It Can't Happen Here

Mr. America, walk on by your schools that do not teach Mr. America, walk on by the minds that won't 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!

Having been a pubescent Frank Zappa devotee in 1966 when these lyrics from Hungry Freaks Daddy resonated through the fertile psyche of the nascent underground counter-culture movement, I'd like to think Frank, had he lived, today would have been aghast to see that the movement which he served to spearhead has done more to undermine individualism and critical social thinking than anything. The tie-dyed kids who danced lyrically and spasmodically to his music have now infested professionally the corridors of our schools and government and spare no effort in protecting their sinecures and all pervasive, unchallengable, enviromental, politically correct, faux-compassionate, big-government mass-conformist worldview. (Step out of line and they'll take you away. It's time to stop, hey what's that sound ...) Veritable Hawthornian ostracism for those amongst you who dare to don the socially ignominious status of being ....a denier! Be forewarned. You're never going to get to 1000 Facebook friends if you persist with those viscerally dis-settling notions about the behavioral and artistic levelling effects of the Nanny State. Why, just look at all those little Rembrandts and Shakespeares our public school system and politically correct culture gestates on a regular basis. It's OK to stand out, but not too much..... Not so much it might make someone else feel inferior. Venerating individual achievement has frequently become perceived as a form of bullying.

Frank was the consumate individualist. Mocking and satirizing what he saw as the Stepford Wife, nine-to-five, American middle-class culture of the 1950's. I think he would have been equally critical of today's tattoo ridden, neo-grunge, quasi-illiterate, texting addicted, hip-hopping monolithic teen culture that dominates today's contemporary scene. I suspect too that he might have been highly critical of the nuevo-baby-boomer, share-the-wealth, don't keep score communalism that ameliorates the veneration and compensation justly due Mr. America's most individualistic wealth and artistic creators. And surely someone as perspicacious as Frank would have discerned the inherent destructive consequences to economic growth of the greenest generation's acquiescence to big-government's insinuation into almost every aspect of our lives. For after all, isn't every rule at some level a limitation of individual freedom? And isn't individual freedom of thought and expression the wellspring of all creativity both economic and artistic? Can there be true artistic freedom separate and distinct from economic freedom? Ever hear of Solzhenitsyn?

But probably most of all Frank would have been horrified that his children of the Mothers of Invention have created an American culture where nothing could shock anyone, no matter how disgusting, violent or perverted; where the guiding tenet of civility had become non-judgment; the blind acceptance of any viewpoint as legitimate; where civilization itself would potentially risk annihilation rather than risk offending someone.

Sorry Frank. Wish you were to here to see that despite your radically individualistic, creative admonishments on your tour de force debut album Freakout, it can happen here*... and we are Freaking Out, new sustainable, come together, non-offensive establishment style, somewhere in Kansas...and Minnesota... and Rome... and...


* 'It can't happen here' was another lyric from this influential album


M.D.T.