Writing about South Park, a silly cartoon, in the middle of an eminently predictable and yet entirely unanticipated global pandemic has an uncanny quality, like meeting a time traveler and realizing that he is you. If I could travel back in time now and meet myself circa, say, 2005, just a few years out of college and struggling to figure out how to become a writer, and tell that younger me that in 15 years, nearing 40 years old, I’d be locked in the house during a plague year writing a review of the political valences of South Park, which would still be on the air, I’d have probably gone to business school sooner than I did. Oh well.



But we are all stuck in the house and watching a lot of television, so perhaps this, too, like a globalized viral outbreak in the age of near-instantaneous air travel, is inevitable. “I should have realized,” murmurs a dour Nick Stahl in Terminator 3, that “our destiny was never to stop Judgment Day; it was merely to survive it.”

South Park itself feels like a transmission from what should have been an alternate past, the one that the desperate time traveler from our time went back to, Terminator-style, in order to try to prevent our present from happening, but which, in utter failure, he only managed to cement into place. Other artifacts from that fin de millénaire epoch—the bad clothes, the last triumphant guffaws of TV laugh tracks, the popular music—have settled into the familiar patterns of cultural ephemera: first kitsch, then nostalgia, and at last fashionable revivals that are usually less ironic than they seem. But South Park, though no less affected by the hyperbalkanization of media than any other entertainment, remains influential. True, it’s far less central to mass culture than it was in the earlier 2000s, when you could still crack up a conference room with a well-timed “Respect my authorit-ah!” joke, but it retains a kind of currency. (I almost wrote relevance, but thought better of it.)

People still think this show, about a gang of vulgar fourth-grade boys, their families, and the extended, eccentric everytown of South Park, Colorado, is important. I grew up in small, semirural towns myself, albeit in Appalachian Pennsylvania and not the Mountain West. I recognize the universal appeal. I was friends with guys like Stan Marsh, the show’s generally kind, usually moral protagonist, and guys like Kenny McCormick, the self-sufficient poor kid whose riotous, unsettled home life we all made fun of, even though we knew better. I knew guys like Kyle Broflovski, the lone Jewish kid in a sea of uncomprehending gentiles, because I was that kid. We were even friends with guys like Eric Cartman, an obscene, self-pitying little anti-Semite, for reasons we could not quite articulate or explain. And beyond these, the show’s bestiary of Main Street America, its hapless parents and inept leaders, its weird small businesses and petty local politics, its moral pretensions and amoral vanities do ring true, however exaggerated. Because it resembles them and their lives, people believe that South Park matters. And, in a way, it does.

Why am I writing this? Now? With everything else that’s going on? The truth is that an editor wrote to me a month ago and asked me if I had any thoughts about the purchase that South Park seems to have gained on contemporary conservative culture, especially in the post–Tea Party, now Trumpified era in which “owning the libs”—deliberately going after the various multiculti pieties of diversity, inclusion, and other supposedly softhearted liberal pathologies—has become an end in itself. Just a few weeks ago! That was back when we could still foolishly imagine that what we were still mostly calling simply “the coronavirus” would be another near miss, a grim warning of an inevitable pandemic that would remain, always, in the near future, the probability never quite collapsing into an event.