BOOKS

THE ELEPHANT MAN: A STUDY IN HUMAN DIGNITY

Ashley Montagu Outerbridge & Dienstfrey

It’s always amazed me that the word “freak” should have hung on so long as a label for who we are. Frank Zappa’s idea on the matter was clear long ago: the comfortable but ultimately monstrous existence of middle class America has spawned a mass of spiritually disfigured children. Their only path to liberation is to affirm their grotesqueness and extend it to even greater extremes, etc., etc.

But why the freaks have continued to identify themselves in this way after their liberation, after the “Freak Out,” continues to baffle me. Zappa himself seems to have been caught in his own web, a prisoner of the side show he created for people like Wild Man Fischer and the GTO’s. Apparently, the worship of distortion is not without its costs.