George H.W. Bush

George H.W. Bush, also referred to as George Bush Sr. (12 June 1924, Milton, MA - 30 November 2018, Houston, TX) was the 41st President of the United States, from 1989 until 1993. Previously he was Vice President under Ronald Reagan from 1981 until 1989. He was the father of George W. Bush, the 43rd U.S. President.

Zappa and George H.W. Bush

George Bush is referenced (as Vice President) in The Untouchables.

Following a combative interview that journalist Dan Rather had in 1988 with President George H.W. Bush, Frank Zappa sent Rather a telegram saying "We're with you Dan. Nuke the weasel."

Interviewed in Ode To Gravity - Frank Zappa: World Affairs Commentator, 15 April 1991, Zappa talked about a project he had been working on: "One thing that we started doing today is ... I have a new piece of gear in the studio called Sonic Solutions, and this is a hard disk based digital audio editing system. It's got a Macintosh frontend, and then it has a an interface box and several hard disk [sic] which can store up to five hours of stereo digital material. And today we started transferring in my collection of George Bush speeches. And the first thing we are going to do, after we get it loaded in there, is find as many times that he - over the month of this event - that he's said the name "Saddam Hussein". And we're gonna get a collection of those, and that in itself should be pretty good material for a tech sound composition. (...) It's a set of variations, it's like listening to a Jimmy Reed record, you know? You know ... you know the riff is gonna be the same but there's a few things that change. And the other thing we're looking for in speeches is the times when he has gagged on words. You know when the word doesn't quite come out and that should make a nice assortment of background textural things that can be used as percussion. (...) I mean, he said it, he must be proud of it. Hum ... then there's some of these classic statements like at one of his press time once he blurts out: "THERE'S NO ANTI-WAR MOVEMENT ANYMORE! [imitating the voice of George Bush]".

Video footage of Bush is shown in the Zappa documentaries Peefeeyatko and The Revenge Of The Dead Indians.

Zappa about George H.W. Bush

Frank 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."

Did you see the movie called "Cover Up"?
Zappa: "Yeah, I saw it."

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."

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."

But the election hasn't happened. He hasn't won yet.
Zappa: "That's right. So, let us bear that in mind."

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

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." - Frank Zappa, quoted in Interview by Bob Marshall, 1988.

"Anybody who looks at George Bush and sees a tough guy has really been mediated". - Frank Zappa, quoted in Interview by Bob Marshall, 1988.

"I think that the school system has been purposely damaged to keep people from being able to sort data because only a person who can't data will vote for a guy like Bush or Reagan. You have to be numb." - Frank Zappa, quoted in Interview by Bob Marshall, 1988.

"In a way, I would agree with George Bush in that education in America needs to be reinvented, but certainly not in the way he would imagine it." - Frank Zappa, quoted in Signs Of The Times, 1991.

CA:: "What about George Bush? Did you happen to see a speech over the weekend?"

FZ:: "I watched his speech, in fact I taped the speech, that he made at the airforce base in Alabama."

CA:: "Anything strike you about it?"

FZ:: "Well, he's still talking about the New World Order. And one of the great lines in there was, "… Yeah! Well, the New World Order: of course we'll be using force. But then we'll extend the Hand of Friendship or the Hand of Comfort or something like that. And at the point where he says that, he reaches up and scratches his face."

CA:: "Very convincing!"

FZ:: "Yeah! Well, the hand went nowhere except to his face. So what do think from a guy who goes fishing when there is a war?"

- Quoted from Ode To Gravity - Frank Zappa: World Affairs Commentator, Radio interview by Charles Amirkhanian, April 1991.

[On the Gulf War]: Zappa: "I had a very bad reaction to the war in general because it was such an incredibly stupid idea to do it. All you got to do is look at what's happening in Iraq this week, and see whether it was a good idea to send a half a million guys over there to blow shit up. It's a bad idea. So I look at it as the utter failure of diplomacy, the utter failure, embarrassing failure of the U.N. to stand up for any of the original principles that it was supposedly constructed to uphold. It was well worded into putting a rubber stamp on the war, because George Bush decides that there ought to be something called the new world order. I did an interview with a German television station not long ago, and the guy said: "New world order,' doesn't he know that Hitler said that? That is a Hitler line."

What's your theory of why America didn't finish off the war, why we left Saddam in power?
Zappa: "First of all, there's no guarantee you can get him. The other thing is, on Crossfire last night, Stephen Solarz was arguing that we should start the war again and go in there and not just get rid of Saddam Hussein, but root out every aspect of the Baathist Party in Iraq. Tell me, what the fuck kind of tweezers are you going to need to do that? If you kill Saddam Hussein the Baathist Party – it's just like trying to get the Communist party out of Russia. At every level. There's Baathist Party guys running everything. Plus five different forms of secret police. How are you going to do that? "

"The thing is, there's nothing more threatening to those bogus monarchs down there than democracy. If the Kurds and the Shiites succeed in toppling Hussein's government and they go for a democratic parliament and the rest of that stuff, if that trickles Southward then it endangers the Kuwait [Emir] and the whole Saudi royal family. They don't want democracy anywhere near that peninsula. And also from the U.S. national interest point of view it's probably easier for our business guys to deal with one corrupt monarch or another then to deal with some unruly democratic parliament. It's easier to pay off one guy and the rest of his relatives." - Frank Zappa, quoted in Signs Of The Times, 1991.

"I was so irate at the carryings-on at the Republican convention," he said. "I thought that if I can do anything to make sure that George Bush doesn't get elected again – up to and including shaking hands with Tipper Gore – I'll do it. I mean, it's that bad ... I take back every bad thing I ever said about Clinton and Gore ... Whoever or whatever George Bush is, if you look at his friends, or his fellow travelers, I don't want to see those fellow travelers anywhere near Washington, D.C. Enough already with Pat Robertson and these guys! So I even considered calling the Clinton campaign and say I'd be happy to give them an endorsement if they thought it would be beneficial to them. They might want to run screaming in the other direction." - Zappa in Frank Zappa, 1992-10-01

"Even if Clinton and his people just stood still for the next four years it would be better than what we had the four previous years under President Nero, which is what Dennis Miller calls Bush". - Frank Zappa, quoted in Pulse Interview, 1993.

"In 1990, I think, President Bush objected to recordings that had obscene lyrics, keeping them in record stores but not on display. That was wonderful for Frank. He just got up and spoke in front of 200 000 people. He talked about abortion and drugs; he said: George, stay out of their bush." - Allan Zavod in Allan Zavod interview by Avo Raup, 2003.

See Also

• Wikipedia article on George H. W. Bush