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| Don't mess with the PC Bros brah! |
Please realize that I fully realize South Park is not for the faint of heart. I fully admit it is a vulgar show and as each episode's pre-show disclaimer warns, it in actuality "should not be viewed by anyone." All that said, as far as I am concerned South Park contains the most visceral, scathing, impacting satire of our times—you will need to wade through all the vulgarity however, in order to see it. Actually, no. Let me say this: America is a vulgar place already and though I do not necessarily agree with their means, Trey Parker and Matt Stone (the show's writer/creators/actors) use vulgarity to show us how vulgar our time and place and people truly are.
South Park is never greater than when it places us somewhere within the insanity of the swirling funnel cloud of American politics and entertainment, someplace where all our competing ideologies and the tactics we use to espouse those ideologies renders reality itself an absurd farce. South Park lets no one escape alive who is not willing to tirelessly sift through the mad storm cloud or our culture wars in order to seek out a reasoned, coolheaded cleft of a rock for safety.
On the first two episodes of their 19th season they take us deep into this insane country managing to skewer the current simultaneous uprisings of (1) a hostile "politically correct" culture where all speech is policed with militantly sensitive force and (2) a hostile far right culture that sees all difference and the invasion of that difference (in the form of immigrants, documented or not) as so much of a threat that that culture is willing to elect an unknowledgeable hate-spewing buffoon as president (you know who I'm talking about). The parable takes on tangible form first with the new character PC Principal who rules South Park Elementary with an open-minded, culturally sensitive (who knows all about white privilege!), spiked iron fist. Then, in the second part of the parable we find a once again enraged Mr./Mrs. Garrison, who is so irate at the influx of Canadian immigrants into the U.S. (as a direct result of the rising overly PC culture) he openly says we should "@$#& them all to death" and then build a big wall on the Canadian border—to which he gets enthusiastic cheers from his supporters.
The plot thickens from there but Parker and Stone's point is clear: we are living in dire times and it is not just those Other people's faults. It's everyone's fault. And sometimes there is nothing you can do about it. Sometimes, you are in the middle of giving a speech to everyone, as Kyle does at the end of the episode, but you give up because you realize it will not do any good. Sometimes, all you can do is watch the train wreck happen (that and pray—pray real hard).
If you seek some solace from all the cultural craziness currently taking place, might I suggest South Park as a remedy?
You can stream new South Park episodes at:
www.southparkstudios.com
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