Goin' Down to South Park

How kids can learn from "vile trash."

Barry S. Fagin from the May 2000 issue

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It's good to make fun of hypocrisy. In "Conjoined Fetus Lady," we're introduced to the school nurse: She has "Conjoined Twin Myslexia" and was born with a stillborn fetus attached to her head. The script suggests that the handicapped don't want to be singled out for special attention; they just want to lead productive, fulfilled lives. Some "normal" characters talk about wanting to help, but they single the nurse out anyway with a hilariously awful "Conjoined Twin Myslexia Week." It's bad, I tell my kids, to say one thing and do something else.

Things that happen in cartoons aren't real. My kids figured this out long ago, but it's a point worth driving home. Kenny gets killed in almost every episode of South Park, only to reappear the next week with no explanation. If there is any more dramatic way to teach kids that TV is fantasy, I don't know it.

Make no mistake, much of what my evangelical neighbors say about South Park is accurate. Every show contains a lot of profanity and graphic sexual humor. I won't let my kids watch most of the episodes, because they deal with issues they aren't ready for yet. Very young children shouldn't watch the show, because they don't understand context; repeating what they hear could get them in trouble. In fact, I doubt that kids of any age should watch it without their parents sitting there with them. Of course, that's true for virtually everything on TV.

But cultural critics who think shows like South Park are malevolent don't really understand modern life. They seem to think Americans are completely passive consumers, helplessly force-fed a mass media diet that they can't control. Well, they may lead their lives that way, but my family doesn't. In my experience, parents can wield much more influence over what their children see now than they could when I was a kid.

When I was growing up in the '60s, our house had three networks, two TVs, one time when we could watch a television show, and no real choice. We had to watch what was on, when it was on. Today, my house has more than 60 TV channels, every one of which competes with the Internet and the video store down the street. In our house, TV loses so often that we pay our cable bill only so we can get the Weather Channel. (And if we parents do want to watch something on TV, and it doesn't fit our schedules, we can tape it.)

Having more choices wakes you up as a parent: It makes you realize how much you can do for your children, and it helps you shape their environment to be more in tune with your values. It may be counterintuitive, but for an alert parent more options means more control.

Let me stress this again: South Park is no ordinary cartoon. Don't watch it with your kids unless you're prepared to talk about homosexuality, profanity, and fart jokes. Don't show your kids any South Park episode unless you've taken the time to watch the whole thing first, to make sure it's right for your family. You're a parent. That's your job.

But if South Park isn't Sesame Street, it isn't poison either. Given the opportunity, parents can find moral education and artistic value in surprising places--even in a video called "Conjoined Fetus Lady." When our family sits down to dinner and 10-year-old Erica starts riffing on a South Park episode, we share the kind of connection that cultural conservatives claim is all too scarce in American family life. When her big brother Max chimes in with his Cartman imitation and we all start laughing uproariously, that's a moment of closeness I treasure. And it's a moment made possible by the delicious anarchy of American popular culture. If this is a moral sewer, it's one I'm proud to swim in.