The South Park Issue-Rant

I haven’t watched South Park in awhile, the show never really grabbed me to the point where I would tune in specifically for the show. Once in awhile I will go through these periods where I will watch it for several weeks at a time and then months without. Few of the episodes I have seen really made me laugh where as most of it, was well done but didn’t appeal to me. Comedy Central seems to prefer rerunning the movie than it did any of the really good episodes that I always seem to miss.

Yet people that tune in to the show and find themselves shocked because the show has insulted something that they hold dear still surprise me. For a show that was developed from a short which pitted Jesus fighting Santa Claus over control for Christmas people seem to have a very short memory over the series’ draw: it’s shock value.

It’s shocking to hear the foul mouthed kids tackle concepts that are way over their heads as the clueless town folk run about as a polarizing satire on whatever issue the show may be addressing. It had gotten to the point where in 2004, the phrase “South Park Libertarian” was coined to apply to people who didn’t trust the right but also didn’t believe that the left was at all practical.

That Muslims are offended should come as no surprise, they can get in line behind Christians, Jews, Scientologists, and Mormons for the religions that the show has skewered. So the Muslim website that “warned” Trey Parker and Matt Stone to watch what they produced lest they become another Theo Van Gogh must have really been looking to be insulted. It’s not like Parker and Stone hadn’t done it before when they skewered Family Guy doing a cut-away gag with the prophet Muhammed and Peter Griffin getting lemonade. Even then he was behind a black box. I remember that episode quite clearly because their criticism of Family Guy hit so close to my main problem with the show and the fact that it came so closely to the Danish newspaper issue.

Someone is always going to be offended by the show. It’s the same people that thought all the children were so scarred from seeing two frames of Janet Jackson’s breast during the Superbowl (I wonder how those kids are doing) but cut from a different cloth.

The thing that really pisses me off are the calls from people who think that Parker and Stone should engage themselves in a bit of self-censorship so that people don’t get to the point where they are using thinly veiled threats on their lives. This is saying that the real problem isn’t with a guy who would make death threats around a poorly animated cartoon show, but with the people who made it. That isn’t even close to being the correct way of thinking in the post-renaissance age.

Asking them to censor themselves in some fit of being ultra-politically correct isn’t the mark of enlightenment, it’s the mark of being so afraid of the reaction that it violates the basic freedoms we base our modern societies on. Since everyone seems to be agreeing that this was a complete overreaction to the show, why can’t we agree that it’s the reactor that is wrong?