BOOK REVIEWS
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oneself postideological is to trade the difficulties of agency for the convenience
of acquiescence” (124). These kinds of viewers of South Park “become
susceptible to particular types of domination that take advantage of complacency
and apathy—actions under the category of faits accomplis” (125). Passive
audiences of South Park thus beware their contentment.
And finally, in “Shopping at J-Mart with the Williams: Race, Ethnicity, and
Belonging in South Park" Lindsay Coleman notes that the offenses against the
accepted and/or prevailing “social and racial etiquette have long been mainstays
of many comedy forms . . . thus, we are hardly surprised that the South Park
creators. . . should use common stereotypes and insults within their series to
provoke responses from viewers” (131). Coleman adds that “whereas essentialist
assumptions underlie the bigoted slurs and epithets meted out by the town of
South Park’s white majority,” the show “ultimately satirize[s] the racism that
still pervades American social life” in the late 20lh and early 21sl centuries (132).
But, despite the specificity of this satire, South Park does “not provide solutions
to society’s problems or provide the keys to social harmony” (141).
Nevertheless, Coleman presents the highly debatable claim that the series does
offer “the potential for positive outcomes to emerge from racial and ethnic
tension” (141).
Part Three of Taking South Park Seriously carries the intriguing title, “South
Park Conservatives?” In the lead essay of this section, “‘I Hate Hippies’: South
Park and the Politics of Generation X,” Matt Becker explores the idea that South
Park incorporates “both antiliberal and anticonservative themes” into its
episodes (146). As such, Becker argues “that the political worldview of South
Park is consistent with that of Generation X” and thus “characterized by irony,
apathy, feelings of disenfranchisement, and deep cynicism toward official
political institutions. South Park is therefore not simply antiliberal, nor
anticonservative, but antipolitical” (147-148). Becker later deems South Park
“an effective mirror for a politically polarized nation racked by culture wars
because in it every political stripe can see its own ideologies reflected and thus
seemingly justified. At the same time, however, because of its ambivalence,
South Park offers no clear political worldview and therefore no political
solutions” to the very real problems of today (160-161). In “South Park
Heretics: Confronting Orthodoxy through Theater of the Absurd,” Randall
Fallows considers the idea that what almost all of the South Park episodes to
date have in common “is the notion that we have become a country that goes to
absurd extremes, too lazy for the mental discipline to find a more reasonable
path down the middle” as we grapple with all of the troubling issues facing our
society (165). Fallows goes on to state that thinking “for ourselves becomes too
difficult and time-consuming, so we rely on our preexisting ideologies to make
quick sense of events,” then expresses the tentative hope that, perhaps, South
Park “can help us to avoid those easy answers that have already led humanity
down too many blind and dangerous alleys” in the past (170-171).