South Park Tackles Political Correctness

South Park is known for being timely with the latest trends in the national media. Lately, each season has focused on a larger theme.  This season is political correctness.

The show’s creators do a masterful job at making fun of “PC culture.”  The biggest addition to the show is a new principal at South Park’s school, named PC Principal.

As the National Review points out, this is the best tactic that can be employed against social justice warriors and PC police:

“In their 19th season, show creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone have taken aim squarely at the thought-crime police. But they aren’t relaying a message about how suffocating a society built on the foundations of political correctness can be by preaching about it; they are putting the citizens of South Park through it, and in doing so, they’re showing us all just how ludicrous we’ve become.

Each episode of the new season has dived deeper into political correctness. And each new episode showcases the disasters of a politically correct world.” They are on a season-long crusade to slay the beast. Permanently. For them, this isn’t about liberal vs. conservative politics per se, and it would be a foolish thing for the political Right to attempt to lay claim to Parker and Stone (although, personally, I would hand the keys to the RNC over to them after last week’s CNBC debate debacle). We should, however, embrace what they are doing and sit back and admire it.

A culture of political correctness dominated by progressives depends on their ability to freely offend the sensibilities and beliefs of those with whom they disagree. Lena Dunham’s career presents a good example of how this works. When Dunham dons a Planned Parenthood lab coat and calls it a Halloween costume, she’s doing so explicitly to troll a pro-life, religious constituency. Photos and articles on her stunt then generate hate clicks and mean tweets about her, allowing her to keep her celebrity-victim profile fresh and her unpopular show in the spotlight a little while longer. The same dynamic is at play when media outlets pluck random tweets from low-follower Twitter accounts they feel are problematic and embed them into stories to present to their mob, so readers can bombard the offenders into apologizing and never showing their faces in public again.

Parker and Stone aren’t vulnerable to this kind of attack, though. They’ve built a profitable brand not only with South Park but with films like Baseketball and their award-winning musical, Book of Mormon. So they don’t care about offending Lena Dunham or any other celebrity for that matter, and they certainly don’t care about offending right or left wing political leaders nor do they care about offending their media allies. Parker and Stone are effectively critic-proof. Social-justice celebrities, media, and politicians who might otherwise jump at the chance to condemn South Park’s message know they would inevitably invite trouble for themselves in the form of more sardonic mockery.

South Park’s creators are succeeding with ruthless humor (and occasionally a catchy song), which is ultimately the only way to defeat these people: Laugh at them. Parker and Stone are laying the groundwork and leaving us blueprints as a culture for how to move past all this ridiculousness. They are dismantling the social-justice society piece by piece, week by week.

South Park has an uncanny history of its episodes and seasons being anti-continuity. In earlier seasons, its episodes were not written and recorded until days before the episodes’ air date. By shifting toward sequential story arcs, Matt Parker and Trey Stone have been able to create more multifaceted arguments this season. For instance, the creators of the show have acknowledged that sometimes outrage culture has a basis in actual outrages. A hilarious, and quintessential, episode on police brutality suggests both that South Park’s cops are needed to keep the peace and that many of them joined the force to beat up minorities whenever they pleased. While the story behind Police brutality is exaggerated, it is a major concern among many minority groups in this country. And the show tackled it nicely.

            In the following episode, an allegorical figure named Reality. shows up to scold South Parkers with a lecture that sums up this season’s morality, “I’m sorry the world isn’t one big liberal-arts college campus! We eat too much. We take our spoiled lives for granted. Feel a little bad about it sometimes.” This causes the towns people to capture reality, and hang him for all of the town to see.

            This reminds me of little old Randolph College. On a very ‘progressive’ campus inhabited by minorities, liberals, feminists, and members of the LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender) community, it is quite easy to offend someone with the mildest of statements. While having a discussion with a classmate of mine with strong feministic views, I stated that I would one day like to start a family. She lashed back with remarks such as,” Why do you have to start it?” and “You must expect women to conform to societal ideologies.” I was left dumbfounded and confused. I had no idea how to respond as the noticeably frustrated and offended young woman stormed off. Perhaps my statement was not seen as politically correct.

            This incident had me wondering if Randolph was a place where the simplest of micro aggressions could be a trigger for someone. Perhaps that a miniscule statement made inside the ‘red brick wall’ could lead to someone’s reputation being ruined for good. Are Randolph’s students leading towards ‘politically correct’ ideology where the offender must be punished, not just for justice’s sake, but also to send the message to anyone else on campus that should he or she stray off the script, they too might find themselves harassed or ostracized?   How must one live their life to avoid harming others by being ‘politically correct’? Merriam-Webster defines political correctness as, “conforming to a belief that language and practices which could offend political sensibilities (as in matters of sex or race) should be eliminated.” While this is the dictionary definition, it does not represent the social definition very well. I for one simply see modern political correctness as powerful form of censorship designed to prevent anyone from having their feelings hurt.

Randolph College woman’s basketball player Alexis Calloway ’18 says, “I only feel free to speak my mind a select few. I feel like a lot of people on this campus look for reason to be mad at someone.” When asked what made her feel this way, she responded, “It hasn’t happened to me, but I’ve heard stories of people who made what seemed to be a harmless and [comical] statement, that was overheard by someone who then blew it out of the water.” This seems to be a common occurrence. Not only at Randolph, but other small liberal arts colleges as well.

In an article by Stephen Carter of the Bloomberg View, he cites a study done by McLaughlin & Associates about the attitudes of college students toward free speech. The survey, conducted during September on behalf of Yale University's William F. Buckley Jr. Program, found some disturbing responses on basic questions about just how free students think their own campus speech is.

The survey asked whether students felt intimidated about sharing their own views because they differed from either the views of their professors or the views of their classmates. On both questions, respondents split almost evenly. That roughly half of students feel that professors sometimes don't welcome their dissent is unwelcome news. But we learn more if we probe the data more deeply. Republicans were slightly more likely than Democrats to have experienced classroom intimidation, and men were slightly more likely than women. The outlier group, by a significant margin, is Hispanic students, of whom some 56 percent report feeling intimidated, compared with 49 percent of black students and 45 percent of white students. College is supposed to be a place where ideas can be shared, and experiences can be learned; Not a place where students are intimidated to not speak their minds out of fear of an unrepairable consequence.      

This falls back on my use of South Park as a savior for those against the new political correct stigma on college campuses. These intimidators are represented in show by P.C. Principal and his crew of like-minded, jacked-up frat bros, who believe that being P.C. [Politically Correct] “means you love nothing more than beer, working out and the feeling that you get when you rhetorically defend a marginalized community from systems of oppression!” These ‘P.C. bros meet micro aggression with macro aggression, bullying kids and adults who say or do anything that does not align with their views. An example would be the way P.C. Principal threatens to physically harm and publicly shame anyone who doesn’t refer to the transgender reality star Caitlyn Jenner as anything less than “stunning and brave.”

The exaggerated behavior displayed in the show is an accurate representation of the lives of faculty and students on college campuses today. South Park captures a vivid image of political correctness that so many people are exposed to. For people who are like me, aspiring comedians, we are afraid to showcase our talents out of the fear of offending someone on our campus. Future philosophers and politicians are afraid to share their views out of fear of hurting someone’s feelings. The ideas of political correctness need not go away, but rather, instead of focusing on micro aggressions and trigger warnings, we should focus on respecting everyone, and allowing people to be entitled to their own opinions.