#i was friends with a jewish kid who was more conservative leaning at least politically but we got along really well | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

rabtownsend · 5 years

Text

CW for some slurs, and general small-town casual prejudices

sub-tumbling (is that a thing?) this post I just saw claiming that shows like Family Guy and South Park are directly responsible for eroding empathy and instilling alt-right belief structures in young people.

Here’s what I think about that. I’m a leftist. Definitely a socialist. Would not necessarily describe myself as radical. Am a feminist. Am anti-fascist. Am anti-capitalist. Hate libertarianism. Do support trans rights. Do support sex-workers’ rights. And I do have complicated, sometimes contradictory feelings about a lot of things in between any one of those subjects and belief structures.

I can attribute a lot of that to my upbringing, sure. My parents were both Canadian Liberals. Both teachers.

Maybe my mistake - before I even begin - is that when I was young, and I saw the other kids in my small, conservative town calling other kids “stupid jews” and “faggot” - I never had the sense that they actually hated jews or homosexuals. Rather, they had just found some new way to call someone (who, statistically speaking, was probably not jewish or gay) an idiot, in a non-sincere way.

I didn’t see them as being truly hateful toward anyone, just ignorant. And certainly I was bothered that they were so ignorant about the meaning and connotations of those terms. And I was bothered because when I’d asked my father what words like those meant, he had explained how they were used to hurt other people.

So, that was already the context I had before South Park premiered in 1996, when I was 10 years old.

I was not allowed to watch it until I was 12, and only then because my friend Leo watched it (presumably, his dad had watched it, and told my mother it was okay).

But very specifically, the thing about South Park is that the show was always punching up. And here, I have to make a distinction between the show and its characters. The characters you are supposed to identify with, are Stan and Kyle. They are the straight men. So when a character like Eric Cartman - who represents all of the kids I grew up with who called other kids “faggot” or made fun of them for superficial reasons, without truly knowing or understanding the origin or consequence of their words - calls Kyle a stupid jew, you are supposed to be outraged with Kyle, not thinking “this Cartman character is hilarious, and I should behave like him.”

And obviously, a lot of kids I knew, as I went on to high school, had taken Cartman as the role model, rather than the bad example.

Let’s talk about Family Guy for a minute. I have thought episodes of Family Guy were funny. But as it came out a bit later, when I was a bit older, I was more able to see it for what it was (and is still) - a platform for Seth MacFarlane to shit-disturb, and champion what my friends over on Mastodon have amusingly rephrased as “freeze peach,” free speech without consequences.

In Family Guy, Peter Griffin is supposed to be the Cartman character.

Wait, let’s scoot back a second. Both characters are supposed to be the Archie Bunker character. The character you love to hate. The character who says inappropriate things, while the good, but less developed characters react with outrage. You’re not supposed to sympathize with them, but some people - people who still believe what a character portrayed as an idiot/out-of-touch curmudgeon seems to believe - will think they are being catered to.

So, Peter is supposed to be that. Only there are no straight-men on Family Guy - except Lois and Meg. The two women on the show who are physically beaten on screen or constantly verbally abused by the male characters on the show. Punishing them for being straight-man characters, on the rare occasion that they are that. Not to mention that the humour in Family Guy is almost never situational. It is almost always a cut-away joke - a thing which South Park rightly criticizes it for, in the Cartoon Wars episodes.

And knowing that South Park’s use of Cartman as an Archie Bunker type has been misinterpreted, for whatever reason, why have I stuck with it for so long?

At the heart of South Park is satire. Like, real satire, not the “satire” that alt-righters claim to use.

The parents on the show are shown as largely incompetent and driven by impulse/fear. The boys are, by contrast, progressive and wise. Cartman’s offensive behaviour has consequences for him, in ways that Family Guy characters never face consequences. For every scheme he enacts, he is thwarted, either by one of the other boys, or his own folly (in a Seinfeld-esque kind of way). Characters he offends on the show are quick to make him face consequences.

And, unlike Family Guy, South Park’s political leanings are more anarchist than libertarian. While Family Guy’s creators would champion free speech in the name of a racist joke, South Park only champions free speech in the name of valid criticism or in the service of making a moral point.

The underlying theme of many South Park episodes is to think for yourself, or that blindly following authority or acting out of fear is foolish, and has negative consequences.

Stereotypes are used and sometimes stretched to ridiculous proportions on South Park, as a means of demonstrating how stupid and ridiculous it is that we believe or rely on those stereotypes in media.

I won’t say that South Park hasn’t made missteps, but I find it hard to believe that it could train anyone to be anything but a critical thinker with anticapitalist, leftist leanings.

As always, a great deal of media is made with one intention, and misappropriated by ignorant people, who don’t fully comprehend that they are seeing something critical of a certain way of thinking, because comprehending that requires the capacity for abstract thought, which the ignorant, typically, lack.

I could see how Family Guy might encourage alt-right beliefs in young people, because it is edge-lordy, and it champions free speech over good conscience. I don’t know that I’d place the onus on the show so much as on the viewers for failing to make a more discerning choice. After all, one of the most popular shows on television: The Big Bang Theory, routinely mocks higher education, interest in niche subjects, makes a joke out of sexual harassment, and plays with misogyny. And it was propped up by a laugh track it didn’t deserve. The majority of Americans decided it was their favourite show. Far more so than Family Guy or South Park, and definitely since at least the mid 2000s.

I dunno, guys. This just feels like another “video games cause violence” argument, from people who don’t play videogames.

You know what I don’t think? I don’t think eating squid causes peritonitis. I’ve never eaten it. I have no reason to believe that it would cause peritonitis. But I sure don’t like the idea of eating squid, so it sure would be helpful to pretend that I don’t eat it because it might cause peritonitis. If only I were willing to live that kind of lie...

#rab thoughts

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