Found this excellent video on Youtube this morning of Frank Zappa in the Crossfire discussion show in 1986. The subject is how far records should be censored by the government. What I love about it is that, at the distress of the interviewer/interrogator, Uncle Frank remains calm and collected whilst John Lofton, evidently attempting a kind of proto-Paxman attitude to his questioning, veers off topic and shows no respect for any of the panel. Zappa’s famous quote ‘The most plentiful ingredient of the world is stupidity‘ holds stead here- he states that the lyric censoring boils down to America slowly veering to a Fascist Theocracy. How right he would be thirty years later. Lofton seems to use religious moral arguments in order to justify his case for the nanny-state he wants to implement, continually personally attacking Frank Zappa for his own lyrics and wealth.
Lofton (sarcastic): How much money have you made, Mr Zappa, from peddling this garbage?
Zappa: Many millions of dollars indeed, Mr Lofton.
I never before realised what an excellent debator he was- in the face of being accused by right-wing zealots such as Lofton as an ‘anarchist’ and ‘compromising family values’, Zappa just asks whether Lofton thinks he’s protecting anybody by censoring seven words from a record. Also, it brings to light a very important issue which many conservatives and religious fundamentalists do not understand- by allowing free speech, we do not advocate any of the statements made by those who make good use of it.
One thing is for sure- only a Deep South conservative American such as Lofton would consider telling Zappa he needed to ‘get out more’, to which Zappa retorts ‘I love it when you froth like that’.
It’s quite incredible how during a forty-minute interview, somebody could have assumed that Zappa of all people was ‘advocating incest’ because he defended the right to mention it in music. When asked what the founding fathers would have thought, Zappa should have responded the simple word, ‘freedom’.
As Zappa told the US senate in 1985:
‘The PMRC [Parents' Music Resource Centre] proposal is an ill-conceived piece of nonsense which fails to deliver any real benefits to children, infringes the civil liberties of people who are not children, and promises to keep the courts busy for years dealing with the interpretational and enforcemental problems inherent in the proposal’s design. It is my understanding that, in law, First Amendment issues are decided with a preference for the least restrictive alternative. In this context, the PMRC’s demands are the equivalent of treating dandruff by decapitation. (…) The establishment of a rating system, voluntary or otherwise, opens the door to an endless parade of moral quality control programs based on things certain Christians do not like. What if the next bunch of Washington wives demands a large yellow “J” on all material written or performed by Jews, in order to save helpless children from exposure to concealed Zionist doctrine?’
It is quite alarming to inform Americans just how bigoted and closed-minded a lot of the Puritan founding fathers were, and those who signed the American Declaration of Independence later on- Benjamin Franklin in particular, good old Uncle Frank reminds us.
For a man who named his children Moon, Dweevil, Ahmet, and Diva, this is an important thing to remember.
Oh, if only we could all be like the Muffin Man or Sheikh Yerbouti 
MehmetXII
