Weapon of Mass Instruction

Part of Alternative Tentacles' ongoing series of politically inclined spoken word releases, Weapon of Mass Instruction was recorded live at a lecture in label head Jello Biafra's hometown of Boulder, CO. The material is mostly taken from Greg Palast's 2003 best-seller The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, a pointed attack on the cynicism and hypocrisy of the second Bush administration. As a polemicist, Palast is somewhere between Biafra and Noam Chomsky, neither as bitterly funny and sarcastic as the former nor as occasionally difficult to parse as the latter. The 21 pieces here mostly cover the Iraq war, with a few asides relating to the merchandising of 9/11 and the contested 2000 election. Provocative, sometimes amusing, and occasionally infuriating (for different reasons depending on one's political stance, of course), Weapon of Mass Instruction is a fine addition to the Alternative Tentacles canon.