The Ultimate South Park and Philosophy (24 page)

His misery isn’t the result of being treated as a pack animal within their home (indeed, he could clean
whatever he
wanted—let’s forget for a second that he doesn’t have the option
not to clean
). The ­couple’s prescription is that Mantequilla belongs with “his own kind,” and so they drop him off at a Mexican restaurant.

This sets off a chain reaction when Mantequilla convinces the ­restaurant employees to return to Mexico, and they proceed to tell their friends and family (all in varied service industry jobs) to do the same. Unlike the white family who can’t tell Mantequilla
isn’t actually Mexican
, Butters doesn’t fool the workers at the Mexican restaurant for
un minuto
. To them, it’s strange that there is “a white American kid who wants to be Mexican” but they still conclude, “Mantequilla is RIGHT! Why did we even come to this country? It SUCKS HERE, MAN!” This starts a mass migration of Mexican-Americans past the border from the US to Mexico and the border patrol has to reverse its normal operations in order to keep Mexican-Americans from leaving the US. As a confused TV anchorman says: “You’ve heard of Mexican salsa, but Mexican pride? The phenomenon is called ‘Orgullo de Mantequilla,’ where Mexicans are realizing it actually is starting to suck more here in the US. The borders are being flooded with Latin Americans trying to get back to their own countries.” The mass migration results when recognition blossoms about how terrible it is to be a population that’s “super-exploited” because of their racialization within the US society and economy. “The Last of the Meheecans” shows two things: first, that Mexican and Mexican-American labor is just as important as it is disrespected in US society; second, the racialization of this population in the US involves two conflicting stereotypes—that Mexicans and Mexican-Americans are lazy
and
that they excel at demeaning, difficult service work.

Marx isn’t known for his in-depth treatment of race or ethnicity, but he also doesn’t ignore these topics. Marx scholar Kevin Anderson ­suggests that Marx’s writings “on oppressed nationalities and ethnic groups … became central to Marx’s assessment of the working-class movements of the two most powerful capitalist societies, Britain and the United States. He concluded that labor movements in core cap­italist countries that failed to support adequately progressive nationalist movements on the part of those affected by their governments, or failed to combat racism toward ethnic minorities within their own societies, ran the danger of retarding or even cutting short their own development.”
⁵
The charge has been made, though, that Marx’s earliest writings on issues of nation and ethnicity reveal a certain “Eurocentrism.” In the
Communist Manifesto
, for example, Marx and Friedrich Engels write:

The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian nations into civilization. The cheap prices of its commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians’ intensely obstinate hatred of the foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilization into their midst, i.e. to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image.
⁶

Marx’s thoughts about colonialism evolve, though, in his progressive studies of Polish and Irish national liberation movements, as well as slavery and the American Civil War.

Issues of national independence were deeply connected with class struggles for Marx. For example, in the
Communist Manifesto
Marx says that with “the supremacy of the proletariat,” class exploitation will end, but so will “the exploitation of one nation by another.”
⁷
Engels, too, noted the importance of national liberation movements for class struggles within the dominant European countries. Engels supported the 1846 Polish insurrection, arguing that “by opposing Russia, the Poles were also undermining the major external support of the Prussian monarchy, and ‘henceforth the German people and the Polish people are irrevocably allied’.”
⁸
For the Polish uprising of 1863, Marx had drafted an unsigned, short statement of support:

In this fateful moment, the German working class owes it to the Poles, to foreign countries and to its own honor to raise a loud protest against the German betrayal of Poland, which is at the same time treason to Germany and to Europe. It must inscribe the
Restoration of Poland
in letters of flame on its banner, since bourgeois liberalism has erased this glorious motto from its own flag. The English working class has won immortal historical honor for itself by thwarting the repeated attempts of the ruling classes to intervene on behalf of the American slaveholders by its enthusiastic mass-meetings … If police restrictions prevent the working class in Germany from conducting demonstrations on such a scale for Poland, they do not in any way force them to brand ­themselves in the eyes of the world as accomplices in the betrayal, through apathy and silence.
⁹

Marx also offers unconditional support for the abolition of American slavery in several newspaper articles. In 1860, Marx wrote that “in my view, the most momentous thing happening in the world today is, on the one hand, the movement among the slaves in America, started by the death of [John] Brown, and the movement among the slaves in Russia, on the other.”
¹⁰
Issues of race and nation were deeply important to Marx.

Less well known is that fact that Marx also exulted about Abraham Lincoln’s reelection on behalf of the First International, which he helped organize:

While the working men, the true political power of the North, allowed slavery to defile their own republic; while before the Negro, mastered and sold without his concurrence, they boasted it the highest prerogative of the white-skinned laborer to sell himself and choose his own master; they were unable to attain the true freedom of labor or to support their European brethren in their struggle for emancipation, but this barrier to progress has been swept off by the red sea of civil war.
¹¹

This language is matched in a 1866 letter from Marx to Paul Lafargue, a French socialist and journalist. Marx talks about recent Congressional victories of radical Republicans in the US, in which he notes that “the workers of the North have finally understood very well that labor in the white skin cannot emancipate itself where in the black skin it is branded”
¹²
For Marx, interracial unity was a condition for the revolutionary overcoming of class society, and clearly the existence of racialized slavery (or racialized subjugation of any kind), defines both the nation in which it occurs and the dominant race of that nation. Most importantly, it’s an obstacle to the freedom of the entire working class.

The Marx best known for
Das Kapital
kept issues of nation, ethnicity, and race mostly outside of his analysis of the value of labor power in an explicit manner. But it’s clear that he treated such value as socially determined, a process based on the actual social needs of a population of workers, given what that population is used to in their place, time, and circumstances. But as Marx started to analyze the political issues of his day, he highlighted issues of national liberation, opposed colonization and slavery, and advocated interracial solidarity. Marx and Engels both criticized the use of national and racial divisions by ruling classes to divide laborers from each other, emphasizing that international and interracial unity among laborers must be achieved in order for collective freedom from class society to be achievable. Marx’s labor theory of value is about due, as a result, for a reevaluation in terms of the socially constructed division of people based on their value as members of a particular nation, ethnicity, race, or gender. As soon as Butters becomes racialized when he’s interpreted as a Meheecan, he’s treated as though his nature is to clean and engage in hard domestic labor. “The Last of the Meheecans” hilariously illustrates the connection between race, ethnicity, and nation, on the one hand, and class and labor power, on the other. It does this in the very way that Marx’s labor theory of value connects to his thoughts on nationalities and races. And it leaves us with but one conclusion: Meheecans of the World Unite!

1
. Karl Marx, S. Moore, and E.B. Aveling,
Capital: A Critique of Political Economy
, ed. F. Engels and E. Untermann (New York: Modern Library: 1936), 190.

2
. Ibid.

3
. Ibid.

4
. A lot of has been written on the social construction of race and gender, but the events of “The Last of the Meheecans” truly begin when Butters/Mantequilla is
falsely
taken to be from Mexico. His “Mexican” identity as Mantequilla is the product of assumptions about him as part of a “racialized” population, and when this happens, his behaviors, traits, history, and limitations are filtered through a racist lens.

5
. Kevin Anderson,
Marx at the Margins: On Nationalism, Ethnicity, and Non-Western Societies
(Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2010), 3.

6
. Marx and Engels,
The Communist Manifesto
. Retrieved from
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch01.htm#007
, accessed Feb. 12, 2013.

7
. Anderson,
Marx at the Margins
, 58.

8
. Ibid., 60.

9
. Ibid., 66.

10
. Ibid., 85.

11
. Ibid., 110.

12
. Ibid., 114.

John Scott Gray

Patrick Henry famously exclaimed, “Give me liberty or give me death!” Some people might argue that this statement could be a motto worthy of the American democratic experience. As evidence, they might also point to how our free elections put officials in positions of power, and then take them out, in a non-violent fashion. The passing of political power as representative of the will of the people rests on questionable assumptions, though. For one, the American founders gave the power of the vote to very few of the new nation’s inhabitants, allowing a small number of men to select office-holders in the legislative branch. Also, American democracy rests on the moral idea that every vote counts and counts equally. This can be questioned by looking at statistics, especially in light of the 2000 and 2004 presidential election controversies.

South Park
dealt with these issues in the 2004 episode “Douche and Turd,” parodying the American election process in the attempt to ratify a new school mascot. After the initial selection of nominees, the boys are forced to select between a Giant Douche and a Turd Sandwich in a run-off. Stan doesn’t care about the issue and decides not to vote. This decision leads to the introduction of Puff Daddy, who enlightens Stan about his “Vote or Die” campaign. Stan is forced to consider the value of the election process and in the end casts a vote for the Turd Sandwich, who loses in a landslide. How important was Stan’s vote, given that the election went soundly against his choice? Would the vote have been more valuable had the final margin of victory been closer? Also, how important is a vote that is between only two viable and equally unsavory options?

Questions like these are the subject of
political philosophy
, which evaluates political institutions and the ways in which they’re constructed. In light of
South Park
’s parody of the election process, this chapter engages with these questions by looking at how the power to vote has been extended in the United States over the past 200 years and discussing the voting irregularities that arose in the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections. This chapter will also consider the problem of choice within a two-party system, given the South Park PETA member’s comment that every election is “always between a giant douche and a turd sandwich.”

In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Americans have taken the ability to vote for granted. Any student of history knows that the founders viewed voting as a privilege worthy of only the best citizens society had to offer, with only white male landowners able to cast ­ballots. Such voting
directly
elected only members of the House of Representatives, with the presidency decided by the Electoral College and US Senators appointed by the various state legislatures. In the ­process of amending the Constitution, ten of the 17 amendments ­proposed after the Bill of Rights either directly or indirectly dealt with elections. Of these changes, the most important was the Fifteenth Amendment (1870), giving freed male slaves the right—at least in principle—to vote. Also noteworthy were the Seventeenth Amendment (1913), making the election of senators a direct election; the Nineteenth Amendment (1920), giving women the right to vote; and the Twentieth-Sixth Amendment (1971), making the minimum voting age 18.
¹

Given the suffering and hardships so many people had to endure in order to ensure their right to vote, one might think that nearly every eligible American would choose to exercise their right. But, just like Stan in “Douche and Turd,” many Americans choose not to vote. Nearly 40% of the
eligible
voters chose not to vote in the general election of 2004, and over a million
actual
voters didn’t cast a ballot for that presidential race. While the general trend in voter turnout has been downward since the 1960s—with voting-age turnout at 63.1% in 1960—the numbers for the Bush–Kerry election are surprising given the controversy that surrounded the 2000 election. Data from the “United States Elections Project” show that tens of millions of possible voters now fail to make the trip to their local ballot box, with only 60.7% of the voting-eligible population voting in the fall of 2004 and 62.2% in 2008 (at the time of writing, data from 2012 are still being analyzed, but it appears that the turnout percentage will drop slightly from 2008).
²
Maybe Stan’s desire not to vote is a part of this trend because of lack of interest in the two nominees, or maybe he shared real voters’ feelings that a single vote did not matter in the larger scheme of things. Is the trend that Stan represents symbolic of a growing sense of apathy, or is something more going on?