A reader alerted me to the latest episode of South Park which takes on #OWS, linking this post where Christian Toto offers a summary of the episode, including this line from Cartman, “Don’t you get it, Mom? People voted for Obama, and now that everything sucks they have to blame me!”
Shouldn’t these folks be #Occupying the Obama campaign and the Democratic National Committee.
NB: Oops, inadvertently published this piece before I was done writing it, so delayed the publication as I was editing.
I watched the whole episode earlier, and felt it lacked a certain spark. It faded the OWS commentary as the episode progressed, and the OWS commentary was muddy and directionless to begin with.
The Cartman lines can be read “either way”. Cartman is a usually a villain. What he says (about erstwhile Obama-lovers needing a scapegoat, since things have turned out badly under Obama) happens to be the truth, so yeah, it could be a zinger on both OWS and Obama. Or not. It could be read as a zinger on us critics of OWS and Obama, implying that only a character as deranged as Cartman could possibly agree with us.
The South Park guys play both sides of the fence like that, in a lot of their commentary. Their punchiest, most interesting episodes are the ones where they don’t… that is, the episodes where they really take sides.