by Lindy West
Maybe it took you until Donald Trump started tearing children from their parents and then LOSING THEM like he’s fucking Andy Capp looking for his keys to notice that Republicans have slightly different priorities than even fully starfished, middle-of-the-bed centrist Democrats, and that’s fine. We are all in process. But at this point, when we have maybe thirty more years (if we’re lucky) before there is no more ice and many people on the right are over here calling for a RETURN TO MOTHERFUCKING COAL, and you’re still smirking at the libs for being try-hard, bleeding-heart “social justice warriors” because we want our grandchildren to experience, I don’t know, fish, then you have crossed the threshold from kicky contrarian into fully detached-from-reality genocidal psychopath.
In 2018, the People for the American Way—a liberal advocacy group founded by Norman Lear to counteract Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority—gave Matt Stone and Trey Parker something called the “Freedom Award” for doing freedom very good. Larry Elder, the libertarian-turned-big-R-Republican commentator who introduced them before they received the award (I don’t fucking know why he was there), wrote on Twitter, “After they graciously accepted, they said, ‘We’re republicans.’ Nervous laughter. They repeated, ‘No, seriously, we’re republicans.’ #Priceless”
#Priceless!
Yes, it is hilarious that during perhaps the most hyperpartisan moment in modern history, when the Republican Party has shown itself to be the servile, invertebrate lapdogs of fascism, and the current Republican president has been accused of sexual assault by at least twenty-two women and is busy stacking the lower courts with barely disguised quasi-Nazi goons, a group of left-wing donors who came together to raise large sums of money in support of progressive causes such as (per the “campaigns” section of People for the American Way’s website) “promoting gender equity” and “protecting lower courts” were confused when the men they were honoring in the name of “freedom” announced that, actually, they back the party of Grabbing ’Em by the Pussy.
How embarrassing that the vast swath of real estate between the Left and the Right—which grows wider all the time—actually has meaning to some people! How dare the stuffy scolds of the gala class silence these freedom fighters with their fearsome, censorious *checks notes* “nervous laughter”!
The implication, as usual, is that Stone and Parker aren’t your daddy’s Republicans, they’re cool guys. They even tried to be good, nice Democrats—because they’re cool, they’re not racist or sexist or whatever—but liberal overreach, PC censorship, and lefty carelording finally became too much for these boys of freedom and they were exiled to the right, welcomed into the bosoms of the other Reasonable Men. MUCH LIKE AMERICA ITSELF.
When Stone and Parker made that “announcement” in 2018, the alt-right cheered that the libs had been officially owned. The Left harrumphed that those silly goofs must be doing a satire. But it wasn’t really news. Parker and Stone have been calling themselves Republicans in public, over and over, since at least December 2001. That was when the pair got their first award from People for the American Way.
John Tierney, writing in the New York Times in 2006, recalled the event: “The audience, warmed up by an evening of lefty rhetoric, was startled to hear Stone and Parker announce they were Republicans.”
They could have said libertarians, which are Republicans with sunglasses, but they said Republicans, specifically. “I hate conservatives,” Tierney quoted Stone as saying, “but I really hate liberals.” That, again, was 2001, when George W. Bush had just gone to war in Afghanistan—a war that, along with its fraudulent, for-profit spinoff, Iraq—would spend the next several decades forcing the children of impoverished Americans to massacre the children of impoverished brown people overseas. At the time, in those months after 9/11, Bush had his highest approval rating ever, which is perhaps why the American public (which was hyperpartisan even then, don’t you remember?) didn’t bat an eye at their snotty cartoon counterculture heroes self-identifying as Dwight D. Eisenhower superstans. But in retrospect, is there a worse time in history to proudly call yourself a Republican? (2016: “Hold my beer.”2)
This mental contortion came to be called “South Park Republicanism,” an ideology that we can easily recognize now as a sort of proto-alt-right—predominantly young white men who felt “bullied” by un-fun, po-faced liberals and chose to fight back not with vicious stereotyping and oppressive social programs like their GOP dads had done but with vicious stereotyping and irreverence (and tacit endorsement of oppressive social programs).
In 2004, asked about their politics again, Parker and Stone clarified:
Basically, if you think Michael Moore’s full of shit, then you are a super-Christian right-wing whatever. And we’re both just pretty middle-ground guys. We find just as many things to rip on on the left as we do on the right. People on the far left and the far right are the same exact person to us.
I just want to take a moment to make one thing clear, to shine a spotlight on this one specific idea: It is very important that people not feel this way.
Liberals are imperfect. Yes, of course. Liberals need to grow one fucking vertebrae, stop massaging capitalism’s nards, and actually serve their constituents. But, on the other hand, if you look at the actual fucking laws they are trying to pass and the actual fucking leader they are supporting, the Republicans of 2019 literally do not want human beings to have health care. They do not want millennials to be able to earn a living wage, own property, or comfortably retire, ever. They want to expand access to guns and shrink police accountability. They want refugees tossed into concentration camps. They want pregnant people to be forced to incubate and birth unwanted children and for barely pubescent rape victims to die in childbirth. They certainly want to roll back marriage equality, if they can, and they’ve already begun stripping rights and protections from trans people. They want to squeeze every last resource out of our ecosystem until everything you love—manatees, dragonflies, fruit, your grandchildren—either burns or starves or drowns. They want to steal your money and waste it on gold-leafed steaks that they can shit into their gold toilets while they watch the sun swallow the earth. They are very, very bad! Similarly, sometimes Democrats ask you to respect people’s pronouns!
The Trump era has produced an insidious strain of political amnesia, leading otherwise rational left-wing people to feel warm things for George W. Bush because he paints pictures of kitties and shares his gumdrops with Michelle Obama and because a toilet demon is president now and a bungling, babbling warmonger seems like a gorgeous statesman by comparison. (Sheepish disclosure: I briefly fell for the cat paintings.) But how can we forget so much so quickly? My parents literally had toilet paper with George W. Bush’s face on it. Don’t you remember how you felt before you knew that things could get worse?
Republicans were bad before Trump, and they will still be bad when he is gone. It is objectively destructive to fetishize the past, to dismantle social safety nets, to deny the existence of structural inequalities and leave the most vulnerable to face impossible odds without succor. It is a fundamental betrayal of everything a society is for.
There is no cool version of conservatism, no ethically responsible version, no rational version ready to reclaim the tiller after Trump leaves office. The word itself betrays an inherent violence: to conserve is to avoid change, to embrace stasis, to freeze frame the now because the now is treating certain people very, very well. And those who aren’t being treated well under the current system? Better not complain. Wouldn’t want to annoy Matt and Trey. Remember: black men locked up for drug crimes and forced to do slave labor in for-profit prisons are the “exact same person” as the white millionaires profiting from the prisons!!!!!!!!!!!!!
In the 2004 episode “Douche and Turd,” South Park Elementary holds an election to choose a new mascot after PETA objects to their previous mascot, a cow. The boys, obviously, think this is stupid and write in prank candidates; Kyle’s suggestion is a giant douche, while Cartman’
s is a turd sandwich. The joke soon grows into a genuine dispute, which in turn erupts into a hotly contentious and corrupt election. Stan announces that a giant douche and a turd sandwich are exactly the same, and he refuses to vote, after which he is chased by a gun-wielding “Vote or Die” mob led by Sean “P. Diddy” Combs and eventually exiled from the town.
The episode aired just before the 2004 election in which John Kerry, a kind of uninspiring boring guy, was defeated by the incumbent, George W. Bush, a war criminal. You sure got ’em, boys!
Yes, PETA sucks. A stopped clock and all that. But the South Park guys are not mad at PETA for the things that actually suck about PETA. They’re mad at PETA for being annoying, for caring too hard about animals (however imperfectly). This is not some new, cool strain of conservatism—nor is the alt-right. This is the same old stuff. It’s Morning in America. Make America Great Again. When I was a kid, “Save the whales” was a punch line, shorthand for those limp-wristed environmentalists, those tree people in their knitwear, always caring so annoyingly on your doorstep with their clipboards. Well, good news, jokers. We didn’t save the whales. They’re dying. Another victory for irreverence. Ha ha.
In researching this book I spent a few hours playing the South Park video game “South Park: The Fractured but Whole” on my PlayStation 4. In it, you play as the New Kid, joining a vast war of pretend superheroes that spans the entire town. It is possible that I just never got to the good parts, but I found it excruciatingly dull, a feat for a product striving so wildly to be edgy. (One minigame tasks the player with shitting in as many toilets as possible. Is there anything less controversial than something that comes out of every butt on Earth?)
The game piqued my interest when I was poking around for South Park background and came across this passage on Wikipedia: “The non-player character, PC Principal, can teach the player to recognize microaggressions, which allows the player a free in-battle attack against an enemy.”
Perhaps nothing is more pathetic than a white millionaire dad sneering at the attempts of oppressed groups to articulate their daily grinding indignity and begging for that indignity to be seen. To take microaggressions—like, say, if you’re a black gamer and a character in the video game you’re playing (Cartman) names his superhero alter ego “The Coon” and invites you to his “Coon Lair” to teach you how to post photos to “Coonstagram” for extra points—and characterize them as a boon, a bonus, a life enhancement, a “free in-battle attack,” instead of a hindrance? How fucking weak. Those bitches wouldn’t last a day.
Twenty-two seasons since the inception of South Park, who doesn’t remember the disabled kids in their class being called “Timmeh” and the black American kids being called “Token” and the Ethiopian immigrant kids being called “Starvin’ Marvin,” even though Ethiopia hasn’t been in famine since the mid-eighties? That Ethiopian famine, the death toll of which some place at 1.2 million, displaced around 400,000 refugees—many of whom came to the United States and some of whom were thirteen when South Park debuted, blessed to spend the next twenty years being mocked for having watched their family and friends and neighbors die in a largely human-engineered catastrophe, which the BBC called “the closest thing to hell on Earth.” Funny! Lighten up!
I understand that the whole point of South Park is to bait me into writing exactly this essay—into such self-serious “offense,” but, sorry, if we let trolls dictate the parameters of what’s right and what’s wrong, what’s acceptable and what’s taboo, we end up with Donald Trump as president.
There’s a meme that pops up a lot in social media arguments, toward the end, usually posted by whoever’s arguing against PC snowflakes and for something extremely cool such as Louis CK making fun of the Parkland shooting survivors or Roseanne Barr comparing Valerie Jarrett to an ape. (I cannot confirm this, but it’s not impossible that Ricky Gervais has this meme tattooed on the inside of his anus.) It is generally deployed as a mic drop, a weapon of mass rhetorical destruction, a big stinky nuke that no mortal could possibly withstand.
The meme goes like this: It’s a photograph of the English comedian Stephen Fry, looking smug, beside the quote “It’s now very common to hear people say, ‘I’m rather offended by that,’ as if that gives them certain rights. It’s no more than a whine. It has no meaning, it has no purpose, it has no reason to be respected as a phrase. ‘I’m offended by that.’ Well, so fucking what?—Stephen Fry.”
I mean, okay? I guess? The use of “offended” here—and, indeed, in all such discussions—is deliberately vague, much like the way the US media have been lured into using the obscure, ill-defined, not actually criminal term “collusion” to describe Donald Trump’s activities instead of “felony fraud and obstruction of justice.” Of course it doesn’t matter if someone is “offended” if “offended” doesn’t really mean anything. The implication is that “offense” is a dishonest, manipulative way to overstate “hurt feelings,” an attempt to make a frailty of the offended into an aggression of the offender. And that is sometimes true—I occasionally get emails complaining about my use of profanity, for instance, an utterly fucking poopoo-brain complaint for doinks. But more often, “offended” indicates the inverse; it’s a cloaking device intended to make large-scale, systemic social issues look smaller than they are, to turn class-based oppression into individual oversensitivity. Railing against the “offended” as a homogeneous group conflates two very different issues.
“Just a joke” is context dependent. Certain topics, such as rape, can be “just a joke” to some, but to others they require a degree of self-negation far beyond any reasonable cost-benefit analysis. So what exactly are Fry’s parameters here? Is all “offense” equally unsympathetic, equally “whiny”? Is a Muslim person complaining about an Islamophobic joke the same as a golden retriever breeder who’s “offended” because somebody said he doesn’t like dogs? Does the Muslim person’s “offense” become more legitimate the closer its temporal proximity to a mass slaughter of Muslims by a white supremacist terrorist? Fry is gay; are gay people allowed to be “offended” by homophobia? Are gay people allowed to request respect and civility from their inner circle but not from their professional colleagues or the world at large? Or is any such request simply “whining”? If black people live in a country in which their community is so relentlessly stereotyped and flattened that they are regularly murdered by agents of the state and even the simple statement that their “lives matter” is met with frothing outrage from a heavily armed majority, is it “whiny” if they ask white people not to call them racial slurs? Are women—modern comedy’s greatest bugaboo—justified in complaining about anything at all? What if, after years of being shouted down when they complained about lazy misogyny and rape apologia in comedy, women found out that several of the most rich and famous male comedians of all time were serial sexual harassers and rapists? Then do you think, Stephen, that those women’s “offense” might be worth reexamination?
If by “gives them certain rights,” Fry means “the right to demand basic human dignity” and “the right to offer critique about the world and one’s place in it,” I’m pretty sure we don’t need the term “offended” to confer those. They are, respectively, innate and protected by the First Amendment (of which Fry-meme deployers are generally such fans!). And, anyway, Fry certainly seems offended by the term “offended,” as though that gives him certain rights—why are we expected to respect that as a phrase?
Well, so fucking what?
There’s a type of person who thinks he’s getting away with something by not believing in anything. But not believing in anything is believing in something. It’s active, not passive. To believe in nothing is to change nothing. It means you’re endorsing the present, and the present is a horror. And why wouldn’t a couple of straight white millionaire dads be invested in protecting the status quo? If they can do it under the guise of challenging the status quo, what better camouflage?
Irreverence is the ultimate luxury ite
m.
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1 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I know that douching is actually not good. Let me have this.
2 I apologize for how hack “Hold my beer” is even at the time of this writing, but it conveys a specific idea with great efficiency and the slang gods have not yet come up with an alternative. I am hoping that it will come back around, like “Wazzzaaaaaap.”
Gear Swap
My husband plays the trumpet, which is a sort of loud pretzel originally invented to blow down the walls of fucking Jericho and, later, to let Civil War soldiers know it was time to kill each other in a river while you chilled eating pigeon in your officer’s tent twenty miles away, yet somehow, in modern times, it has become socially acceptable to toot the bad cone inside your house before 10:00 a.m. because it’s “your job” and your wife should “get up.” What a world! If one was feeling uncharitable, one might describe the trumpet as a machine where you put in compressed air and divorce comes out, but despite this—despite operating a piece of biblical demolition equipment inside the home every bright, cold morning of his wife’s one and only life—the trumpet is not the most annoying thing about my husband.
The most annoying thing about my husband, Ahamefule, is that he is obsessed with microphones. To be clear, this is also one of the most charming things about him, one of the things I love the most, because that’s what love does to you—it scrambles your compass, so that the idiosyncrasies you hate with fire and fury become so fucking charming you just want to gobble that person up and then poop them into a baby’s cradle and coo over them until the heavens fall into the sea. But that doesn’t mean I don’t know he’s annoying! The thing is that Ahamefule doesn’t just love microphones, he needs me to care about microphones, too. Sometimes, if I ask for a kiss good night, he won’t give it to me until I can name the three types of microphone or answer a quiz question about acoustic foam. (Which I can’t! We have not kissed in seven years.)
