Page 45 Review by Stephen
"I say all illegal aliens should be aborted."
"Don't you mean "deported"?"
"That too."
Sarah Palin almost made satire unnecessary for a month or two, didn't she?
Even funnier, smarter and head-noddingly engaging than I was expecting. As a huge admirer of STUPID COMICS, I have to declare that for me at least this is the best body of work Peter Bagge has produced. It's more focussed, more pertinent and very well informed, as Peter tries to make sense of a world that refuses to talk any. Modern art, modern art critics, The War On Drugs, The War On Terror, peace rallies, the homeless, crazy laws and their crazy enforcement, the right to bear arms and the right to be utterly infuriated at both sides of an argument. Peter's a self-proclaimed libertarian, but do not for one second expect him to conform to any single partisan outlook because it's the failure to think for oneself that exasperates him most. He's equally confident in his dismissal of modern instalation art and its arbiters of taste ("they feel compelled to denigrate anything that the average schmuck can recognise as quality work") as he is of Shakespeare ("hokey, unintelligible, 400-yr-old situation comedies" - an outrageous statement even I might have shied from!).
This is a collection of one-page satire strips and three-to-five-page commentaries originally printed in the aptly named Reason magazine, in startling contrast to what it reported on. Sometimes he's your man on the scene, reluctantly taking part in peace rallies (taking part because he was against attacking Iraq; reluctant because he found it full of bogus posturing, grannies sniping at the police, and "piggybackers" promoting their own agendas by association) or a mutual-support gathering of swingers, polyamorists, sadomasochists and transsexuals, whilst at others he mocks by holding a mirror to the more monstrous or simply quoting them. From the New York Times (01/12/07), here's one of the Bush-appointed contraception opponents, Dr. Erik Keroack, "before questions about Medicaid fraud forced his resignation":
"[Premarital sex] will end up damaging your brain's ability... to help you successfully bond in future relationships."
As Peter perceptively retorts, "That's right: hormones can tell if you're married!"
But it's serious stuff, as the horrifying story of one of Peter's friends makes clear, when she visits a pharmicist who judgementally denies her the Plan B morning-after pill following her third visit in a year: "It's become obvious that you're a very irresponsible woman..." As to well informed, Bagge uses science to remind us that contrary to the lying rhetoric employed to sabotage this pill, it's still a contraceptive drug, not an abortive one
What impresses me so often in this book is that Bagge never shies of saying what many think but would never dare say, but is also prepared to mix with those he feels uneasy around in order to learn more and communicate his findings to a wider audience. I don't always concur - though I usualy do - but I could not agree more about the politically motivated, socially destructive, absurdly hypocritical and historically proven-to-be-completely-counter-productive War On Drugs. Here he follows the insane persecution and its costs to the taxpayer of one man using marijuana legally for medical reasons; then he interviews former Seattle Police Chief Norm Stamper who's pro-legalisation of all drugs for very sound reasons not least of which are health, the drain on police resources, the discretion of arrest that has produced a mammoth discrepancy in arrest rates along racial lines and, oh yes, does anyone remember the Prohibition era when alcohol was banned...? Al Capone...?
"The drug war has corrupted entire police departments, and it makes a cop's job far more dangerous than it needs to be."
Now that alcohol is legal again there, how many modern Al Capones are there fighting over the distribution of Dubonnet?
[No vested interest here, for although I drink and smoke life-threatening amounts of far more life-threatening drugs (alcohol and cigarettes), they're both legal at home - one of them even in bars. I wrote a five-page manifesto on the legalisation of drugs ten years ago. It'd clear up 90% of non-corporate crime in this country in a second (again c.f. Prohibition) whilst freeing up so much money in the NHS, judiciary, police and prison systems that we wouldn't know what to do with it all. Except invade another country, perhaps, then waste millions putting its farmers out of work by destroying their only economically viable crop.]
