The Ultimate South Park and Philosophy (26 page)

More political parties might also undermine the atmosphere of partisan vitriol that exists today. The 2008 post-election episode “About Last Night …” captures that atmosphere, with Randy Marsh and his friends chanting loser to the neighbors across the street, believing that “everything is going to be awesome now … this is the greatest day of our lives!” The “losers” across the street, including Mr. Garrison and Butters’ parents, think that Obama’s “change” will mean the end of civilization, so they make an ark in the side of a mountain to try to survive when society breaks down. This clear division is even seen in the hospital, where the nurse determines if incoming patients partied too hard or had tried to kill themselves by asking if they supported Obama or McCain. This kind of divisive extremism can leave those in the middle feeling that they’re without representation in the political process. In a thought-provoking twist, this two-party dualism is itself mocked as the episode plays out, with Obama and McCain actually working together in a plot to use the presidential escape tunnel from the White House to steal the Hope Diamond.

Despite all this, you have to marvel at the stability of the American system. During the uncertain days that followed election day in 2000, little political unrest and no major physical violence took place. Our political structure continued to work and, ultimately, most Americans accepted the winner as legitimate, even if they did not agree with his selection. This respect for the system might simply be due to American reverence for national institutions. This respect might also be due to a faith that we are, rightly or wrongly, better off in our system than we would be in any other.

Americans who choose not to vote on election day may simply be too distracted by the day-to-day events of busy lives. They may choose not to vote as a form of protest against a system or against candidates that they object to. They may not cast ballots because, quite simply, they don’t believe their vote matters. The question is, then, is this is a true democracy, given how few voters determine its course? ­Con­temporary philosopher Jürgen Habermas has said that the right to vote, “interpreted as a positive liberty, becomes the paradigm for rights in general not just because it is constitutive for political self-­determination but because its structure allows one to see how inclusion in a community of equal members is connected with the individual entitlement to make autonomous contributions.”
¹⁶
More work must be done in political philosophy to investigate the reasons for the absence of so many voters from our political community, as well as ways to alleviate the problems that are involved.

1
. The text of the Constitution can be found in most US government textbooks, such as Steffen Schmidt, Mack Shelley, and Barbara Bardes,
American Government and Politics Today
(Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 2001). The Constitution can also be found online at:
http://www.­senate.gov/civics/constitution_item/constitution.htm
, accessed Feb. 15, 2013.

2
. Michael McDonald, “Up, Up and Away! Voter Participation in the 2004 Presidential Election,”
The Forum: A Journal of Applied Research in Contemporary Politics
2 (2004): 6–22. Complete data from the project can be found at:
http://elections.gmu.edu/voter_turnout.htm
, accessed Feb. 15, 2013.

3
. Discussion of these assertions can be found in Thomas Patterson,
The Vanishing Voter
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002). For further discussions of recent voter behavior, see Alan Abramowitz,
Voice of the People: Elections and Voting in the United States
(New York: McGraw-Hill, 2004); André Blais,
To Vote or Not To Vote? The Merits and Limits of Rational Choice Theory
(Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000); Geoffrey Brennan and Loren Lomasky,
Democracy and Decision: The Pure Theory of Electoral Preference
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Donald Green,
Get Out the Vote!
(Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2004); Steven Schier,
You Call This an Election? America’s Peculiar Democracy
(Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2003). Robert S. Erikson and Christopher Wlezien’s book,
The Timeline of Presidential Elections: How Campaigns Do (and Do Not) Matter
, looks at the ways in which the campaign process impacts voter behavior (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012).

4
. For an explanation and discussion of the United States Electoral College, see Robert Bennett,
Taming the Electoral College
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006).

5
. Schmidt, Shelley, and Bardes,
American Government and Politics Today
, 325–327.

6
. Patterson,
The Vanishing Voter
, 144.

7
. Schier,
You Call This an Election?
, 9.

8
. See Patterson,
The Vanishing Voter
, chapter 5 and Blais,
To Vote or Not to Vote?
, chapter 1.

9
. J.S. Mill,
Considerations on Representative Government
(Buffalo: ­Pro­metheus Books, 1991), 12–13.

10
. J.S. Mill,
On Liberty
(New York: Penguin Books, 1975).

11
. Blais,
To Vote or Not To Vote?
, 8.

12
. Patterson,
The Vanishing Voter
, 21.

13
. Ibid., 172.

14
. Nader drew over 97,000 votes in Florida. This crucial state decided in favor of Bush by just over 500 votes.

15
. Brennan and Lomasky,
Democracy and Decision
, 119–120.

16
. Jürgen Habermas,
Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy
(Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1996), 271.

Dale Jacquette

War to palaces, peace unto cabins—that is the battle cry of terror which may come to resound throughout our country. Let the wealthy beware!

—
The Times
, June 1844; quoted by Friedrich Engels

Yeah, that
’s three
homeless! Suck on
that
!

—Eric Cartman, “Night of the Living Homeless”

It is one of the great dilemmas of our industrialized culture, playing itself out in economic events as it does periodically, in an appalling way. We expect marketplace competition to result in the better quality, availability, and affordability of a wider range of goods. Many of these commodities are not only worth having, but also we owe their presence on the market to corporations in mutual competition. In case you hadn’t noticed, corporations have become indispensable to what we today consider a civilized life.

Corporations also appear by their very nature to be instruments for concentrating wealth in fewer and fewer hands at the top of the economic food chain. That kind of wealth equals power and presents temptations of corruption, among them limitless petty and grand ­larcenies and any number of related crimes that might privilege ­corporate profits regardless of the social costs. All of us with a stake in the social contract should inquire into the nature of corporations, about what they are, and whether corporations are potentially greater goods outweighing corporate misbehavior. We should also ask whether corporations can be morally as well as legally responsible when they act in socially irresponsible ways. Those are exactly the questions that a number of
South Park
episodes address. The answers given by the bad-boy fourth-graders, comrades in all things, have controversial philosophical as well as social and political dimensions.

It’s cool or it sucks, unless it’s kinda’ both. The boys’ honesty when they’re exposed to harsh social realities, and their candid reactions to their own micro-culture of growing up in an absurd post-industrial America, are all the more revealing for their lack of ulterior motives. Each episode sees them reflect on daily life, spiced up with bizarre imaginative cartoon elements, occasional aliens, a pterodactyl or two, biological mishaps, nuclear meltdowns, celebrity politicians, and an endless stream of adult behavior that can only be classified as stranger than weirdness.

So it is with the South Park kids’ encounter with American economic realities. These are comic-dramatized with the usual irony, sarcasm, idealization, and end-of-the-hour moralizing that we have come to associate with a satisfying
South Park
episode. Several stories from the South Park archives offer comment on the concentration of wealth in the so-called “1%,” the disappearance of the middle-class American dream, joblessness, homelessness, the Occupy Wall Street movement, and the glorious naked greed of an astonishing culture of “me first” acquisitiveness that assumes we have to “get ours” or lose out, while everyone else thinks and acts the same. The boys, of course, think this sucks—ass.

Surprisingly, the episode “1%” sends the message that social inequalities and corporate wrongdoing are nothing but whiny sloganeering on the part of those who aren’t successfully playing the “amass wealth” game. The greater majority suffer for the misdeeds of the few—of one person, in this case: Cartman. He’s the 1% at the bottom of his local social pyramid. He’s so badly out of physical shape that he not only brings down his whole class average, but that of his entire school in a nationwide competition, making it the lowest in the country. Could that really happen? Suffice it to say that in a school with as many students as South Park Elementary is depicted as ­having, it wouldn’t be mathematically possible for even a fat fucking pig like Cartman single-handedly to bring the entire school down, even if all the other students were exactly average in fitness according to the tests.

The philosophical point is that the so-called 1%, whether Cartman or the super-wealthy, are easy to scapegoat until we remember that social groups making up the 99% will inevitably take sides against each other. This shatters their solidarity and, with it, their political will and political power, which is exactly what happens in the
South Park
episode. An 83% soon begin opposing the remaining 17%, ­specifically the fourth grade. Because of the sins of one member of the fourth grade, the entire school is being made to suffer mandatory PE class instead of recess for four months. The fifth graders are angry and become increasingly threatening and militant.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) seems to have anticipated the moral of this
South Park
adventure in his book
The Social Contract
:

If we enquire wherein lies precisely the greatest good of all, which ought to be the goal of every system of law, we shall find that it comes down to two main objects,
freedom
and
equality
: freedom because any individual dependence means that much strength withdrawn from the body of the state, and equality because freedom cannot survive without it.
¹

The sense of equality at the school is broken because penalties aren’t falling where they could do the most good: on Cartman’s sorry carcass. The penalty suffered by South Park Elementary reveals another conflicting concept of justice. The federal government setting the parameters for the nationwide physical fitness tests is bound by statute never to single out and confront any individual students who have humiliating test results or to make them the particular individual focus of corrective measures. As one regular extra, Jimmy Valmer, remarks, “How can a meager 17% ruin things for 83%”? The answer is that
Cartman
makes all the difference to their test results. To this, Jimmy then reasonably replies that Cartman is only 17% of the problem, and the argument trails off.

Later, as the Occupy Red Robin incident winds down, the cheesy television announcer, as usual trying to induce a false sense of urgency at the fast food restaurant chain, mentions a further fracturing of the protests into 30%, 26%, “and even little brackets of 5%s here and there.” So now who’s in which group? And with what percentage? To which side of things do I belong? Does it matter if it’s one number or another? The entire question eventually seems meaningless, even if the issues about rights and social equality behind the statistics, not to mention the mindless and socially irresponsible selfish greed, are real and concerning enough. Along with the government representative, Jimmy meets the “crippled kid,” who identifies him and the other boys as a delegation from the “Fatty-boom-balatty School” (later also eulogized as the “Boom-boom-chubby-choom-choom School”). Jimmy, having read the policy and heard his classmates described by the government representative as “fat fucking pigs,” challenges the President’s Council on Fitness rep through his endearing lisp with the knowing pronouncement, “I warn you, this could turn very ugly.”

On this fatal prophecy, class warfare erupts on a South Park scale, with protestors occupying the Red Robin, while nonetheless creating no disruption to its daily business. Nor can Trey Parker and Matt Stone resist a scatological pun in claiming that another splinter group has broken away to occupy the Red Robin
restroom
, where the sliding sign on the door plainly indicates in red, “OCCUPIED.” There is the sound of a toilet flushing, the door panel slides back to the green “UNOCCUPIED,” and a confused boy emerges to cameras and microphones. The event prompts the reporter to remark: “Tom, the movement is finished. But from the time it took, it must have been a pretty decent-sized movement.” (This is where we are looking for philosophical insight.)

A cartoon version of freelance video journalist Michael Moore also puts in an unflattering cameo outside the Red Robin, with his signature baseball cap and flabby gut hanging out of his T-shirt, screaming solidarity with the 99% into a megaphone. Surely, this is the kind of disorganized mishmash of social theory and frontal politics that Rousseau has in mind, again in
The Social Contract
: