Libertarian Means Never Having to Say You're Sorry

Comedy Central recently started running a cartoon called Lil' Bush. It's set loosely during the presidency of George H.W. Bush, with all the players in the current political scene present as children. The main characters are the main characters in the original G.W. Bush administation, except with "Lil'" in front of their names: Lil' Condi (who has a crush on Lil' George), Lil' Cheney (who talks like a mix between Boomhauer and the Penguin), and Lil' Rummy. Also, Lil' Jeb, who acts like a dog for some reason. It's been generally panned, seemingly because it debuted as cell-phone-only content, which is always mentioned, and despite the fact that the creator, Donick Cary, wrote for The Simpsons, which is almost never mentioned.

It's a great show, though, in large part because it's not a Robert Smeigel-style one-off, so it can't just coast on the "Bush is a small child!" concept. It has to function as a cartoon in addition to functioning as a satire--it has to work in the way a regular ol' non-satirical cartoon does. And while it does engage in some parodying of its less-respectable cartoon forebears, with its opening credits featuing the Lil' characters jamming as a band for no particular reason a la Jem and many plots being resolved in schematically the same way they would be on Heathcliff[1], it still provides potent does of the silliness and absurdism that people have always come to cartoons for. (Take a look at old Looney Tunes shorts sometime and ignore the fact that all that stuff has become conventions and a common grammar. Is a talking meatball really that much more ridiculous than a coyote building a series of elaborate traps to catch a trickster bird?) The characters' status as children allows them to be cute--which is good--and also makes the offensive things more offensive. So, for instance, in the episode where the gang goes to camp ("Camp Lil' Camp David"), it allows the writers to tweak, revel in, and exploit all the conventions of a "going to camp" episode. The familiar structure provides opportunities for character-driven jokes (all Lil' George cares about is pranking), while at the same time the expectation of light conflict makes the discovery of an Al-Quaeda training camp as Camp Lil' Camp David's rivals (and the subsequent sending of a video in which one of the campers apparently has body parts sawed off) more surprising and thus more funny. The overall argument is not that Bush is dumb, but that Bush is unserious--in a world filled with real threats and real consequences, he blithely pursues his own individual interests and is saved only by a combination of luck and priviledge.

It's also notable, though, because it's the first of a number of attempts[2] at making sustained, character-based fun of the current administration to succeed both as comedy and as politics, the former in that it's funny and the latter in that it has a coherent and accurate point. You might recall Will Ferrell disowning his impression of George W. Bush as making him seem too nice of a guy and too harmless, more like a lost puppy than someone dangerously unfit to govern. Most other anti-Bush humor has been too self-righteous and desperate to really work as comedy, which requires both sympathy with and superiority to its subject.

The most obvious comparison, of course, is with the other show Comedy Central aired about George W. Bush: That's My Bush! It was created by South Park masterminds Trey Parker and Matt Stone and premiered shortly after the 2000 election (they said they were prepared to do one about Gore if he won, although I forget the less-hilarious title they had picked for his version of the show) and it wasn't very good, having little relation to any of the actual people being represented. Bush was just a lovable schlub, the other adminsitration members were his frustrated handlers, and the whole thing proceeded self-consciously as a parody of old laugh-track sitcoms. (See above about rising above your concept.) Non-Americans seem to like it, of course, but non-Americans seem to regard opposition to Bush as heroic rather than, you know, something at least half the country has done for most of his term. It didn't last more than three months.

It did, however, suggest some interesting things about Parker and Stone, which were later more or less confirmed in their movie Team America: World Police. It was doomed from the start given that it was their cinematic follow-up to the South Park movie, i.e. probably the Funniest Thing Ever, but it did fairly well for itself when it stuck to wonderfully ambiguous jokes about jingoistic action movies and jingoism in general. The rest, though, was their Ouroboros moment, a likely byproduct of too much time spent in Hollywood: everyone with an anti-war viewpoint was a celebrity who didn't know what they were talking about. While we can all agree that Sean Penn should shut the fuck up, I don't think we spend too much time thinking about it, and whatever point they had to make seemed to be limited to a three-square-mile area of California. They seemed far less interested in expressing any kind of fundamental truth or meaning than they did in pointing out how people who are obviously wrong are obviously wrong.

Which is another way of saying that they're libertarians. A libertarian is what you say you are if you're a white male member of the entertainment industry who wants to talk about politics without alienating certain segments of your fanbase, and it basically means you're a liberal, but not one-a them wussy liberals like Tim Robbins[3]--think Bill Mahr. You still talk about things being "politically correct," even though no one else has for 15 years. The theory is that this makes you look like you don't care about, and in fact hate, ideology and political parties, which is kind of like saying you're a baseball fan but think teams are stupid. Small-l libertarianism (which Stone and Parker have basically admitted to) is an almost entirely superficial way of thinking about politics, like constructing an ideology out of Maureen Dowd columns. "Everybody is wrong but me" is their rallying cry, and while that's an undeniably attractive one to consumers from crochety old men to emo kids, it's not a political viewpoint but an apolitical one. It's an attempt to opt out of something no one who interacts with other human beings can avoid. The social contract's a bitch, ain't it?

As usual, we can probably blame the boomers for this. They came along in the late 60s and decried politics based on one issue, Vietnam, that would have essentially corrected itself just as effectively without their help. They've lionized this moment ever since, despite the fact that what was accomplished through politics before them and outside them (school integration by the force of the friggin' military, civil rights, all of Johnson's great society programs) far outstripped anything brought about by their politics of no-politics; they also let douches like John Kerry have political careers. The party system has never been the same, although structural changes like open primaries account for a decent portion of that, and declaring yourself an independent, above the messy fray of politics and too smart to engage with other people's opinions, which are inevitably wrong, has increasingly been the thing to do. People have somehow gotten the impression that a political party is useless unless it precisely mirrors each and every one of their personal views, that unless a given candidate agrees with them on every issue, or even if they're insufficiently strenuous on a particular issue, then politics has failed. But the whole point of politics is that you can't always get what you want in a society of several million people. Politics is the process by which we negotiate the different things people want, need, think are right, and think are wrong, which unless you set up the kind of convenient scenarios Parker and Stone have a tendency to do, are rarely clear-cut. You're not supposed to get what you want in politics, and that doesn't mean politics doesn't work, but that it does.

Then again, maybe Team America: World Police was just ahead of its time. Back in 2004, when it seemed like no one was against the war, criticizing the few people who were (however incoherently and self-centeredly) speaking out against it seemed like strangling the baby in its crib, and to align yourself with a conservative viewpoint that has actually been since proven wrong. But before they were, the climactic speech seemed, well, a little too jingoistic:[5]

We're dicks! We're reckless, arrogant, stupid dicks. And the Film Actors Guild are pussies. And Kim Jong Il is an asshole. Pussies don't like dicks, because pussies get fucked by dicks. But dicks also fuck assholes: assholes that just want to shit on everything. Pussies may think they can deal with assholes their way. But the only thing that can fuck an asshole is a dick, with some balls. The problem with dicks is: they fuck too much or fuck when it isn't appropriate - and it takes a pussy to show them that. But sometimes, pussies can be so full of shit that they become assholes themselves... because pussies are an inch and half away from ass holes. I don't know much about this crazy, crazy world, but I do know this: If you don't let us fuck this asshole, we're going to have our dicks and pussies all covered in shit!

In restrospect, though, Trey and Stone have always been decidedly sympathetic to the left, even if they do criticize it[4], and in this post-Iraq world, that speech reads more like a corrective to the isolationist drift that the Bush doctrine has set liberals on. War's bad, sure, but so are genocides and civil wars and all sorts of things that we might be able to stop. As Madeline Albright said, if we're paying for this giant military, we should use it. Just because the current administration picked maybe the absolutely wrongest country possibile to intervene in doesn't mean that intervening in countries is bad, no more so than adding kimchee to strawberry shortcake means that kimchee is bad, and if we can accomplish the kind of things we did in Bosnia et al--well, if the dicks can do some good, what's wrong with a little fucking? It all depends on what you define as an asshole.


[1] The analysis of which was a watershed moment in structuralist criticism for me, at least as an eight-year old. I somehow never managed to crack the code of Scooby-Doo until I was well into my adulthood, which is super embarassing.
[2] There's an odd tradition of long-lasting political humor that I've never quite understood. The most famous example is The First Family, a parody of the Kennedies released in 1962 that sold enough copies to be as ubiquitous as Journey and Frank Sinatra at garage sales and used record stores. Essentially, the things being made fun of are all as time-sensitive as, say, the astronaut who wore a diaper, but peeing-astronaut jokes are told on TV and then disappear, whereas Presidential humor gets enshrined on albums and DVDs. Maybe that's just because Presidents stick around so long and inevitably do a lot of things you can make fun of, but regardless, it's interesting.
[3] In the 80s I guess this would be "like Alan Alda," which I only know from reading old comic strips and still don't really understand.
[4] Conservatives who think South Park is on their side would seem to think making fun of liberals necessarily implies you're against, say, gay marriage, in which case all my friends should be fighting with each other a lot more.
[5] And apparently endorsing the invasion of North Korea due to Kim Jong Il being a space alien.

Labels: cartoons, comedy, libertarians, lil bush, politics, south park, theory, TV

posted by Mike B. @ 7:46 AM