South Park Tried To Warn Us...

...and we didn't listen

As anyone who has even the slightest interest in the so-called ‘Culture War’ will be aware, the pop culture juggernaut that is South Park took a swipe at both sides in 2024 in their special hour long episode ‘Joining The Panderverse’.

With a focus on the current pop culture entertainment sphere, creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker pulled very few punches when applying their unique and world famous brand of satirical critique to ‘Woke Hollywood’ and the Anti-Woke reactionaries who have risen in response. Instantly and endlessly meme-able, the episode exposed the recent creative bankruptcy of studios like Disney in the cutting and incisive way that only comedy truly can.

By holding up a mirror to the ‘Woke’ and parodying the more absurd aspects of their identity based politics in its signature over the top style, South Park highlights the ridiculousness of Hollywood’s recent fealty to the Critical Social Justice quasi-religion.

Like a modern day court jester, South Park is uniquely positioned to speak such truth to power. This institution of western culture that has lasted for nearly three decades now has the weight of influence to tackle the ‘woke mind virus’ while also being strong enough to remain mostly immune to the usual ‘cancel culture’ tactics that the identitarian movement usually employs to silence dissenting voices.

But the uncanny insight into our culture that South Park shows in this and countless other episodes is more than cheap reactionary satire to the world it is critiquing. It sometimes seems to have a certain wisdom of foresight as it is often as prescient as it is poignant.

And never more so (in my humble opinion) than in 2002 during its Sixth Season, where it no more than flat out predicted the ‘Woke’ world we live in now. A full two decades or so before it happened. People often share memes about how The Simpsons seemed to predict the future to an eerie degree, but in this case I think South Park has Matt Groening’s team beat.

In the 14th episode of Season 6, entitled The Death Camp of Tolerance (which first aired on the 20th of November 2002), the boy's teacher Mr Garrison takes centre stage.

In the early seasons, Mr Garrison was a Mr Smithers type character, in that he was a closeted homosexual. This point was obvious to us the viewer but seemingly unknown to the characters within the show and some of the comedic and dramatic beats in his story were gleaned from his trying desperately to keep his sexuality a secret. This may seem obtuse and crude to some younger readers but I can assure you this stuff was common in fiction during the late 90s/early 2000s.

Somewhere along the way, Mr Garrison’s secret got out and he lost his job at the school because some parents and coworkers were uncomfortable with a gay man working with children. This truly happened in real life to real people in recent history and was just one of the social issues South Park tackled during these early years.

The episode picks up with a recently rehired Mr Garrison in the principal’s office. He has been working as a Kindergarten teacher since returning to South Park Elementary and we learn he has repeatedly asked to be reinstated in his old job teaching the Fourth Grade.

He gets offered the promotion he craves from Principal Victoria along with an endless and relentless line of apologies for his previous dismissal on account of his sexuality.

He accepts the job and as he is leaving the office, he asks for assurances that he won’t ‘just be fired for being gay again?’ The principal assures him the school wouldn’t do that because he could sue them for a lot of money if they did.

It is from this that Mr Garrison learns of several high profile court cases being filed for wrongful dismissal by workers across the US who were discriminated against by their employers and sacked for being gay. Many of them received enormous cash settlements out of court or were awarded huge sums in damages as a result.

Mr Garrison decides he wants a piece of that action and plans to get himself fired for being gay again so he can sue the school and get rich. Solid plan and a good premise for an episode of a comedy show.

He starts by having his BDSM fetishist boyfriend Mr Slave turn up as his ‘teacher’s assistant’ in class, (affectionally referring to him as ‘the Teacher’s Ass’). He then bends Mr Slave over his lap & spanks him with a paddle when one of the class misbehaves & makes endless innuendos about things being ‘long & hard’. As Mr Garrison shoves a ball gag into Mr Slave’s mouth and orders him to ‘Take it, Mr Slave’... he says to himself ‘This’ll get me fired, for sure’.

The boys tell their parents about what they saw in class that day but, as they are children, they cannot articulate the level of depravity that was on display as they are too young to fully understand it. And because of their youth, their descriptions of events are understandably vague and innocent given their limited knowledge of the world of adults and their childish vocabulary.

They can only say that Mr Garrison & Mr Slave acted ‘really gay’ because they have no more frame of reference for what they saw. They wouldn’t have known the correct terminology to use; BDSM, ‘Dom’, ‘Sub’ or ‘bondage’. The only term they might have conceivably known which would have relayed the relevant information to their parents would be ‘spanking’, but the writers opted to avoid that to let the story play out.

Now, in a scene that is hard (so hard, giggity) to believe came out 20 years ago, the boy's parents turn super woke and scold them for their bigotry towards homosexuality. In the name of political correctness, they take their sons to the ‘Museum of Tolerance’ to be reeducated. This is all so eerily familiar…

At the museum, the boys are instructed by a bureaucratic white woman to essentially interrogate their whiteness by walking through a ‘Tunnel of Prejudice’ & a ‘Hall of Stereotypes’ to learn what it feels like to be discriminated against. She then tells the boys of all the plethora of ways that people can be discriminated against, including introducing Cartman to the radical and frankly dangerous, Healthy At Any Size (HAAS) ‘body positivity’ concept that we have seen so much in recent years. ‘If he chooses to eat fatty foods that’s HIS life choice’. Yeah, don’t be a bigot and let him risk giving himself diabetes, liver disease and heart failure in the future.

After this struggle session, the boys are sent back to school and instructed to ‘be tolerant’ of Mr Garrison’s differences and to ‘respect his life choice’.

To Mr Garrison’s eternal bemusement, his actions of the previous day, (which were entirely inappropriate to do in the presence of children by anyone's standards), did not bring about his desired dismissal. So he ramps it up a notch by inserting objects, including the innocent class pet gerbil, into Mr Slave’s anus. All of it in class, in front of the kids.

It’s a hilarious scene for sure and at the time it was seen as one of those moments where South Park went ‘over the top’ to prove a point. In hindsight however, it is deeply disturbing when looking back retrospectively given what we have seen happening in classrooms around the world in the last decade.

The fact that this behaviour was clearly wrong has nothing to do with the men’s homosexuality either, as all of those acts would still be equally inappropriate for 4th grade children to see if they were performed by a heterosexual couple.

At lunch, the kids tell Chef of the animal abuse and displays of sexual deviancy, but only after they ask him if they are ‘intolerant of gay people’ for having felt uncomfortable? Tellingly, their first instinct was that it was they themselves who were in the wrong. I wonder where they could have learned such ill-advised behaviour?

The ‘tolerance’ that was drummed into them at the ‘Museum of Tolerance’ had conditioned them to try to accept whatever they saw as Mr Garrison’s ‘life choice’; to ‘tolerate differences’. Because of the (let’s call a spade a spade shall we) indoctrination they were subjected to, they instantly assumed that they were somehow bigoted against gay people because they were upset by seeing sexual acts being performed that they were far too young to have any knowledge of yet.

They were told gay people are different and they must tolerate their differences. But because they were kids, they couldn't tell the difference between ‘different’ and ‘strange’, between ‘unknown’ and ‘irregular’. They had no way to differentiate between something that is inappropriate to do in the presence of children and something that is perfectly normal but just unfamiliar to them. And for kids who have only lived very short lives, an awful lot of things are unfamiliar to them by definition.

As Chef tells them after learning what their teacher was showing them, "Children, there is a big difference between ‘gay people’ and Mr Garrison. You understand?’ Of course the boys answer ‘No’, which is precisely my point. How could they know? They have no means of making that distinction because they have never experienced, much less contextualised, any of what they saw.

So Chef rightly reports Mr Garrison to Principal Victoria and the 3 of them are in her office. Mr Garrison is trying to hide his glee at the idea of getting fired and making millions in a lawsuit. Chef is also expecting him to get fired but after relaying Chef’s grievances, Principal Victoria reveals that they are not firing Mr Garrison but instead ‘sending Chef to a tolerance seminar’ to work on his internalised bigotry against gay people. As I said, it is all eerily familiar!

The boys are now refusing to attend class so they too are sent to ‘Tolerance Camp’. Cue the switch to Black and White, Nazi imagery and endless comparisons to the authoritarian ‘wrongthink’ correctional facilities of history. It’s extremely heavy handed, even by South Park’s standards, but it definitely gets the point across. They made them paint rainbows and make macaroni pictures that spell ‘DIVERSITY’.

Meanwhile, Mr Garrison can’t believe what is happening. Instead of firing him as expected, the school is giving him ‘The Courageous Teacher Award’ for being stunning and brave or something equally idiotic. So he plots a plan to use the award ceremony to offend the parents with his BDSM antics, which would surely, (finally) get him fired. But that doesn’t work either. No matter what he does or says at the ceremony, the audience of mostly parents just applaud and call him courageous.

And that’s where it is Mr Garrison who delivers the moral of this story in earnest.

[Mr Garrison] ‘Can’t you see I’m trying to get fired here? This sort of behaviour should not be acceptable from a teacher!’

[Audience] ‘But the Museum told us we need to be tolerant’. (The score and imagery invokes cult-like behaviour here in a lovely moment of prescience).

[Mr Garrison] ‘Yeah, Tolerant but not stupid! Just because you have to tolerate something doesn’t mean you have to approve of it. If you had to like it, it would be called the ‘Museum of Acceptance’. Tolerate just means you’re putting up with it. You tolerate a crying child on the airplane or a cold. It can still piss you off! Jesus tap dancing Christ!’

[Audience] ‘He’s right! Our boys weren’t intolerant of homosexuals, they just didn’t like how this asshole was acting’.

And therein lies the rub of this episode, I feel. Tolerate differences, yes, but not of people being assholes or exposing our children to inappropriate words, actions or ideas. We should tolerate people's differences, but not their asshole behaviour.

I have no problem with a man in drag reading kids books to children per se; he’s just a human being reading to kids, which is perfectly normal behaviour. But if he happens to be wearing a thong & gyrating around on stage whilst fellating a cucumber, well that I do take issue with. And I would have the same objections to a female stripper performing the same hyper-sexualised actions around young kids, although I doubt the older schoolboys present in that class would agree with me on that one.

The same can be said for many of the debates in my home country of the UK right now. Yes we can denounce racism, bigotry and xenophobia of all kinds, and so we should. But we should never let the fear of inviting those terms upon ourselves cause us to turn a blind eye to young girls being violated in ways that are too revolting to specify. We should never tolerate that stuff, under any circumstances, ever.

But, as a nation, we have. Just like the residents of South Park, for fear of being seen as bigots or intolerant, we have excused not just inappropriate behaviour, but some of the worst atrocities imaginable against children.

This episode came out over five years before the invention of the smartphone. A decade before social media became the ‘social credit score’ seeking video game that we all opt into. Years before the works of Robin D’Angelo & Ibram X Kendi became best sellers. South Park tried to warn us but we didn’t listen and the batshit crazy world that they predicted would arise out of political correctness pretty much played out as they wrote it. We should have listened.

Judging by this episode, it seems that Trey Parker and Matt Stone were like the modern day Nostradamus on this issue. I wonder how many more moments of clairvoyance can be found in those old episodes? Perhaps we’ll have a MAN-BEAR-PIG running around before too long.

Thanks for reading and don’t be an asshole.

The Common Centrist