Jimmy Carter
Jimmy Carter (October 1, 1924 - December 29, 2024) was the 39th President of the United States, between 1977 and 1981.
A member of the US Democratic Party, his administration was praised for achieving peace between Israel and Egypt during the Camp David Accords (1978).
However, in 1979, the regime of the Shah of Iran was toppled and succeeded by the regime of ayatollah Khomeini. While Carter refused to give the Shah political asylum, he did allow him to undergo hospitalization in the US for a while. The Iranian government demanded that the Shah would be deported to Iran, which Carter also refused. As a result, the US embassy in Teheran was kept hostage, leading to a long crisis that made Carter lose the presidential elections in 1980 to Ronald Reagan. Another problem was the ongoing economical crisis.
After his presidential term, Carter improved his public image by doing a lot of charity work. In 2002, he received the Nobel Peace Prize. He died in 2024, being the first US President to become a centenarian.
Frank Zappa
Zappa and Jimmy Carter's name were included on the Freedom Wall in Chicago.
Zappa about Jimmy Carter
"I think the President we have now is not exactly of Watergate stature but will ultimately provide a certain amount of entertainment for the history books. The thing that marketed him in was the more-wholesome-than-thou attitude, and I don't believe people like that exist. ... You have this desire among the American people to find something nice. So anybody that is personally clean-looking and smiles a lot can get away with murder. It's the GARNI DU JOUR." - Frank Zappa in Garni Du Jour, Lizard King Poetry And Slime, interview by Tim Schneckloth, Down Beat, 1978.
"We're witnessing the President in an extremely impotent position just because somebody thousands of miles away wants to raise the price of a few, basic raw materials that are necessary to U.S. industry. He can't please everybody. He can't please the Arabs and he can't make things any better for the U.S. industrial guys who are putting pressure on him. The people who voted him in are scratching their heads and going, "What's he going to do for us?" It's not just that Carter is a nerd. I don't think that anybody could be in that chair and do anything better right now. It makes it slightly worse that Carter is in there because he looks worse when he screws up." - Quoted from He's Only 38 and He Knows How to Nasty, Clark Peterson, Relix magazine, November 1979.
"On one of the occasions, when we were doing kind of a question-and-answer thing in a club in Prague, there were two guys who said that they had been grabbed by the secret police and before they were beaten, the guy said, "We are now going to beat the Zappa music out of you." And nobody in the audience seemed too surprised about it, because apparently it has happened to a lot of people. And then there was another statement that was made in Czech by one of the guys in the audience at that same time and I had it translated. And what it said was that when the secret police would arrest you, they would question you and the two biggest enemies of the state at that time – which apparently was the '70s – were Jimmy Carter and Frank Zappa. And I'm going, "What the fuck am I hearing here?"- Frank Zappa in Drew Wheeler's Frank Zappa's Crusade – 25 Years And Counting, Billboard, May 1990.
