Best. Interview. Ever. (with anyone!) A must read for FZ fans

[RandomKoolzip]

www.mcluhaninstitute.org/baedeker/bobs_articles/zappa_interview-01.html

Seriously...this interview with Zappa from 1988 is amazingly prescient and mind-stretching....Frank sounds like the most sensible man on the earth in this interview. I first read excerpts of this in the liner notes of the bootleg "Apocrypha," but this is the first time I've read the whole thing. I'm kinda in a state of shock now.

It's very long (ten pages!) and gets incredibly deep. Frank reveals the secret of life at one point.

And the politics!! TO think that people were actually complaining of a "liberal media bias" in 1988! The excerpt below needs to be placed gently before any person who thinks that the corporate media is somehow liberal-slanted. My god, FZ delineates everything that's wrong with the US at that stage in history, and somehow it's all still relevant today. A MUST READ (even if you don't like Zappa, if you are at all interested in politics, music, or the meaning of life, you hafta read this.)

An especially pungent excerpt:


Marshall: During our break, you mentioned something about George Bush's campaign?

Zappa: The thing about Bush is, if in fact he has won the election, then why is he still campaigning. And, if in fact he has won the election, then wasn't there a payment of forty- six million dollars that was either made to him, or split between him and Dukakis, which is part of that fund where everybody checks off a dollar on their income tax - all this campaign money. If he's won the election, then why is he still spending that money? Shouldn't he give it back? I think that if he insists on spending that money, then he's committing some kind of a fraud.

Marshall: Did you see the movie called Cover Up?

Zappa: Yeah, I saw it.

Marshall: Barbara Honeeger is interviewed in it, but she was on a local L.A. radio station and she mentioned some forty million dollars. She also had on this former CIA man who phoned in and revealed a lot of Bush's skeletons. Did you hear that?

Zappa: No.

Marshall: They talked about some forty million dollars. Are you talking about that?

Zappa: No, this is not secret money. This is from the government. This is the straight-ahead matching funds that the government handed over to both candidates just a little while ago, and the number I recall was forty-six million. And I don't know whether it was forty-six for both, split down the middle, or whether it was forty-six to Bush. But whatever it is, if he's already won, then he shouldn't go out and throw his granddaughter up in the air like we see him doing in the commercials. You know, get off the campaign trail, get out of the flag factory.

Marshall: But the election hasn't happened. He hasn't won yet.

Zappa: That's right. So, let us bear that in mind.

Marshall: You mean the polls, the "pollstergeists".

Zappa: Yeah, the "pollstergeists". That's right.

Marshall: But there are so many people who would express that view. They're quite fed up with the polls. There's a massive sense of frustration.

Zappa: The people who are fed up with the polls are the people who are already smart enough to see through the bullshit to begin with. The people who are bamboozled by the polls are the ones that are most likely to vote for Bush. It's the whole idea that Americans think a winner is so terrific, and if you put the little winner's crown on one guy before the election, the day after the election, you want to make sure you voted for the guy who won. Because when you talk to your buddies when they slap each other on the back drinking Miller Lite in the bar after the election, you want to have been on the team. And that's part of the peer pressure to move the votes around.

Marshall: But there always seems to be candidates for that level of humanity. Do you expect your criticism could wake one of them up?

Zappa: The criticism won't, but in order to motivate the people who are already susceptible to that sort of bamboozlement, you have to provide them with data through another way. You have to either do it through a metaphor or you really have to draw them a picture. They have to be persuaded. They can't work on the logical level. You can't just say, "Look, here are facts". Because those people have gone beyond the medium of fact retention or fact processing. They're "feelies". Everything that motivates them must be wearing warm and fuzzy clothing. They want to have that warm, fuzzy sensation that whatever it is that you're selling to them makes them even warmer and fuzzier. But it can be done. In order to do it, you need to have access to media so that the message can be presented properly. The problem is that the whole myth of the liberal media bias is preposterous because nobody who owns a broadcast license, or a newspaper, is a Democrat. They're all screaming on the right. And the flap about liberal media bias was manufactured by the right wing. The right wing goes to some of their friends in another part of the right wing and says, "You attack my network. You say that CBS is too liberal, and that gives us the license to behave more conservatively in order to appear to be fair". Thereby pushing any liberal idea completely out of their broadcast, and doing it in a way that's saying, "We're doing this to provide balance". Perfect fakeout. Because that's exactly what the people always wanted to do to begin with. The demise of the Red Lion Decision guaranteeing equal time for opposing points of view in a political situation - they got rid of that last year, or the year before. Most people don't even know that regulation doesn't exist anymore. It is no longer required of a broadcaster to give equal time to the opposition. And so the removal of that regulation, combined with the desire to have only one point of view presented to the American public, has given them this great opportunity in this election.

Marshall: Of course, it is important that you say this, but how much do you wrestle with the stupidity of those who do not respond to these facts?

Zappa: I make a distinction between ignorance, stupidity and idiocy. And fortunately we have an abundance of all three in the United States.

Marshall: 'Unfortunately"?

[htuttle]

1. Good stuff in there

Here's a good quote from page 1:

The problem with communicating with anybody in the English language is that so much damage has been done to the language itself by advertisers, by political campaigns, that the words themselves have been mutated to the point where you have to choose them really carefully...

I hadn't thought about it as 'damage' before, but it really is, since it reduces the usefulness of the language. I'm off to read more of it.

[RandomKoolzip]

2. I know..even the first page is bulging with nuggets of wisdom....

I found it totally mind-blowing that Zappa was discussing the myth of the Liberal media back in 1988...his comments on LaRouche are enlightening as well.