Wednesday 30 June 2010
From The Recesses Of The Mind This Month
Sunday, March 15th, 2009
If I was going to tell the story of the first decade of the 21st Century (aka the noughties) to a distant future generation, I’d use South Park. It’s a neat, concise DVD collection of our recent history, perfectly packaged to fit into any time capsule. Hang on, you say, it’s not history it’s a cartoon! Well, consider this. Politicians, dictators, historians, religious prophets and the media have always tried to skew history in their favour or rewrite it, and a recent trip to see the British Museum’s Babylon: Myth and Reality exhibition proved that they’ve been doing this for centuries.
Most of us think of Babylon as this evil place or a ‘city of sin’, which eventually suffered an apocalyptic downfall, as portrayed in fantastic stories and awe-inspiring images in paintings, such as those of the Tower of Babel. We’ve got most of these porkie pies about Babylon from the Old Testament, which was humankind’s history book up until fairly recently. The main reason for all the lies is because the Jews were pretty ticked off with the Babylonians and particularly King Neduchadnezzar, because he captured Jerusalem, destroyed it and deported its elite to Babylon. So the religious prophets had an axe to grind, and painted the city as this evil, downright dirty place, representing the antichrist and despicable side of all humanity. And this we accepted as the truth until archaeologists dug up the reality and discovered that Babylon was a centre of learning from which we inherited the division of time into minutes and hours, the zodiac and useful knowledge of constellations. But a large percentage of people still believe the myths of the Old Testament.
So what’s South Park got to do with all this, I hear you ask? Well, let’s start by comparing its stories to those of the Old Testament. Both use over-the-top, dramatic narratives that are crude and surreal to capture the audience’s attention and to get their point across. They both criticize society. Yet South Park does it through satire, ridiculing the vices and follies of the whole of humankind. Whereas the Old Testament slanders and maligns to bring certain groups into disrepute, those which don’t tow the Christian line. Although isn’t history about learning from all our mistakes, not just a chosen few?
The Old Testament has its tale of the Whore of Babylon, a figure who’s unmistakably cast as the evil bitch of the earth. She’s described as having a golden cup in her hand that’s full of abominations and the filthiness of her fornication. Well I never. And on her forehead is written, ‘Babylon the Great, the Mother of Harlots and Abominations of the Earth.’ She also gets drunk on the blood of saints. Meanwhile, South Park has the ‘Stupid Spoiled Whore Video Playset’ episode, where Paris Hilton represents the overt sexualisation of society. Her cartoon character wears lewd clothing and constantly coughs up semen, while her new shop, ‘Stupid Spoiled Whore’ encourages the young girls of South Park to emulate their role model, by wearing skimpy outfits and throwing sex parties.
Then there’s the Old Testament’s story of one of its most hated figures, King Neduchadnezzar, the geezer who captured Jerusalem and deported its elite to Babylon. This conqueror of Jerusalem, according to the religious prophets, got his comeuppance by going mad, becoming a crazed and terrified man, who spent his last days crawling on all fours like an animal and eating grass. In the South Park episode ‘Trapped in the Closet’, the former King of Hollywood Blockbusters, Tom Cruise, is depicted as a fanatical follower of the Church of Scientology and is seen exhibiting insane behaviour, for instance, he locks himself in the toilet when Stan (who he considers to be the reincarnation of L. Ron Hubbard) says his acting’s not really that great.
Of course, it’s not just the Old Testament that has attempted to create myths of the past for its own ends. Many leaders have too. Take Saddam Hussein in our recent history. The British Museum’s exhibition shows how he attempted to create an image of himself as the modern day successor to the Babylon Kings, as Babylon was where Iraq is today. He had a painting commissioned in which he’s illustrated as this huge Colossus of Rhodes, standing tall above Babylon’s famous Ishtar Gate. In another, he’s transformed into a heroic warrior, riding a chariot into battle.
In contrast, South Park portrayed him as a whiny-voiced homosexual, who had a love relationship with Satan. Again, you can decide for yourself whether you think that South Park’s interpretation of events is a great deal closer to the truth than Saddam Hussein’s.
The point is (and there is one), that these days it’s harder to tell myth from reality, what with all the media spin, conspiracy theories and political propaganda. We don’t know the truth now about certain events in our recent history, let alone in over two thousand years. So why not have the noughties’ history represented by South Park? Every episode is based on the truth, albeit occasionally a small grain, and its creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker are ‘equal opportunity offenders’. This means they don’t just represent one view, but lampoon all sides of a contentious issue, so in that way it’s pretty objective as far as historical accounts go, and it doesn’t preach. And yes it illustrates the sins of humanity, but also its virtues, as every episode ends with the identification of one of society’s morals in the form of an important lesson from which the young of South Park, that is Stan, Kyle and Butters, are seen to have learnt from.
The reality might never be separated from the myths of our times, but I for one would much rather have South Park as our historical document than, say, Sky News reports or any religion’s interpretation. For one, it’s likely to be more honest, and most importantly, a hell of a lot funnier.
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