Posted by Amanda Marcotte November 9, 2007 in War On Terra, Movies, Assholes, Video
To which I have only one last thing to say, which is watch this clip from the movie Team America:
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But Amanda, they’re doing it so scientifically. If Faludi doesn’t have a provable scientific hypothesis backed by both polling data and neurophysiology, culminating in a Theory of Everything framed in terms of evolutionary psychology, she absolutely must not be allowed to speak or write. Only men are allowed to write about what they see, based on years of expertise and their understanding of how the world works.
Shorter everybody in that discussion: chickenhawking has nothing to do with masculine anxiety, except when a man says it does.
Thank you Amanda! You are amazing.
A guy I know told me he loved that movie because it wasn’t political. Not wanting to get into this clip because it makes me so angry, I asked him if portraying Michael Moore as a suicide bomber wasn’t a political statement. He said “No, because Michael Moore is an asshole.”
That’s some kind of privilege right there - to see such a preachy nails-on chalkboard movie and not even recognize the statements being made.
It’s funny because it’s true.
I consider Team America: World Police to be Parker & Stone’s greatest fuck you to everyone ever, including the movie’s own audience.
I keep wondering if Parker and Stone aren’t the quintessential Nice Guys(tm); always portraying anyone who insists that real injustice exists as overreacting. When they’re not worshiping the Almighty Phallus, Penetrator of All, of course.
What’s particularly sleazy about them is that they can always dodge behind the “just kidding! It’s satire, babe!” when someone protests. What’s sad is that they actually can do satire, and have real talent, but just keep shooting themselves in the foot by inserting (!) lectures into their projects about teh crazy non-white-male types harshin’ their buzz and how uncool that is. And once you’ve seen them do that 10 or 12 times, well, you stop seeing satire and start seeing jerkoffs.
I have never managed to sit through an episode of “South Park,” but what turned me off to these guys permanently was when one of them (I forget which one) appeared in “Bowling for Columbine” and called Columbine “a crappy school in a crappy town.” Real classy—like going to a funeral and sneering at the tacky outfit the corpse is wearing.
I wonder if slamming Michael Moore in this movie was their way of getting back at him for making them look insensitive. (By pointing a camera at them and letting them talk.)
South Park (really, the whole Stone/PArker oeuvre) would be better if it wasn’t its creators’ attack dog towards EVERYTHING not white, conserva-tarian and male.
Yep, that TPM discussion is pretty infuriating. I have been reading it, but every time I think about diving in and commenting I don’t really know what to say other than “I wish you nay-sayers would actually read the book!” There is just so many straw men being erected you can hardly cut through it all.
There *are* just so many straw men, rather.
“wonder if slamming Michael Moore ”
You may want to do some walking the web with the power of google. It was public belief that they were responible for the cartoon that in the theaterical run followed their apperance. Matt Stone and Trey Parker hated being associated with that cartoon and spoke out against Michael Moore for it.
Matt Stone lived in Littleton Colorado. He lived near Columbine High School Trey Parker lived in Evergreen Colorado. They met each other in the University of Colorado.
They both have spoken out about their influences for South Park and guess what Colorado is a huge factor.
Littleton was an incredibly conservative town.
And here I thought the point of that wonderful, bizarre final speech in Team America was how the pretty boy lead gets an incoherent sum up speech before everyone just starts shooting. You mean that was actually supposed to be taken seriously?
PS - and I just have to say it - who does Matt Zeitlin know or sleep with? What, exactly qualifies a 17 year old for such prominence?
“What, exactly qualifies a 17 year old for such prominence?”
Especially when he didn’t even read the book being discussed. He obviously is a good writer and VERY smart, and he could have contributed in a helpful way (even being the age that he is) but in that thread I am pretty perplexed as to why he was chosen to do that.
Especially since his idea of a killer retort is “Don’t let the door hit your ass on your way out.” Ohhhhhh, bet that one really scares the other fourth graders.
I’ve been reading along at TPM Cafe and really wanted to comment on some of the responses, but I’ve had a big presentation this week at work, and it’s not seemed like a good idea to get drawn into the conversation. I’ve been storing my comments up for a later blog post, and can sum them up in two words: Gestalt theory. Very few people seem to understand Gestalt theory (not very surprising, really), even without putting a name to it, and it’s so critical to understanding the difference between cultural influences and what individual people actually do.
Bitter Scribe
November 9, 2007 at 9:37 pm
There was one episode of South Park that made me stop watching except for very rare occasions (the one where Christopher Reeve is portrayed as a guy who tears the heads off babies and sucks their innards out to get stem cells), and another that cemented my belief that Parker and Stone are moronic jerkoffs (”ManBearPig”…look it up on Wikipedia to see why).
Now okay, to be fair to them, the following is all true…
tootiredoftheright
November 9, 2007 at 10:33 pm:
Their other complaint was that after seeing Stone in the movie, people might have gotten the impression that these guys were in favor of gun control. Which, I guess due to growing up in conservative Littleton, they are not.
I can, maybe, understand Stone being unhappy about people getting the wrong idea about his views on the gun issue. Maybe.
But the fucking cartoon? Are these guys for real? They’re upset about the cartoon?!
For starters, the cartoon’s style was nothing at all like South Park.
Second, everybody who’s watched South Park knows what Parker and Stone’s voice work sounds like, and the voices in the cartoon were clearly not them.
Third, the only way Stone could’ve had a legitimate complaint would’ve been if he were actually listed in the credits as making the cartoon, which he was not. Some people jumped to a conclusion that he didn’t like, and he got angry at Moore about it.
As for Team America, Roger Ebert pointed out that while the filmmakers portray celebs who spoke out against the war as literally traitors to America who fight on Kim Jong-Il’s side, there’s no appearance by Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld or any of the rest in the film. Interesting, no?
Here’s the extent to which they satirize the hawks: Team America goes into foreign countries and blows things up, including national monuments, while fighting terrorists. Terrorists are always there, and there’s no question that they are terrorists, so it’s not as if they were acting on faulty intelligence of anything. It pisses off the locals, who are unhappy that their monuments are destroyed, but it’s worth it because they kill bad guys. That’s it, that’s all.
Both of ‘em can kiss my whole asshole in mid-dump.
Ah, yes, more guys who poke fun at….the powerless, the liberal, anybody who’s not a conservative white guy.
Nothing is more revealing than a guy who’s obsessed with Michael Moore. Unlike Ann Coulter, he’s never called for murder, ‘perfection’, or bomb attacks, yet all these guys have a hard on for him and can’t say anything too vicious.
I’ve never watched more than a few minutes of South Park and I wish I could get them back, too. Juvenile. Thanks, I have trolls for that. Why are these guys in business? How many juveniles are there out there?
I wonder if you guys think that one political cartoon in The Onion is meant to be taken at face value, too.
Did you hear? Stephen Colbert isn’t really a republican! Shocking!
The more hilariously ironic thing about South Park to me is that the creators of the show consistently show themselves to be the small-minded, mean-spirited simpletons that they so often poke fun at in their show. They talk in interviews about how glad they are to have escaped that small town mindset, but regarding how they view the world…they never really did.
Oh and guys are the emotionally stunted, backwards thinking, regressive fucktards that they are in general because they won’t take an honest look at issues like gender anxiety.
ginmar
Why are these guys in business?
Um, because they have one of the most popular shows ever? They obviously ring true to many people, but maybe not to you.
My daughters dragged me in to watch (I didn’t have to be dragged in after the first time).
Don’t the creators self-identify as libertarians?
Um, LIbertarian, Father Coughlin “RAng true” to lots of people, too. And then there’s the people who believe Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter. Don’t use popularity to justify shit with me. It’s kind of disgusting.
Sheesh, I”m sure these guys try and justify what htey do by calling it ’satire.’ It’s just that true satire is the weapon of the powerless against the powerful, and these guys have always struck me as being the sort of assholes who are, well, small-minded and mean-spirited enough to make excuses like, “WE hate everybody.” Thanks a bunch, assholes, but if you hate everybody then you’re hating victim and victimizer the same. As someone said above, all the anti-war people were satrized in the movie, while the warmongers were let off the hook. Leftists in today’s society are at a disadvantage. Attacking them while they suffer from a power differential is allying one’s self with the powerful. These guys aren’t rebels or interesting or ground-breaking or anything: they’re just younger Republicans.
I have never managed to sit through an episode of “South Park,” but what turned me off to these guys permanently was when one of them (I forget which one) appeared in “Bowling for Columbine” and called Columbine “a crappy school in a crappy town.” Real classy—like going to a funeral and sneering at the tacky outfit the corpse is wearing.
Wow, I completely read that scene differently. First of all, the town is not Columbine, that’s the high school. The town is Littleton. Second of all, he’s from Littleton (what town do you think South Park is supposed to be?), so I think he has every right to characterize the town as he sees fit. Third, if you kept watching, he makes a very interesting, and I think sensitive point about the way that the insular small town high school culture breeds the kind of rage that can lead to school shootings. In particular, his point was that communities like that tend to make a big fucking deal out of high school, like it’s the most important thing ever, the end all, be all of existence. And if you’re kind of a loser in high school, that weighs heavily, because you’re led to believe that you’re failing at the most important phase of your life. And if kids knew that high school is no big thing, that life does go on, that you aren’t doomed to be a loser for life because you were a loser in high school, then maybe they wouldn’t have so much rage that would just boil over.
I thought it was an excellent point and he was the guy to make it.
The show falls flat a lot, but when they’re right, their satire is devastating. Plus, they sent up Bill Donohue perfectly after the Edwards debacle, for which I will be forever grateful. I really needed to see that episode at that point in my life.
Yeah, it almost makes up for the way they let the chickenhawks off the hook in “Team America.” Any Nice Guy ™ could haver had the same insight.
bitter scribe,
I thought the interview with stone in “bowling for columbine” was spot on. I thought his point was “stop trying to portray life in littleton as idyllic and pain free until the killers mysteriously appeared–people feel trapped in these little towns and not acknowledging just how trapped they are is part of the problem. There’s life after hgihschool but highschooler’s *don’t know that.*”
I don’t like south park *because* they are almost equal opportunity offenders. They can be very funny when they are puncturing the baloons of the religiously obsessed right wing, but they seem to feel they have to deal out the hate especially to women, minorities, and leftists.
Like maureen dowd they are quite conservative and predictably hostile primarily to people they see as “trying to do good stuff” because that conflicts with their basic world view (a very conservative one) that everyone is at base selfish and the worst sin is to pretend not to be selfish and make the rest of us look bad. That’s why they hate “hollywood leftists” because they see those people (or they pretend to see those people) as *making stone and parker* look bad by acting as though mere wealth and power was not enough, that people should try to do something political or give back to society. All stuff that they argue is “phony.” Of course arguing that everyone is atomically selfish and should only be expected to look out for number one is, like the ownership society, one of the most de-energizing and de-empowering ways of undercutting social action. It reminds the individual of just how threatened and powerless they are, and turns their attention away from working with other people to makign fun of them and working only for selfish causes.
Could the person who posted up above about “gestalt theory” give us all a little information on how this would solve the problem of analysis? I really mean that. I find, as an anthropologist, that people don’t seem to grasp just how powerful *social structures* and social ties are in determining what is normal and unnoticed and what is considered abnormal and thus noticed. Tell me what you mean by gestalt theory and how it fits in here?
aimai
oops, cross posted with amanda on this. glad to see I wasn’t alone in my reading of that scene.
aimai
And, you know, the clip creeps me out. There’s only so many times one can hear the word ‘pussy’ used like that before the mantle of satire slips off. It reminds me too much of liberal guys who call Ann Coulter a tranny or a bitch or a cunt.
The most irritating part of the show is that they set out to take the piss out of anyone they feel takes himself too seriously, but then they’ll have the main characters go on earnest speeches that make Al Gore look like a light-hearted ne’er do well. I’m gobsmacked that they don’t see that they don’t get an exemption from their own no-earnestness rule.
I always got the feeling that somewhere, off-camera, they were boasting about not being PC. You can’t attack unequals equally. That’s what they do. It makes it easier for them, but it’s just like these dipshits who proclaim they’re equalists. Yeah, well, men, women, and other minorities are not equal, so if you work equally for them, you’re just preserving the inequality. SAme thing with satire. Using it ‘equally’ on the powerless is just bullying.
ginmar’s rule:
No jokes about anyone but white males.
Shorter Libertarian: I don’t understand anything.
Let me translate for you: No jokes by those belonging to the groups in power about those out of power, unless those in the former group can STFU with a smile when told that they’re assholes for mocking those less privileged than themselves. (I’ve yet to meet ary a one of the Privilegeboys who *can* laugh and accept that they are assholes for mocking those less privileged, when called for their shit, so it’s pretty much a safe bet that “unless” that will never be taken up on.)
Or to put it in historical analogy: aristos laughed at peasants, and used the word for peasant as synonyms for “fool” and “thug” (look up the history of “clown” sometime) all the while eating up the poor like bread, having whole different sets of laws for themselves and those being rarely enforced.
Then they wondered why on earth the peasants revolted against their kindly and benevolent rule…
Libertarian: that is, unless you’re, you know, not a white male.
Oh, Bella, you’re giving him too much credit. He understands, he just doesn’t want to. Those damned peasants could have pulled themselves up by their bootstraps if they really didn’t want to starve to death!
Here’s the extent to which they satirize the hawks: Team America goes into foreign countries and blows things up, including national monuments, while fighting terrorists. Terrorists are always there, and there’s no question that they are terrorists, so it’s not as if they were acting on faulty intelligence of anything. It pisses off the locals, who are unhappy that their monuments are destroyed, but it’s worth it because they kill bad guys. That’s it, that’s all.
But is it very clear in the opening scene that Team America did far more damage than the terrorists ever could. And you say the locals were “unhappy”–but that’s a weak description for “the entire populace yelling at Team America and explicitly kicking them out of the country.” Which, by the way, Team America “didn’t get”.
Team America was ridiculed throughout the whole film: the fake empath, the team recruiting Gary to use his “great acting” to infiltrate the bad guys, the ridiculous “signal” that Gary’s in trouble, the boneheads missing the ridiculous signal, the leader forcing Gary to give him a blow job before he can go save the team…are we really supposed to think these bozos are to be taken seriously?
When the ship was crashing, the Team calls back to base “We’re going down! We have no intelligence! Repeat–we have no intelligence!” Yep–cause they’ve been completely clueless since scene 1. And is “You had me at dicks fuck assholes” supposed to be a serious romantic line?
I thought the ripping of “Hollywood anti-war movement” was overdone, but it seemed to me to be more about “why don’t these damned celebrities shut and entertain us” instead of “war is bad.” And the Kim Jong Il/Hans Blix scenes were pointless, other than to allow them to use the catfish as a shark, I guess.
I don’t think a single character in the movie comes out looking good. However, I think the classic entitled Nice Guy or chickenhawk would be pretty blind to how poorly Team America is portrayed because they are just dazzled by the huge breasts and explosions and such.
“The show falls flat a lot, but when they’re right, their satire is devastating. ”
I have seen numerous remarks on forums that the show satire is best when they are aiming at conservatives, or just fascination with certain cultural trends. Liberals for example they don’t seem to know how to satire since it seems based on some overblown fancical view of Liberals. They know conservatives which is how they can satire them so effectively but liberals are a mystery to them.
Make Love not Warcraft. Guitar Queer-0 are considered pretty good because they poke fun at those who became infauted with these video games. It was pretty amusing to see the reaction of wow players who didn’t get the episode and why they are living proof of what the episode was aimed at.
Well, and I’m not the first to point this out. What it comes down to is this:
When you satirize the Right you just repeat back whatever they just said in a funny voice, because the ideals they promote are so ludicrously antithetical to the Left that it’s already absurd.
Where as the Left’s ideals such as social equality, taking care of the planet, not killing millions of people in unnecessary wars etc. fail to be reprehensible to the Right, so they have to make up bizarre hidden agendas or go reducio ad absurdum (sp) or just make shit up (see the cloud of smug and the whole hybrid car episode). At which point it slips from satire to paradoy or just flat out insults.
Dorvl, you’re ignoring the point. They included leftists in the satire and left putative righties out entirely. Sorry, try again.
Aimai, as someone who is fairly schooled in the application of Gestalt therapy I am also looking forward to the coming analysis regarding the theory, which is slightly related and way over my head. I will go read the TPM thread to see how it relates to this particular instance, but in general, I know that Gestalt theory relates to laws of human perception, and explains how people arrive at their beliefs, impressions, concerns etc as based on the normal tendency to invent whole, completed patterns out of insufficient data, from which our thought and behavior proceeds. It has to do with the unavoidable human propensity to make shit up and call it the truth, which we do to create the necessary fiction of an unnassailable and orderly world.
Slightly OT: Faludi speaks at Iowa State University this coming Monday night. I will so be there.
idiosynchronic,
Watch this video, it’s a 1951 recruiting film for Iowa State’s Department of Home Economics, and it’s a hoot.
Where’s she speaking? (My Dad just went down to Ames yesterday for some continuing ed stuff at the Vet School)
I love watching South Park, but then again, I take it as seriously as I do Bill O’Reilly, Lou Dobbs, Wolf Blitzer or C-Spans 1 thru 3. Too many of them are just poorly drawn cartoon characters…
Southpark is good when it depicts the unromantacized, unvarnished truth about childhood (i.e., foul mouthed little kids who treat each other cruelly and have about zero empathy, combined with adults that are at best clueless and at worst crueler than the kids); it’s at its worst when the creators use the show as a soapbox for their libertarian fantasies.
Unfortunately, the latter has come to outnumber the former.
So, what aspects of the Left, since it’s so virtuous, ARE open to satire?
What aspects of feminism ARE open to satire?
Or is it all totally fucking subjective, and what’s funny to one is heinous to another?
A lot of this smacks of ‘who’s ox is getting gored.” The targets of effective satire probably NEVER like it, nor even ‘get it’.
It’s not that the left is so “virtuous” it’s that the ideals we run around espousing just don’t strike many people even on the right as reprehensible. As a result straight satire is harder to make work, again I point to the hybrid car episode, it’s not liberal stereotypes, it’s just sort of gibberish. Or look at the failed Half Hour News Hour or whatever that show on FoxNews was called, It had to attack the ACLU on one specific case (Nazis), why, because not many people hate free speech. It’s bit about Obama, entirely more effective, but then it was also about a specific person not just liberals in general.
Of course it “helps” that the liberal stance at the moment is ridiculously centrist as a result of not being in power for so many years, and being pretty centrist even when it was in power, the Left hasn’t been all that left in decades. Mean while the Right just keeps going further and further.
Just a further note:
Of course all aspects of feminism and liberalism are open to satire. It’s just hard to satirize “opposing torture” or “expecting women to be paid as much as men” without resorting to ludicrous slippery slope arguments or just making shit up.
ginmar already said it better than me, but I might as well repeat her point with a slightly different example. I’d seen some early South Park when it first came out, and remembered it being kind of amusing. (Also, I thought that “Scott Tenorman Must Die” was a masterpiece of Crossing The Line Twice.) So my significant other got the season-nine DVDs as a present, and I thought it might be worth seeing.
So, we popped in the first ep, “Mr. Garrison’s Fancy New Vagina”, which is essentially a half-hour rant about how transgendered people are just fooling themselves and will always “really” be their birth gender, and that transwomen are just looking to get those delicious priviliges that women enjoy… which appear to consist mainly of showing your tits and getting abortions. Thinking that it might have been a fluke, we then saw “Die, Hippie, Die”, which inveighed heavily against, well, hippies, a social movement that now exists primarily as a pejorative term.
Nobody said that targets on the left aren’t “open to satire”. The point was that aiming satire at those targets is cruel and tasteless, and that satire only really works on cartoon versions of the left anyway. Yes, it is who those targets are that matters. Satirizing the actual positions of the powerful (a la The Daily Show) is different on a very basic level than satirizing strawman versions of that which the powerful want to demonize anyway. In the former case, you’re fighting the good fight with humor; in the latter, you’re acting as an attack dog for those in charge. See the above note about The Half-Hour News Hour for a concrete example of the difference. I can do no better than to quote Molly Ivins:Also, did anyone else notice that the “dicks/pussies/assholes” speech up there was pretty much lifted from the military-fap nonsense quoted in Bill Whittle’s classic “TRIBES”? Just replace “dicks” with “sheepdogs”, “pussies” with “sheep” and “assholes” with “wolves”, and you’ve got yourself the Team America argument presented straight-up.
So, if anyone wanted to pretend that that exact logic isn’t used to defend the idea that we must let amoral cretins run amok because otherwise brown men will rape us (I mean our beautiful porcelain-white wives and daughters) in the night… go ahead and chew on that. Or you could just meditate on the frequent quotation of Orwell’s “rough men stand ready” bit; the idea’s the same.
Parker and Stone are like chocolate and shit.
Eric, did you read anything I wrote or what? Several other people quoted Molly Ivins. She said it all.
Why do you want to justify skewering people who have less power than the powerful? Why are you interested in doing that? You want to skewer people who are already scapegoated and strawmanned out of existance? Why?
Libertarian
November 10, 2007 at 11:53 am:
If they made fun of Al Sharpton when he went too far or took a stand that was ridiculous (which I considered the whole “Michael Jackson’s record label is racist” thing to be), I wouldn’t mind.
I’m not saying that they can’t make fun of anybody in particular. Obviously they can.
I’m saying that I won’t like them if they make fun of the good guys, such as Al Gore.
I’m saying that I won’t like them if they perpetuate this “global warming is a myth” propaganda by making Gore out to be a guy who sees imaginary threats.
I’m also saying that I really won’t like it if they depict Christopher Reeve the way they did (and okay, this was before he died, but it was still pretty scummy) while the stem cell debate was raging.
If you really are a libertarian, then you should have a live and let live attitude. Stone and Parker aren’t about “live and let live”, they’re about being the biggest assholes they can get away with being. OK, Gore, Clooney and Baldwin might be able to laugh about it, but they’re bigger people than me.
Kind of similar to the Team America speech, sometimes these two dicks will take down somebody who deserves it, like a Donohue (and I’m glad it was able to help you get through that time in your life, Amanda). And other times, far too often, they’ll attack somebody who doesn’t deserve it. Not only attack them, but go balls out and totally tear them to shreds. Not cool at all.
The point of Team America is to lampoon people who actually believe that we should allow amoral cretins to defend us against phantom brown rapists.Honestly, this is not rocket surgery.
Put another way…Cartman is not a “hero” in South Park. His presence is not intended to endorse bigots. It’s to show that bigots are fools. Are you getting this yet?>
Stone and Parker aren’t about “live and let live”, they’re about being the biggest assholes they can get away with being.
Yeah, what he said. I’ve never been able to get into South Park either, for reasons that have been spoken here much more lucidly than I was ever able to articulate them to myself.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manbearpig
Rob, SP did take on Al Gore in this episode.
Yeah, Louise, that’s what I was talking about. I remember reading Gore commenting on it somewhere, and as I recall he was able to laugh about it, which I don’t think I’d be able to do in his position.
If this topic hasn’t passed its expiration date, there was a Matt Stone quote that I didn’t remember to mention in my last couple of posts:
“I hate conservatives, but I really fucking hate liberals.”
–Matt Stone
Amanda surmised…
Not to argue with your conclusions, but a few facts.
There is no “town” involved with Columbine; it is located in unincorporated Jefferson County. Littleton happens to be the mailing address.
Columbine, which is located in suburban Denver, is neither itself small nor is the area it is located in “small”. Your characterization of an “insular small town high school” does not hold up regarding Columbine. Columbine’s enrollment is around 1750 students. Some may not consider that a huge school, but it is not small. Others may consider Denver a provincial burb, but it is hardly a small town.
Neither Parker nor Stone went to Columbine. Parker went to Evergreen High School, which is located in the foothills west of Denver. Evergreen H.S. is smaller than Columbine, but it is far from insular. Evergreen is part of the Denver Metro area. It is extremely wealthy and its residents are highly educated.
Stone went to Heritage High School, which does happen to be in Littleton. Though it is in a different school district it is some what “close” to Columbine in location and characteristics. Per capita income at Heritage would be higher.
There is a South Park in Colorado, but it denotes a large glacial valley, not a town. There are two very small towns called Fairplay and Alma, both of which have high schools.
Now to argue with your conclusions: Their premises are based on facts that you assumed were right because they fit your prejudiced view of the situation. If you have any real insight into what happened out here we would love to here it.
Maybe your wisdom could help prevent things like what happened at Platte Canyon High School? Funny, Platte Canyon is small; Bailey is closer in kind to Stone and Parker’s South Park. Bailey is even on the road to the actual South Park.
Parker and Stone are extremely funny.
Aside from pointlessly saying that I grew up in white priviledge town (aka Evergreen, CO) and went to white priviledge high (aka Evergreen High School). Its a very glibertarian area, for what its worth. And similar in some respects to littleton (same county), but much further from the city.
I guess I have to stand up for South Park, kind of.
South Park seems to mainly satirize white, middle America (I’ve been watching the show a long time) and “rednecks” regularly. Some of the episodes REALLY piss me off (Manbearpig, absolutely…in the most recent episode they kind of made it up to Al Gore b/c the character of Manbearpig was “real”.)
They have also trashed Republicans before (not as much as “lefties” supposedly_…
The best episodes are relatively apolitical…if anything, the show is sympathetic to gays (Big Gay Al) if not an overextension of political correctness (you CAN be too “political correct.” Illogically politically correct).
Sometimes the show pisses me off, but otherwise…it’s good, weird satire that hits everyone.
P.S. Tolkein is a sympathetic wealthy black kid, one of the few rational characters on the show; Chef was one of the favorites on the show (before Isaac Hayes left) and both were used to softly skewer soft-handed racism in various episodes.
Just got through all the comments at the Book Club, so I’ll just put this here for posterity’s sake:
First, on Parker/Stone: Kudos to them for standing up to Donaghue, but their general attitude is definitely a data point in support of Faludi’s theories. If you read their Rolling Stone interview last year, you get a clear idea that the one thing they never, ever want to be thought of as is “pussies”.
Second, on the Book Club: That was not your finest hour, Amanda. Your “smack-down” of Matt was particularly egregious:
- You claim Matt won’t accept scientific research that would support Faludi’s claims, when he’s brought up the exact same research that you do (to make the case that Faludi’s claims are not as well-structured, and therefore have less explanatory power)
- You accuse Matt of only pointing out the nonscientific nature of Faludi’s claims because you “suspect that he doesn’t demand scientific rigor in books that don’t give him the same knee-jerk desire to refute them.” Isn’t it at least as equally likely that Matt’s beef is with Social Theory in general? Based on his two posts, especially the conclusion in his second (see last paragraph), I’d say that’s far more likely. Faludi rightly points out that this upholds a status quo, and you do a good job pointing out that these theories can be fertile soil for future controlled research, but that’s no reason to impugn his motives.
- And then you “won’t theorize” about his motivations, except for the rest of the paragraph where you do. Classy.
The sad thing is that the posters to the Book Club did a fine job of pointing out the weakness in Matt’s argument almost immediately (see this post for an example), so your bloviating on it was entirely unnecessary.
Then you go after BevD for the only paragraph in her post that dares to disagree with you and Faludi and Ducat that critiques of Faludi’s theory might not be gender biased. Throughout the discussions, she was a voice of reason, but because she said one thing that might explain others defensiveness that didn’t imply repression or ignorance, you go off on her.
To be sure, there were some commenters at the Book Club that were spewing vitriol at you, and you had every right to defend yourself against them (kozmik in particular was quite trollish), but a lot of others were trying to let you know that you were just being a jerk. I hope you see the difference.