlightening news stories concerning issues of social justice- and for the ladies, red-hot full color glossy centerfolds of "Marxism's Sexiest Men Not Alive." Hubba Hubba!

Phase 6: Revolution!

Years of vehement protesting with diminishing returns had left me with the harsh reality that challenging the policies of President Bush head-on was perhaps an ineffective approach to destroying the diseased and entrenched political system. Why not strike at the capitalist power structure at its very origins by mobilizing for grassroots action in elementary school politics, before it evolves into a greater evil? One call to my friend Ralph Nader later, we found ourselves as a crucial factor in ousting Timmy Lancaster from his perch as 4th grade class president at Hoover Elementary in a crucial election in which the future of tater tots on the school lunch menu hung in the balance. After the diminutive power-monger and his cronies had been driven from the auditorium by Ralph's righteous tongue-lashing, mutual friend Noam Chomsky addressed the mesmerized student electorate with a brilliant treatise on the merits of anarcho-syndicalism. Unfortunately, we later found that our involvement in ousting Timmy had created a power vacuum and inadvertently led to the election of a hard-line reactionary class president who presently rules the entire class with an iron fist.

Resolving to set my sights slightly higher in the twisted Long Island power structure, it didn't take me long to realize that the Levittown City Council was a corrupt puppet regime. I utilized the element of surprise and disrupted their weekly session by stripping naked, taping my mouth shut and standing in front of them in silent protest of the fascist Proposition M, which involved the unjust misappropriation of taxpayer dollars to fund a statue of Billy Joel in the town square, and also make the last Friday of every month "Crazy Hat Day" for the Council. I expected my expression of dissent to be met with the typical end result of brutalization at the hands of police and being led away in handcuffs, but instead I left the City Council with a $5000 grant, as they apparently mistook me for a performance artist of some sort.

Ever wonder why you can furnish an entire three bedroom home for under $100 by shopping at Ikea? The dirty little secret of this unstoppable Swedish menace is that all of the furniture components are manufactured by preteen Scandinavian children in horrorific, overcrowded factories that would surely be classified as sweatshops if it were not for the frigid Nordic climates, with their only compensation being a daily ration of 5 Swedish meatballs and a Diet Coke. To raise awareness- and maybe pick up a futon if I had time- I decided first thing Sunday morning to gather all my resources ($5000, the Pretzel Guy and my "Little Brother") and launch a full-scale "Revoluggen", which is Swedish for "peoples struggle under tyranny." Note: From a tactical standpoint, it is a good idea to plan your "Revoluggen" for the late morning hours, as Ikea does not open until 10am, and the parking lot is pretty much empty until then, which we learned the hard way.

With Phase 6 and the show's taping coming to a disappointing conclusion, I gradually transitioned into Phase 7: Denial and then Phase 8: Acceptance which was quickly followed by Phase 9: Packing My Shit and Getting The Fuck Out Of Levittown. In retrospect I'd come to realize that I greatly underestimated the challenge presented by suburban American juggernaut, with my only consolation being that as bad as my experience was, it was all far less humiliating than being a member of the band Audioslave.