The Ultimate South Park and Philosophy (7 page)

Given this list, it’s apparent why there would be confusion in public discussions about what qualifies as a terrorist act. The criteria are actually quite stringent. This doesn’t mean that acts that don’t meet those criteria are any less terrible. Many heinous acts (like Cartman feeding Scott Tenorman a bowl of chili made from his parents) might not be considered terrorism, but they’re still repulsive and morally reprehensible.

Now that we have an idea of how to identify terrorism, let’s explore how best to deal with it. As we’ve seen, one of the biggest problems with the threat of terrorism is that it represents a risk that isn’t tied to any particular geographical location or any particular group of people. It has become, especially since the attacks of 9/11, a pervasive problem. Beck calls this the “irony” of risk. The more we try to anticipate what cannot be anticipated … the more we are pulled into a state of anxiety that compels us to anticipate. This is worse than the Socratic irony of knowing that one doesn’t know. It’s more like not being able to know what it is you don’t know! And that’s scary! We can’t use our past experiences to help us accurately predict where, when, or how the next terrorist attack will occur. In this way, Beck says, risk is sort of “omnipresent” (everywhere all at once). But, its irony goes even deeper, because risk is something that isn’t real in the same sense that an attack or a natural catastrophe is real. Risk is more like a state of
becoming real
. Only when the risk is turned into a catastrophe, as when a terrorist group actually strikes, is it made real, but then, it’s no longer really a risk.

These extremely frustrating qualities are part of the reason we suck at handling risk. In fact, Beck argues that there are really only three possible responses to risk—denial, apathy, and transformation. Let’s focus on the first response for a moment. The people who fall into that group, the deniers, are those who think they can manage risk or ­prevent it. Like the military in the Imaginationland episode, and like our own national governments, the deniers create more and more complex security measures in the false hope that they can eradicate risk.

We see several instances of this throughout “Imaginationland.” As the first episode ends, Kyle and Stan are taken from Cartman’s house (where Cartman is just about to collect Kyle’s debt) by the General and his men. It seems the boys have information the government needs and we find out what that is in the next episode:

STAN:
Look, we already told you everything we know. Some guy just showed up in a big balloon and took us into Imaginationland …

GENERAL:
Do you realize what’s goin’ on here?! Terrorists have attacked our imagination, and now our imaginations are running wild! [
Wags his left index finger at them
.] You’d better start remembering!

SPECIALIST:
It was the Chinese, wasn’t it?

KYLE:
… What?

SPECIALIST:
We’ve suspected that the Chinese government was working on a doorway to the imagination. [
Wags his right index finger at them
.] Is that where you were?!

STAN:
No.

GENERAL:
That’s it, isn’t it?! Where do the Chinese keep this portal? How does it work?

SPECIALIST:
Is it better than ours?

STAN:
Your what?

SPECIALIST:
Our
portal to the imagination built as a secret project back in 1962 to fight the Soviets …

KYLE:
Wait. The US government has a portal to the imagination?

GENERAL:
Aw, see? Good job, Tom! Why don’t you just tell them everything about Project X?!

TOM:
Yes sir. [
To the boys
…] We built a portal to the imagination to use against the Russians during the Cold War, but we never got a …

GENERAL:
THAT WAS SARCASM! I was being sarcastic, you ­fucking idiot!

TOM:
[
More chagrined
…] Aw, jeez, I’m really sorry sir …

The Pentagon brass is still working with old concepts like the Cold War and state espionage—concepts that, as Beck put it, “are ­incapable of grasping what has happened.”
⁴
They have no clue how to handle this new kind of threat. By the end of Episode II, after a squadron that was sent through the portal under the command of Kurt Russell (because he was “in that one movie that was kind of like this”) is raped by evil Christmas critters, they decide the only solution is to send a nuclear warhead through the portal and “nuke our ­imagination.”
South Park
has demonstrated time and time again that there’s no ­bigger collection of unimaginative assholes than one finds in US politics, and “Imaginationland” does its best to underscore that point.

What happens when we try to eradicate risk by throwing ­technology and stricter security measures at it? We make the problem of not knowing even worse, because the
very idea
of prevention breaks down when faced with threats that we aren’t even sure are real. “Now all possible, more or less improbable scenarios have to be taken into consideration” and “the boundary between rationality and hysteria becomes blurred.”
⁵
When that happens, politicians are forced to promise a security they can’t deliver because the political cost of ­failing to act, or acting too slowly, is much greater than overreacting.

The second way of dealing with risk presents us with the apathetic folks, like Cartman, who ignore what’s happening around them and focus on their own individual goals and interests. Of course, this doesn’t remove risk, it just covers it over and does so in a way that makes it even riskier because when something finally
does
happen, it’s completely unexpected. This can give rise to a radical form of individualism as people are forced to cope with world risk by themselves (Cartman even takes on a Rambo-like role at the end of the first “Imaginationland” episode). Yet in those moments when imagined-risk becomes real-catastrophe, the individual depends on experts, “whose judgment he cannot, yet must trust” to make sense of what has happened.
⁶
This is one of the most pernicious ironies of world risk society.

However, if we deal with risk through transformation, we can ­experience what Beck calls the “enlightenment function” of world risk. Through critical reflection, we can open up new possibilities by adjusting ourselves (in part) to the circumstances, and adjusting the circumstances (in part) to ourselves. Let’s take a look at what it might take to make a transformative response.

The third and final episode of “Imaginationland” opens with an homage to the Helm’s Deep scene in
Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers
. The good imaginary characters are preparing to defend Castle Sunshine against the overwhelming hordes of evil characters approaching. Their leader, Aslan of the
Narnia
series, tells Butters that he has a power in Imaginationland that he is yet to fully understand—he is a “creator.”

Beck seems to suggest something similar about us when he claims that within world risk society the possibility exists of a “cosmopolitan moment” (a moment in which everyone comes together and divisions vanish). He identifies features of this moment that can get our imaginations once again working
for
us. The first, which Beck calls “involuntary enlightenment,” occurs when we’re forced to pay attention to aspects of our world that we otherwise typically ignore. For instance, when Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans in 2005 or when the Indian Ocean tsunami struck parts of Southeast Asia in 2004, we were forced to see how vulnerable those living in poverty can be in the face of catastrophe, and
that
forced us to think about poverty in ways we ­normally might not. Japan’s Fukushima nuclear disaster in 2011 and the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010 led us to question the costs and dangers inherent to the way we produce energy. Likewise, the Arab Spring and Occupy movements have given us new insights about social and political inequities both at home and abroad. A constant stream of media attention surrounds events like these, and, as Beck argues, “We are children lost in a ‘forest of symbols’ …we have to rely on the symbolic politics of the media.”
⁷
However, that perpetual media blitz can also act like a mirror, reflecting the limits of our old ways of thinking and opening up new conceptual spaces for us to explore … if we allow it.

This is the real danger of allowing our imaginations to run wild or be held hostage. We may miss the really big opportunities to learn something about ourselves, to gain a little more wisdom. Of course, this requires that we think a little outside of the box—that we think
creatively
.

This is what Butters learns to do in Imaginationland, just as the evil characters arrive at Castle Sunshine:

ASLAN:
Get everyone to the battlefield! Defend the castle walls! Quickly young boy, we need your powers now!

BUTTERS:
What powers? Ah I don’t understand.

GANDALF:
You are real. You are a creator. That means you can ­imagine things into existence here.

BUTTERS:
I c-, I can?

ASLAN:
Santa Claus was killed in the terrorist attack. The first thing we need is for you to bring him back.

BUTTERS:
How?

GLINDA:
You just have to focus your mind. Imagine Santa and nothing else.

His first few attempts fail miserably, but after some practice, Butters starts to get the hang of it and the tide of battle begins to shift. Meanwhile, Kyle has regained consciousness in a hospital bed (after Operation Imagination Doorway has failed) only to discover that he can now hear Stan (who was sucked through the portal during the malfunction) in his imagination. Stan convinces Kyle to go back to the Pentagon and try to stop the government from nuking Imaginationland.

World risk society also provides a chance for communication across differences and borders. When we feel the
same
looming threat of risk as those we traditionally viewed as enemies, we may be more inclined to cooperate with them. This can lead to a political catharsis (a ­purging of harmful emotions) in which old rivalries and old battle lines are broken down. As an example, Beck quotes a Turkish reporter commenting on the unprecedented diplomacy that took place between Turkey and Greece after the earthquakes of 1999: “Who would have thought before that tears would be our common language?”
⁸
Likewise, who would have thought that Cartman and Kyle would ever work together, yet that’s precisely what happens when they join together in trying to talk the Pentagon out of sending the warhead through the portal (although Cartman’s motivation is ball-related).

The pervasive presence of world risk means that it transcends political or economic borders and forces a type of wider, cosmopolitan attitude on us in which we begin to see ourselves as citizens of the world. This might help to counteract the tendency we have to value security over liberty whenever we are faced with danger because “world risk society brings a new, historic key logic to the fore: no nation can cope with its problems alone.”
⁹
Instead of turning inward, we should reach outward. Only critical thinking and cooperation on an international scale can counteract the uncertainty that has arisen in world risk society.

That’s how the boys try to save Imaginationland, too, in Episode III. For his part, Kyle begins to see the importance of imagination and creativity and delivers a pretty philosophical speech to the Pentagon staff:

KYLE:
You have to stop!

GENERAL:
If I’m not mistaken, you’re the one who bet that leprechauns weren’t real. So why do
you
care what happens?

KYLE:
Because I … [
catches himself
] I … Um … because I think … they
are
real. It’s all real. Think about it. Haven’t Luke Skywalker and Santa Claus affected your lives more than most
real
people in this room? I mean, whether Jesus is real or not, he … he’s had a bigger impact on the world than any of us have. And the same could be said of Bugs Bunny and, a-and Superman and Harry Potter. They’ve changed my life, changed the way I act on the Earth. Doesn’t that make them kind of “real”? They might be imaginary, but, but they’re more important than most of us here. And they’re all gonna be around long after we’re dead. So in a way, those things are more realer than any of us. [
Cartman begins a slow clap, then speeds it up. The techs in the room join in and soon everyone is applauding Kyle’s speech
.]

Of course, no sooner has the day been saved than Al Gore barges in demanding that Manbearpig be destroyed. Before anyone can stop him, he damages the portal controls, which causes it to malfunction again, pulling the warhead and everyone in the room towards it. As they fall into Imaginationland, we learn that Butters has already used his creativity to defeat the evil characters.