There have been a couple of articles floating around the blogosphere (e.g. this one by Jesse Walker) that make the claim that South Park is politically right-wing, more or less. (Another quotes Trey Parker saying "We hate conservatives. But we fucking hate liberals.")
I think this is projection. It's not hard to see the kind of politics you want to see in South Park. For example, the early episode with Scuzzlebutt "is" an anti-hunting episode. Big Gay Al cannot be construed in any way except as a social liberal icon. The episode in which all the kids are put on Ritalin (and become fans of Phil Collins, in the year when his cartoon song beat South Park's cartoon song for the Oscar), that echoes a common liberal plaint. So surely the show is liberal.
But South Park has praised large corporations and chain stores, with the townsfolk realizing that "Harbuck's" coffee really is good. It's devoted a catchy musical number to encouraging the destruction of the rain forest. It's satirized abortion-on-demand and alternative medicine, and established Saddam Hussein as a worse evil than Satan. So surely the show is conservative.
In fact, probably the only group never to receive any respect from South Park are the religious, primarily evangelical Christians. South Park's view of Jesus and the afterlife is decidedly heretical--God is a kind of midget hippopotamus/muskrat creature, Jesus and Satan wrestled on pay-per-view, and, later, Jesus gave his life while rescuing Santa Claus from the Iraqis. Jews are shown to worship Moses in the form of the Master Control Program from Tron.
However, it is probably the show's relationship with the Mormons that clearly shows its true politics. It began with a throwaway line that established, in the South Park afterlife, that the Mormons had the "correct" religion. Recently, a Mormon family moved to South Park, giving the kids an excuse to learn the story of the founding of the Mormon religion. The tale of Joseph Smith, literally told, was given a score consisting primarily of a male chorus chanting "dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb".
And yet, the Mormon family themselves was used repeatedly to make the point that Mormons aren't freaky cultists, but are, generally, hard-working, happy people who devote themselves to raising children in a congenial family environment. At the same time South Park is hurling childish insults at the founder of the Latter-Day Saints, it's asking how you can argue with a system that produces well-adjusted people like these
I think that shows that South Park is punk, pure hooligan punk, with all its contradictory goals, with a dash of Derrida and Duchamp. South Park will do anything to offend you. It shouts the punk mottos "Everything you think is sacred is crap" and "Nothing you believe is true".
You can't conclude that the writers of South Park have a political agenda. Their interest lies in mocking whatever someone has passion for, out of a belief that nothing human can be completely sensible, or completely foolish, and, if at all possible, they're going to gross you out in the process. Why is it wrong to devote half an episode to a "cripple fight" between a wheelchair-bound retarded kid and an MS sufferer on crutches? Let's make a beloved Christmas icon out of a turd, and make sure that he shows his affection to the kids by kissing them. Instead of showing part two of a cliffhanger episode as we promised, April Fools, we're going to show a parody of Sally Field's "Not Without My Daughter", featuring two farting Canadians and even more primitive animation than usual.
Politics just makes fertile ground for offending people. Belief comes easily to people, and punk is all about shattering that belief. That's why religions never win in South Park and why high-minded liberal ideals may come under more fire. South Park isn't political at all. It's the opposite of political.
Posted by Greg at December 16, 2003 2:51 PM
Reminds me of an old Trudeau interview, where he noted that SNL never managed to take a point of view.
While I think that there's still a lot of energy left in South Park, I also think it's suffering from creeping burning (which sometimes becomes leaping burnout). And one of the ways this burnout expresses itself is that it takes a lot of unimaginative shots at easy targets. I think that the shots they take at liberals and liberal ideals are more unimaginative, less comprehending, and more personally nasty than the ones they take at conservatives and conservative ideals. But I haven't sat down with a scorecard and backed up my impressions with hard numbers.
Kevin:
I would tend to agree with your perception that the easy shots come more often at the expense of liberals.
However, I wonder how much of that is observer-effect? Both you and I are pretty solidly liberal, and we're probably more likely to recognize and remember when our point of view is being offended, and less likely to notice the opposite.
My argument was that the show is libertarian, not conservative, and the examples you cite don't contradict that. Ritalin bashing is common among libertarians and conservatives as well as liberals. Big Gay Al declared, in one of the most libertarian episodes, that Scouts should be allowed to discriminate against gays. And the punk iconoclasm you document is hardly inconsistent with libertarianism.
Parker and Stone aren't purists, and there are some exceptions to the pattern (cf. the homeschooling episode). But South Park seems consistent here in a way that, say, The Simpsons is not. (Now there's a show that inspires projection.)
You yourself cited an episode--"It Hits the Fan"--that seems to hew fairly strongly anti-libertarian and pro-regulation. The episode with Mr. Garrison's "It", created to compete with the airlines, is strongly anti-market, and even the underpants gnomes episode, otherwise strongly pro-market, gets in a jab at modern business methods with "Step 2-? Step 3-Profit!"
I think the show's is consistent in first trying to offend.
(But, man, I'd love to know what the end of last night's episode looked like last Friday, before Saddam's spider hole was found. Their turnaround time is amazing)
I remember thinking the episode about Mr. Garrison's invention was pretty libertarian when I saw it, though that was two years ago and it's possible there was some anti-market aspect to it that I've forgotten. And "It Hits the Fan" wasn't pro-regulation -- the Knights were the networks' private Standards & Practices departments, not the FCC's mandatory rules.
While I'm at it, the episode where Cartman buys his own theme park seemed like a free-market fable to me and the guys I saw it with, but maybe that serves me right for watching cartoons with a bunch of libertarian filmmakers... :>
Yeah, I'm thinking there might be more brought to the cartoon than taken from it 8)
Witness this whole discussion about a show that at one point featured a pony fellating a hot dog.
But I'm not sure that a "free-market fable"--which characterization I won't dispute--is necessarily libertarian, as the topic wouldn't seem especially out of place in an 7th-grade civics class.
And, hey, thanks for the good discussion.