The Ultimate South Park and Philosophy (27 page)

It is said that Japanese mountebanks can cut up a child under the eyes of spectators, throw the different parts into the air, and then make the child come down, alive and all of a piece. This is more or less the trick that our political theorists perform—after dismembering the social body with a sleight of hand worthy of the fairground, they put the pieces together again anyhow.
²

Or maybe not. I had wanted to use the word “mountebank” in something I was writing for a long time, and this is
Japanese
mountebanks!

Cartman, meanwhile, finds a way to blame President Barack Obama. He tells his feather-headed, over-indulgent, fawning mother in his sniffly voice: “People voted for Obama, so now that everything sucks, they can’t blame him, so they have to blame
me-eee
!”

There’s a twisted logic to Cartman’s reasoning, coupled with his usual delusions of grandeur and overweening paranoia. He seeks sanctuary with the young black neighbor kid Token Williams, thinking he’ll be safe in Token’s house because of his theory that “in this day and age, black people are just impervious to being fucked with.” That’s our Cartman.

What it comes down to, in transparently legible technicolor, is
personal
,
individual
,
responsibility
for action. At the beginning of the episode “Night of the Living Homeless,” a mounting wave of people who’ve lost their jobs, homes, and families take on the dimensions of a popular zombie horror movie. The boys are out on the street and literally stumble over a homeless person in a fetal position. “Spare any change?” they’re asked by more ambulatory homeless, to which Cartman responds, “No, fuck off!” Then, closing the door behind them, he adds, “This is bullcrap. Somebody has to be responsible!” Cartman nevertheless knows exactly what to do upon his first encounter with the shelter-challenged. He assumes that the other boys are fully behind him as he dons a cape and crash helmet, and prepares to charge admission for skateboarding over one hapless victim who’s lying down at the end of a ramp. Cartman doesn’t even clear him as he bounces painfully over the man’s undernourished ribs.

Yet kind-hearted Kyle may have unknowingly started an avalanche when he gives a homeless guy $20. That, at least, is the opinion of the ruggedly handsome Head of Homeless Studies, who warns the community on TV, “If we give them anything, there could be more!” “They feed on our change,” he tells the boys when they visit his laboratory. He drops some coins in the cup of a bearded ragged man chained to the wall, observing, “It has already completely forgotten that I have just given it change. It just wants … more change.” Nor does Kyle receive any thanks for his charity, only the request, “Do you have any more?” Now a scene of the economically undead unfolds, with helicopter news reporting of people trapped on rooftops at a shopping mall, and the media warning everyone to “Stay indoors and protect your change.”

Even Kyle’s dad gets caught up in the frenzy. Trying to escape from the mall roof through the street, he finally showers coins from his pockets to the unappeasable horde, only to realize that he has no change for the bus. Almost immediately, he plays zombie, staggering around like the others asking for change. “He has become one of them,” his neighbors remark, watching through binoculars. Steve Garrett, from the library, pounds frantically on the door and pleads to be let inside. “For God’s sake, they’re coming!” he shouts. “One of them is a war veteran. We’re gonna
have
to give
him
some change!” One of the stragglers at just that moment realizes his unpaid mortgages have resulted in the loss of his home. He starts to fret over what he’ll do with all his
stuff
, getting increasingly frantic as the enormity of the situation dawns. He reasons out loud that he could rent a locker if he could put together some money, and starts asking the others for change, whereupon he gets his cartoon head blown off by a cartoon shotgun—the only reliable remedy for the marauding, unpropertied, living dead, just as it is for the “real” zombie onslaught in the Pennsylvania countryside.

The worldwide economic problem from a
South Park
perspective is not to be laid at the door of big corporations. The 1998 episode “Gnomes” manages to praise the abstract concept of corporations while serving up a scathing parody of blind corporate greed in same episode’s central economic parable. The gnomes are elfin underpants thieves. With pointless industry they steal underpants from bedroom drawers and, eventually, from inattentive people right out from within their trousers.

The gnomes are enormously proud of their business sense. They’re keen to share and show off their corporate model to the South Park boys. At first, only Tweek, the blond-haired son of a local ­family-owned-and-operated coffee shop, has seen the gnomes. He can’t sleep at night, when the gnomes are active, because his parents keep feeding him strong brewed coffee. The other kids deny the gnomes’ existence, thinking that Tweek is just a little overwrought and failing to understand the effects of coffee on his frayed nervous system. Finally, late at night, the gnomes are seen in Tweek’s house by the other boys. Cartman smacks one of them with a stick and eventually the gnome decides to share the secrets of their trade.

The gnomes have a daring three-plank business plan, which begins in Phase 1: Collect underpants, and terminates in Phase 3: Profit. For Phase 2 the gnomes have nothing but a big fat question mark. They have no clue as to how they are supposed to profit from the pilfered briefs, and so no idea why they’re stealing the garments in the first place. They never even pause to consider, in their eager energetic efforts to corner the market on mostly used underpants, why they are devoting their time and talent to the enterprise. What’s it for? Why are we doing all this rather than anything else? These are questions that non-gnome corporations caught up in the corporate rat race might also ask themselves.

After Tweek’s family-owned-and-operated coffee shop is challenged by a hostile takeover bid from Harbuck’s Coffee, the boys inadvertently raise the cause of small business versus corporate giants. They’re supposed to do a presentation to the entire school board in a last-ditch effort to prove that Mr. Garrison isn’t a “complete dickhole,” but is teaching his students something socially relevant. The gang would actually prefer to have him fired, but Mr. Hat threatens them with horrible things if they don’t make him look good. The boys meet at Tweek’s house to plan their course of action, and on Tweek’s first ­recommendation they do a presentation on the underpants gnomes. When the gnomes fail to materialize, and they can’t come up with anything else after running themselves ragged and actually chewing on coffee grounds to keep themselves awake, Mr. Richard Tweek ropes them into speaking on how big corporations are ruining America. When Mr. Tweek complains about Harbucks’ plan to open a coffee shop right next to his, Harbucks’ representative John Postum says, “Hey, this is a capitalist country, pal—get used to it.”

That basic fact of American life seems indeed to be part of the ­episode’s final message. Mr. Tweek is merely a laid-back, friendly neighborhood coffee slinger, who stands in front of rainbows and waxes poetic about the virtues of hand-selected, fresh ground and home-brewed coffee beans: “Like the morning after a rainstorm.” We can see from a mile away that he’s going to get absorbed by the starving paramecium Harbucks. Frazzled as he is on a high caffeine intake, unable to bear the slightest pressure of responsibility, Tweek has no comic distance as Richard Tweek occasionally threatens to sell the boy into slavery. The Tweeks get the other boys so revved up on their first exposure to coffee that they spend all their time running in circles and bouncing off the walls. Richard Tweek actually writes their speech for them, which they deliver to the tremendous approval of the school board. Now, as often happens, the South Park kids have really started something: the case is taken to the mayor, there’s live news coverage, and the boys are interviewed. Postum from Harbucks is on point, and the boys on counterpoint. The moderator is anything but moderate, introducing Postum on camera as “Mr. Douchebag,” “Mr. Assface,” and “a big, fat, smelly, corporate guy from New York.” Ignoring Postum’s efforts to remind everybody of the social acceptability of
anything
that sells on the market, the moderator asks the boys, “What’s your principal argument?” There follows an embarrassing pause, because they don’t have a clue what to say. They didn’t research the presentation themselves, and they don’t know their own argument or any of the supporting facts. Out of strike-first desperation as much as sassy bravado, and because we’re due for a mild shock in the episode at about this point, we hear them defiantly conclude, “This guy sucks ass.” As triumphantly, as inexplicably, the boys are told, “Your argument wins!”

Sales temporarily plummet for Harbucks as a result of the negative publicity. The company responds by bringing out its heavy artillery in the form of mascot Camel Joe. The lovable character demonstrates his social conscience when he offers a variety of kiddie coffee drinks to get the youngsters hooked. Meanwhile, the gnomes continue methodically thieving underpants, now sometimes in broad daylight, humming their catchy little work song like Santa’s busy elves or the diligent merry seven dwarfs, whenever they surface, swelling the coffers of their subterranean underpants cavern cache:

Time to go to work,
Work all day,
Search for underpants hey!
We won’t stop until we have underpants!
Yum yum yummy yum yay!
Time to go to work,
Work all night,
Search for underpants yay!
We won’t stop until we have underpants!
Yum tum yummy tum day!

It can be surprisingly hard to get this melody out of your head, especially if you watch the episode over and over again as part of your research for writing something like this chapter. You’ll find yourself humming it in the most unlikely places and at the most inappropriate times.

Parker and Stone seem to be saying that the CEOs of leviathan ­corporations are just like the underpants gnomes. They have no sense of what they’re pursuing or why; they can only answer, “Profit” or “Underpants.” Both parties don’t know what to do with their acquisitions, which might as well be vintage wines or rare coins or rare vintage underpants made out of coins and full of wine. Corporate CEOs have no grasp of what wealth should be doing and how it should be used, except to endlessly expand the corporation’s market share. Like Cartman, they’re just greedy gullets, the 1% whose exploits inflict costs on countless other persons who may be just lucky enough to keep body and soul together. Still, those are all the results of individual decisions and actions for which individuals rather than corporations are personally responsible.

As has already been emphasized, as if we needed any reminding, “This is a capitalist country, and we had better get used to it.” If collecting wealth is the game and if you’re playing it, whether you like it or not, then why not play it to the hilt? We can always figure out what to do with the money afterwards.

So, do we figure out what to do after we have it
all
? Or just as much as we think we can tuck away? Ah, but that’s not playing the game after all; it’s giving up before the end. The Russian writer Leo Tolstoy, in his (1886) short story of the same name, asks “How Much Land Does a Man Need?” His answer is that the only land that anyone
needs
in the end is just about the one by two meters needed to bury a standard-size coffin. Death is the great equalizer, which the boys are just old enough to sense. A lifetime’s economic struggles end with the same needs for every person, whether the downtrodden victim of economic injustice or the most hard-nosed economic profiteer. The
South Park
creators seem to be saying on final analysis that it’s senseless to blame corporations for the decisions of individual assholes working in corporations.

Kyle blubbers out his trademark sobbing earnest conclusion, this time that corporations are
good
. “Good?” The mayor and school board are incredulous. At the gang’s school board presentation, they’d just forcefully reached the opposite judgment. Now Kyle explains, “Because without big corporations we wouldn’t have things like cars and computers and canned soup.” Of course, our species has slogged along without these things for about 50,000 years. Still, they’re good, many of these canned soups, and it’s hard to imagine soup getting canned except by a corporation. All these positive benefits come as one big package deal, along with medical advances and space travel and consumer electronics. So, if you want laser eye surgery and miracle cancer treatments, then you’d better belly up for shitty electronics and even shittier dining at the Red Robin. If we are tempted to retreat to the opposite position of, “Just look at all the evil corporations have done!” then we’ve missed the precious morsel of philosophical content to be juiced from these
South Park
episodes: this is that the corporation in and of itself—the
idea
of a corporation—is not something that sucks, but on the contrary is something cool. The problem is always with individuals who use corporations to do things that suck. It’s those misbehavers who must be held personally responsible for their individual decisions, even when their actions are committed through corporate agency. Corporations can then be as cool as they are meant to be, when the people who work for them are also cool, rather than sucking ass, as many of them most assuredly do.

Stan immediately adds, “Even Harbucks Coffee started off as a small, little business. But because it made such great coffee, and because they ran their business so well, they managed to grow and grow until it became the corporate powerhouse it is today. And that is why we should all let Harbucks stay!” M’kay, so maybe it’s not exactly the pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps appeal of Bernard Mandeville’s classic
Fable of the Bees
(1714), or even Ayn Rand’s stultifyingly dismal novel
Atlas Shrugged
(1957). But I think that once again we may have all learned something today. How can you dismiss your own senses, as when Mr. Tweek finally tries a Harbucks’ French Roast? Unable to stop himself from loving it, he instantly launches his own homespun Harbucks’ commercial: “It’s subtle and mild. Mild, like that first splash of sun on an April morning. This coffee is coffee the way it should be.” One townsman chirps, “Hey, this is pretty damn good,” provoking another’s response, “Yeah, it doesn’t have that bland, raw, sewage taste that Tweek’s coffee has.”