“I hate conservatives, but I really f***ing hate liberals”
Here's something that caught my eye the other day. Enjoy it?
IS IT right to find amusing the sight of a junk-food-noshing Michael Moore exploding? Or to laugh at that Hollywood bore, Tim Robbins, having his head blasted off? And is it comic to see Kim Jong Il feeding Hans Blix to the sharks? Or, for that matter, to snigger at the East Asian propensity to mix up Ls and Rs when the friendless North Korean dictator sings a song called Ronery?
I ask all this because it is important. If you laugh at these things you stand on one side of a divide. I laughed on Friday night when I saw Team America: World Police. This film, featuring a cast of marionettes, recently opened in the United States to the satisfying sound of squealing left-wingers peeved at the celluloid mockery of peaceniks. The plot has a group of gunslinging heroes saving America from cruel-eyed Islamist terrorists, North Koreans and their fifth-column of dimwit Hollywood celebs (Alec Baldwin, “the greatest actor in the world”, being the chief villain).
The divide is between those who are “South Park Republicans” and those who are not. Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the men behind Team America, are responsible for the cartoon series South Park, which boasts that “due to its contents it should not be viewed by anyone”. Andrew Sullivan, the political columnist, coined the elevated term to refer to a generation of people who “believe we need a hard-ass foreign policy and are extremely sceptical of political correctness”. They are at ease with popular culture, have no itch to moralise, but want to get big government off their back. Certainly the credo of the dirty duo is simple. As Mr Stone put it: “I hate conservatives, but I really f***ing hate liberals”, and Trey Parker is a registered Libertarian.
South Park, a cartoon series about four potty-mouthed eight-year-olds, has been the most productive abbatoir of sacred cows since it was first broadcast in 1997. Its targets have included affirmative action — the only black schoolchild is called “Token”. It has satirised pro-abortion “It’s my body” fanatics — one character campaigns to abort her eight-year-old child after having an affair with Bill Clinton; he duly agrees to legalise 40th trimester abortions. And it has made fun of green activists. As one song puts it: There’s a place called the rainforest that truly sucks ass / Let’s knock it all down and get rid of it fast / You only fight these causes ’cause caring sells / All you activists can go f*** yourselves). It has also mocked sex education (remember the “Sexual Harassment Panda”?), 60s counterculture, radical disability campaigners, gay scout leaders and Barbra Streisand.
The views in the series are cartoonish but they do reflect a large strand of irreverent right-wing opinion. The kind of views that PJ O’Rourke elegantly expresses (“We are in favour of guns, drugs, fast cars, free love if our wives don’t find out, and a strong military with spiffy uniforms,” he once opined) or that Arnie Schwarzenegger represents.
Alas, “South Park Republicanism” has few champions here in Britain. But there is a growing market for it. A younger generation of Britons — overtaxed, tolerant and modern — can smell the hypocrisy of political correctness. They have grasped that PC is just a job-creation scheme — do we need yet more diversity officers, counsellors, and vision co-ordinators? They know that the welfare state’s raison d’être is to ensure that “chavs” are supplied with Burberry caps and hooded tops.
But the Tories are a shower. Boris Johnson, who has some satiric South Park qualities, was forced to apologise for having unvirtuous opinions. Oliver Letwin, the weedy Shadow Chancellor, believes there is something called the “moral case for low taxation” but he appears to have left it in the luggage rack on some train going nowhere. So Britain certainly needs to import a dose of hardcore liberty-loving. Just look at some news stories from the last few days, and you will see how bedraggled the battle-standard of freedom is.
Half of all voters and virtually all pundits, according to an ICM poll, are opposed to allowing people to spend their money at casinos. Now, the only game of chance I play is eating in greasy-spoon cafés, but it’s none of my business if people want to waste their money on a spin of the wheel or on fast women or slow horses or garden gnomes.
The Government wants to make it easier to deprive defendants of their liberty by allowing juries to know of their “previous form”. Sure, I wouldn’t weep if the underclass — who, by definition are guilty of something and are the most present danger to my life, liberty and property — were corralled en masse into jail. It’s just that I don’t trust the state to do it without imprisoning me. Hence my regard for prosecuting people using nitpicky things like “evidence”.
Some fifty councils are lobbying for a bill to ban smoking in pubs, clubs and restaurants — that’s privately owned institutions. I have a right to smoke; I don’t have a right to a smoke-free environment — that’s like believing you have a right to sunny weather (although the Lib Dems will probably include that in their manifesto).
Three hundred years ago today, John Locke, that great exponent of true liberalism, died. Being a Godly chap, he would not have been a natural South Park fan, but he would have found it perplexing that Britons were so idle in the defence of their own freedoms, so keen to deny it to their fellow countrymen, so unwilling to see liberty flower in other parts of the world, and so willing to see the state devour so much of their income. But at least you are still free to ignore every word of the above.
Cheers
Mayfly