YOU IDIOT #3
by Nate Gangelhoff
($2.00 from Nate Gangelhoff / PO Box 8995 / Minneapolis, MN / 55408. Web:
www.pickyourpoison.net)
Reviewed by Alan RankinThe subtitle of
You Idiot is "Debating the Obvious Since 2002," and unfortunately that's kind of an apt description. Nate spends most of the issue poking fun at the 1980s anti-drug campaign championed by the likes of Nancy Reagan. No denyin' there's a lot of material to work with here: anybody remember
Cartoon All Stars to the Rescue, in which Bugs Bunny speaks out against pot? No? How about the LA Lakers' ill-advised 1987 rap song "Just Say No to Drugs"? In Nate's words, these are "further evidence that the '80s were truly a bleak and deranged decade."
These clueless modern-day versions of
Reefer Madness have always been ripe for satire, and Nate's writing is pretty funny. It's just that after forty pages or so, the material takes on a one-note quality — especially since, in my case at least, he's preaching to the converted. Debating the obvious, that is.
As a historical catalog of anti-drug propaganda, though,
You Idiot succeeds. I'd totally forgotten about Papa Smurf and Alf (who both could have been dreamed up in a drug-induced burst of inspiration) preaching the abstinence gospel in
Cartoon All Stars. (I must have been stoned at the time.) But Nate sometimes overlooks the subtext of these little fables. Like the fact that most of them, rap songs aside, feature only white kids being warned about drugs. The crack epidemic was already raging full-on in the nation's 'hoods and ghettos, but to the anti-drug enforcers, the worst possibility was that Little Johnny might smoke a joint and start questioning their authority.
Likewise, Nate doesn't really talk about the long-range effects of exposing kids to such ignorant hysteria. On page 24, he finally brings up the point: "Within a few years...most kids will see that the absolute-worst-case scenarios taught to them...rarely happen...[leading to] a feeling of 'What else were they lying about?'" But he stops short of the next logical thought. Certainly in my case, and probably many others, this fostered a distrust of authority figures and the status quo that seemed so important to them. In other words, not only did the anti-drug propaganda fail to turn us into good little citizens who sit up straight and do as we're told... it actually laid the groundwork for our future radicalization!
Nate mentions that this is the last drug-themed issue of
You Idiot. I'm glad to hear that future issues will contain more material like "A Brief History of Drunken Robberies" and "Omnipotence Through Pseudo-Science." Both play well to his editorial approach, which might be described as "pointing out the hilarity in the public's everyday stupidity." Best of all is his examination of the brief "rapping wrestler" craze, with in-depth study of the lyrical and musical stylings of Hulk Hogan and "Macho Man" Randy Savage. I daresay T.S. Eliot himself couldn't have come up with lines like "When I hit ya with my power, your body'll start shiverin'/Hit ya to the head, to the gut, damage your liver." Wow... this shit is pure gold.
And it probably sounds even funnier when you're stoned.
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