Ollie North's Gold
Posted in Personal Miscellany
on May 9th, 2009 by
Stephen DeGrace
This week we bought Volume 4 of American Dad. The absolute highlight for me is that it contains the "search for Ollie North's gold" episode. This one is a gem for two reasons. The second reason is the inclusion of the geologist at the end who is portrayed as absolutely the coolest person who ever lived on account of being a geologist. A big shout out to my Dad 
. The first reason, though, is the "School House Rock" style rendition of a little song explaining who Ollie North is for the benefit of Steve, who is way too young to know about Iran-Contra.
This video, aside from being incomparably awesome, is also a nice example of the Revenge of the Left phenomenon. During the nineties and early 2000's, the right wing in America has learned to attack the left's soft, nutty underbelly by sending out angry clowns like Bill O'Reilley to appeal to people who felt marginalized by the liberal paradigm. Eventually the left struck back with real, actual clowns of their own, such as John Stewart and Steven Colbert. The Ollie North video is in the style of Steven Colbert... Seth MacFarlane viciously lampoons the right through the voice of a character who is intensely right-wing. In fairness to MacFarlane, in American Dad he also mocks the left via the character of Hayley.
The Ollie North video is a great education on the Iran-Contra affair but also quite biased... for example, the aspect of the affair where the Iran portion of the transaction was related to freeing American hostages held by Shiite guerillas in Lebanon is not alluded to in the song, and would cast the affair in a somewhat different light. This truly is the revenge of the left - Ollie North may have gotten away scott free and treated like a hero, which is kind of an outrage, but a lot of people are only going to know about who he is and what his background is from pop culture, which is going to be heavily influenced by this catchy little gem.
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