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.
