Oh, that... subversive mainstream media?
The NY Times has a nice article on South Park, the wickedly funny cartoon that's been infecting young (and not-so-young) minds, worldwide, for almost 7 years now.
The article uses as its focus the great "Passion" episode, in which Mel Gibson's movie, among other things, pushes one of the cartoon's protagonists to try and start a Holy War against the Jews. While discussing the merits of that particular episode (and providing a nice summary for those of you who missed it), the piece is also a nice praise for the bit of media subversion that South Park represents — which is always welcome, coming from a mainstream outlet.
Of course, I'm sure nobody was doubting the quality and value of South Park anyway. I mean, just judge by the reviews! This one, for instance, comes from the site ChildCare Action Project: Christian Analysis of American Culture, and I couldn't think of a better endorsement for a cartoon I'd like to see. Here's a couple snippets:
'South Park is an incredibly dangerous movie for those who do not understand or are developing an understanding of the Gospel ....... INCREDIBLY dangerous. Some of the scenes in South Park reminded me so much of the image of demons screeching and dancing around a boiling cauldron as Satan gleefully looks on from the background as the demons pitch soul after soul after soul into the burning cauldron.'
Oh yeah, I can see that too! Holy shit man!!! How much acid did you put in the punch bowl?
'That is all I will say about the content this extraordinarily vulgar, vile, and repugnant movie. Other examples are just too vulgar and vile to even try to describe without being as vulgar and vile. Please note that the final score of 29 is not the lowest of scores earned by the movies we have analyzed, but this movie has earned the most severe CAP Influence Density (ID) of over 800 movies: a CAP ID of 10.65! Natural Born Killers (R) earned a CAP Influence Density of 7.46! Most R-rated movies earn CAP IDs between 1.00 and 3.00. A child cannot escape being influenced by "entertainment" such as this.'
Yes, they have their own rating system, too. Anyway, I was wondering: do you think that fundamentalist bigots sublimate their repressed sexual energy into mind-blowing, righteous orgasms every time they use the words "vulgar" and "vile" in the same sentence? From the above paragraphs, it would indeed appear so.
One more excerpt, from elsewhere in the site:
'In the eight years of an on-going study, the ChildCare Action Project: Christian Analysis of American Culture (CAP) Ministry has revealed objective mathematical evidence of the relative position and movement of morality in popular movies, evidence not possible by subjective traditional movie reviews and subjective opinion-based evaluations.'
(emphasis added — this time)
Leaving aside the question of what exactly is "the relative position and movement of morality in popular movies", I want these people and their ilk to know one thing:
We're coming for you.
We're coming from every direction and there is nothing you can do.
You will barricade yourself inside your hateful, hysterical fear. You will absent-mindedly mouth your castrating propaganda. You will do your best to ban everything, seeking to impose your fanatical agenda on the rest of us even as you whine about your rights being abused. You will deploy impressive amounts of money, political pressure and human resources in a bid to control the mediaspace.
All for naught.
In the end, you will lose — you have already lost. Your deathtrip ideal, in which for millennia you have been trying to lock us up, is crumbling under your feet, a little bit faster with every encounter between free minds. As you haste to cover up one breast, the whole splendid, naked body of Cognitive Liberty is fully visible to anyone who's not afraid to look. Always has been. We are just helping to make it known, you know, spread the Good News. Always have been. You are just nervous spasms of blind apprehension on a collective body awakening to its full potential — and you are being outgrown, as your children look on wondering if you'll get the fuck out of the way in time for them to have a life.
One day you will stop fighting this process, and accept it as that very Love that you like to pretend you know so well, waving around a dead image of it as justification for all the miseries that your terror of life has engendered.
...
Hmm. Guess I'm gonna have to do better than that to get my own CAP Influence Density ranking, uh?