Dropping (Car) Bombs Over South Park

Josh H
4 min readSep 21, 2017

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Is POTUS distracting us from Cartman’s Suicide?

How I Feel Every Morning When I Turn On The News (Comedy Central)

The God’s Must Be Crazy!

Tweek, in a Dennis Rodman-like moment, decides to solve the North Korea problem by sending cupcakes to North Korea’s leader Kim Jong Un.

Unfortunately, one thing stood in his way…This guy!

Make Garrison Great Again (Comedy Central)

President Garrison, appearing only by Tweet, tells Kim that Tweak is lying and that there is probably excrement in the cupcakes. For the rest of the episode, Garrison continuously tells Kim that he doesn’t have the “Balls” to Nuke Tweek.

It would be easy to just laugh this off, but what is the difference between Garrison’s Tweets and this one really?

Anyway, in typical South Park fashion, the locus is shifted from possible war with North Korea (in my opinion not a farfetched risk after the UN Speech), to how distracted everybody gets when POTUS starts Tweeting.

In South Park, when people get distracted by the constant Presidential Tweets they run over kids with their cars (distracted driving).

In the real world, they aren’t distracted they are depressed. They get their health care cut off, they get deported, their stress levels go up, and are about to watch Defense Contractors get 80 Billion Dollars richer and Corporate Taxes get cut all while the social safety net and public schools disappear.

And when and if a war comes, it will mostly be the undereducated kids of lower middle class and poor people who will be fighting. This, of course, is all happening when HHS Chair Tom Price is coming under fire for paying 40k in taxpayer money in just one week to fly private jets from, for instance, DC to Philly. In my three years on the Medicaid expansion in Michigan, I have not come close to costing the system 40k (despite having a surgery this year).

This Health Care Stuff Is Making Me Tweek (Comedy Central)

I don’t mean to make light of distracted driving either, it is a scary and selfish epidemic. I see it almost every day. Every time I pass a car that has me curious and wondering what the heck is going on with the driver, that driver is inevitably texting.

I think the larger point of using distracted driving as the metaphor for President Trump’s Tweets, and this post, is that President Trump seems to be playing very casual games with the lives of the people of the United States. It is almost like Trump is channeling President Merkin Muffley from Dr. Strangelove after he finds out the elite will all get to live in an elite bunker during the by then inevitable accidental nuclear war.

End of the World Party (USA Network)

President Trump seems to be playing as fast and loose with the lives of his citizens, and the lives of the people of South Korea, as a distracted driver does with the people around them on the streets of the United States.

I suspect what Matt and Trey are saying is that we should all give more of a damn about the people we have responsibility for than we do as distracted drivers or Presidents with a Twitter disorder (at the end of “Put It Down” residents of South Park all role play as the President).

So, while last weeks episode was a bit more challenging, from a social justice standpoint, this was still a pretty strong critique, so lets close with a song:

Okay, there was also a subplot about Cartman pretending to be Eminem and another subplot about Craig not trying to solve all of Tweek’s problems.

Josh is a blogger and freelance writer who writes about television, movies, music, politics, ethics, and whatever else is of interest coming across his feed.

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Josh H
Josh H

Written by Josh H

Author, Criminal Justice Reform Advocate, Co-Host of the "Decarceration Nation" Podcast, Television critic and Movie Reviewer, OnPirateSatellite.com

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