Frank Zappa didn’t hold back. In these excerpts from a 1990 interview, he goes after McCarthy, our broken democracy, and what happens when autocrats fear artists.
Senator Joseph McCarthy. I used to watch him on television. I think that he was one of the most important people in American history. And Mount Rushmore should either be replaced or should have a companion, another part of the mountain carved up with some other heads that have had the biggest influence on what America is today. His head should be there.
J. Edgar Hoover’s head should be there. Nixon’s head should be there. And Reagan’s head should be there. These people have done more damage to the idea of democracy than anybody could from another country could ever imagine.
And the impact of this poor, mentally ill, alcoholic son of a bitch and what he did to the United States, that naughty old Joe McCarthy could never forgive that guy. You were about 13, 14, 15 when he was doing his damage. At the time, were you – did you feel you were politically aware? I wouldn’t describe myself as politically aware. I just knew that there was something wrong with this guy.
You know, it just – what he was doing seemed so unfair. It just seemed so wrong. It just smelled bad. I didn’t know anything about communism or this thing or that thing. I was a teenager.
I wanted to have a good time. But you could see this guy and it was bad. He looked like a bad guy and he had so much power. It’s disturbing. You see it in the eyes?
It’s in the eyes. If you were president of the United States, do you think you could make a difference? Sure. If I were going to run, here’s exactly what I would do. First of all, I would file as a candidate of no party.
All I would do is raise enough money to get on the ballot in every state and I wouldn’t campaign. I happen to think that the news media would call me up to ask me, “What do you think about this?” I would tell them and let the other guy spend their money and argue about it. Just being completely outside of the circuit, I think you could get enough information into the marketplace of ideas to let them know what you thought about various things. The day that they got to go to the poll, when they’re just sick to death of next season’s Willie Hortons or whatever it’s going to be, there would be an alternative. There’d just be something that you could check on the box that would enable you to vote against the rest of what politics is.
Whether it’s me or somebody else, I think that that is the key to breaking the way politics is conducted in the United States because it’s going to be a long time before any of these practitioners really change the election procedure. They’re not going to make it fairer. They’re not going to make the expenditures lower. They’re just going to try and keep it going the way it is. The only hope that this democracy – and I use the word advisedly in the case of the United States because it’s almost evaporated – the only way that you can have a choice is for somebody to come up from nowhere and do it just the way I describe, completely outside the system, as simply as possible.
That would enable the voters that are fed up who are always saying one of the reasons why they don’t go to the polls is because there is no choice if they know that this time they would have a choice, no matter whatever the candidate is, just to have a third box that you could check. The problem with artistic freedom is it’s being stamped out in the United States. It’s one of those things that seems to be the high priority for the types of administrations that we’ve been having recently. People who are artistic have always been a threatening force to people who are dictators. Even though we call this country a democracy, it’s turning out to be more and more a candy-coated dictatorship.
It seems fairly logical that the people who would like to convert this country into a candy-coated dictatorship would do everything they could to make it impossible for people who communicate through the arts to say anything that might resemble a message like the emperor isn’t wearing any clothes. That’s the thing that they’re most afraid of. Anybody who will say anything that equates to the emperor is not wearing any clothes, for some reason that scares the piss out of them. They do everything they can to stamp it out. We’ve seen a growing trend toward this since 1985 with the emergence of the PMRC to try and put a clamp on what is said in rock records.
In a democracy, are there any controls that are valid over artists? No. Why? Why does an artist need to be controlled in a democracy? In a democracy, everybody gets to say what’s on their mind.
The problem with a democracy is, and I’ve been having nightmares about democracy recently, because within the last few years, I’ve become more and more interested in getting people to vote and register and do all this stuff. I’ve been active in that. I’m going, “Yeah, let’s get democracy going.” I’m going, “Wait a minute. We got a big problem because you can’t really have a democracy. If one man’s vote equals another man’s vote, then one man’s education has to equal another man’s education so that people have not only the basic machinery to assimilate the data from which they will draw their conclusion and cast their vote.
You have to have that as a basis for a democracy. When you have a society where too many people can’t read or write, how can you say, “We all have an equal voice in the government”? When certain candidates don’t have access to the information dispensing machinery without paying millions upon millions of dollars, that limits the dialogue quite a bit for anyone who doesn’t agree with the sitting administration or especially with the Republican Party. Not to single them out as the biggest evil that ever befell the United States, but recently they’ve come pretty close simply because in the communist system, if you are a party member, even though they talk about, “We’re all equal. We’re brothers.” It’s also supposed to be evened out.
It’s not. Party members have perks. They have special treatment and they get it right. If you are a member of the Republican Party in the United States, the treatment resembles very much what happens in the Soviet Union if you are a communist party member. Certain things will not happen to you.
Certain things can be done for you. In fact, if you can imagine this, I received in the mail, even though I am a registered Democrat right now, that may not last long. I’m going to shred that. I got this blue card. I was even going to bring it today.
This blue plastic card that says, “I am a member of the Republican Party.” Blue plastic, like a credit card, gold embossed, eagle, the whole business, a serial number. It was just like a communist party thing. What would a guy do with a thing like this? Show it to a policeman in case he was going to get a ticket? What do you do with this?
It’s an influence peddling kind of a scheme. I recall throughout the 80s receiving fundraising mail from the Republican Party that was basically an invitation to participate in insider trading. It went like this. How would you like to join the California Golden Circle? You pay $2,500 to get in, $1,500 a year in dues.
Now, here’s what you get. Advanced notice of upcoming legislation, invitations to dinners and social events. This is … I can’t quote it exactly, but I’m getting pretty close to the letter. It will be attended by the people from California who do the business, who really make the deals.
So in other words, if you pay, you’re going to be invited to these dinners where you get to sit next to these people who make the big deals. It’s like inviting me to join that club. It’s baffly. Then I get another letter. That one was signed by Claire W. Burgner.
I got another letter inviting me to … for $2,500. I could go in this junket to Washington, DC, where I get to attend a series of luncheons and dinners with DC political luminaries. They give you a list.
You are supposed to check off on the list who you want to be seated next to at these luncheons. Then there’s another box you had to check off that said, “It’s always possible that the president himself will come to one of these, so we need you to give us permission to run a security check on you and just authorize here.” There’s something weird about doing politics, mail order politics that way, and inviting people to get the edge on a business competitor by joining up certain political party, paying money, and to carry this to the most ridiculous extreme at the point where George Bush takes office. Being on a plane in Europe and picking up the International Herald Tribune and seeing a front page article about the distress of career diplomats at being stepped over by all of these political appointees that Bush had put in as the main consuls and whatever all over the world. Basically these were people who couldn’t speak the local language, had no knowledge of diplomacy, that had given $300,000 or more to the campaign. Throughout the last decade, you see examples where influence peddling, a dollar equals so many points towards your career as a diplomat.
What do you do with that? How can you have confidence in government anymore? Then you look at the media and they just look the other way.
Source: Frank Zappa – the lost interview
