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Monday, August 20. 2007
Hungry Freaks Daddy
This has little to do with Zappa’s song from the Mothers of Invention’s first album, Freak Out, the first double album in rock music among other ground-breaking achievements, but the lyrics to the song seem so prescient — maybe timeless would be a better word. Mr. America, walk on by your schools that do not teach
Mr. America, walk on by the minds that wont be reached
Mr. America try to hide the emptiness that’s you inside
But once you find that the way you lied
And all the corny tricks you tried
Will not forestall the rising tide of hungry freaks daddy!
They wont go on four no more
Great mid-western hardware store
Philosophy that turns away
From those who aren’t afraid to say what’s on their minds
The left behinds of the great society
Hungry freaks, daddy!
Mr. America, walk on by your supermarket dream
Mr. America, walk on by the liquor store supreme
Mr. America try to hide the product of your savage pride
The useful minds that it denied
The day you shrugged and stepped aside
You saw their clothes, and then you cried,
Those hungry freaks, daddy!
Freak Out was released 40 years ago and took the music world by storm! No, not really. Not by storm, but they started growing a cult following. I joined the cult in 1968 when I heard their … second? … album, We’re Only In It For The Money. It was the third or fourth, who can keep track, but the social commentary continued — right up until FZ’s death on December 4, 1993.Frank would love where the world has come since then … or at least our government would have continued giving him inspiration for more political and social commentary. He would have recorded appropriate songs about Bill and Hillary, lampooning them and their views; then he would have poked fun at the “Contract with America,” the largely useless document that was nothing more than a campaign tool — but hey, it worked!
Okay, for those who will vociferously disagree, can you name anything from that document, without Googling (or otherwise looking it up) to find out what it said? Were you even paying attention when Newt Gingrich first trotted it out in 1993?Then of course there was the impeachment! OMIGAWD! The president lied about getting a blowjob in the White House from someone other than the missus.
Okay, as juicy as it was watching these Republican blowhards get up on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives and pontificate on the great harm done to the psyche of the Nation and the integrity and prestige of the Office of President of the United States, Frank would have had more fun and got more mileage from the actual blowjob and other sexual dalliances of Bill and Monica—and Bill and Paula, the affair that really led to Clinton’s troubles with the Clinton haters.
Shit, so many women were climbing out of the woodwork claiming they had affairs with Bill, I secretly wished I could have been one of them! You know, get my name in the papers; have Chris Matthews interview me on Hardball. Yeah, Frank Zappa would have had a ball with that and maybe with the insanity of an impeachment for lying about getting a blowjob in the White House.
Now this is a pretty funny website. Frank would have undoubtedly had fun with the rise of the Internets and how it has changed our lives and promoted some of the most egregious — but funny — myths and lies of our time. This particular web site deals specifically with Clinton’s untold crimes, his association with the vast conspiracy known as the Illuminati — it’s pretty funny reading! The funniest part: Arkansas is a center of Illuminati activity and leadership!
Which skips everything that’s happened since and brings us to the present: the Lies and the Lying Liars who tell them.
Tell Al Franken I’m swiping the title of his book and using it to promote my web site.
Here we have the worst foreign policy disaster in the history of our nation, brought about by a consistent and unwavering stream of misinformation and propaganda orchestrated from the bowels of the White House; a chicken-shit Democratically controlled Senate that went along rather than do the right thing and vote down the president’s desire to start an unneeded and unprovoked war based on lies — faulty intelligence.
What would Frank Zappa say about that? “Hungry Freaks Daddy” still applies, but FZ would probably have been far more direct. Like the 1960’s, we are in a war that was started by a president who had an agenda, pushed by advisors who gave him that agenda and did the dirty work to promote it; a team of advisors led by the vice president — which is what got this particular blog out of the starting gate.
Last week on Hardball Chris Matthews brought up Dick Cheney’s reversal of opinion regarding the invasion of Iraq and regime change by force of arms. In 1994 Dick Cheney, former Under Secretary of Defense, had this to say about invading Iraq for the purposes of regime change:
… if we had gone to Baghdad, we would have been all alone. There wouldn’t have been anybody else with us. There would have been a U.S. occupation of Iraq. None of the Arab forces that were willing to fight with us in Kuwait were willing to invade Iraq.
Once you got to Iraq and took it over, and took down Saddam Hussein’s government, then what are you going to put in its place? That’s a very volatile part of the world. And, if you take down the central government of Iraq, you could very easily end up seeing pieces of Iraq fly off, part of it — the Syrians would like to have to the west. Part of eastern Iraq, the Iranians would like to claim, fought over for eight years.
In the north, you have got the Kurds. And, if the Kurds spin loose and join with the Kurds in Turkey, then you threaten the territorial integrity of Turkey. It’s a quagmire if you go that far and try to take over Iraq. The other thing was casualties. Everyone was impressed with the fact that we were able to do our job with as few casualties as we had. But, for the 146 Americans killed in action, and for their families, it wasn’t a cheap war. And the question for the president, in terms of whether or not we went on to Baghdad, took additional casualties in an effort to get Saddam Hussein, was, how many additional dead Americans is Saddam worth?
And our judgment was, not very many. And I think we got it right.
Eight years later this same man, now vice president, was pushing to do the very act he had so artfully said would be a mistake. That in itself is a big story—but it isn’t a new story. What got me thinking about this all weekend was, “What took Matthews so long to talk about it?” It’s been known since 1991 when the Bush 41 Administration—including Dick Cheney—was explaining to the American public why we stopped short of removing Saddam Hussein from power once he was evicted from Kuwait. In 2002 Bush 41’s friend and National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft, made the argument again to the Times of London.
In the summer of 2002, Senator Joe Biden said this about the war in Iraq: “I believe there probably will be a war with Iraq. The only question is, is it alone, is it with others and how long and how costly will it be?”Why wasn’t Chris Matthews talking about it then? In 2002, before the Iraq War, before the vote in Congress to authorize the president to use war to topple Saddam Hussein? I’m sorry Matthews, but you’re five years and 3,600 lives late.
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