Just say no ... to your phone
South Park skewers our heightened state of anxious Donald Trump-era distraction
In the age of the viral put-down, the creators of South Park know we can’t just #PutItDown. We are the ones living like wired lab rats, and our tweeting leaders, hurling fresh insults with each news cycle, can be the Big Cheese.
Put It Down was both the title and imploring message of Wednesday’s South Park episode, as Trey Parker and Matt Stone again find the satiric sweet spot in what’s been an on-point start to season 21.
Last week, the show satirized Charlottesville-protesting white supremacists while taking larger aim at the U.S. blue-collar job market and our slavish devotion to digital personal assistants.
This week, the ripped-fromthe-headlines aspect involved U.S. President Donald Trump’s incessant playground-taunt tweeting of Kim Jong Un (as comedy strives to get more absurd than “Rocket Man” remarks), as well as the North Korean leader’s obsession with flexing military might toward the United States.
But the episode’s deeper satire was aimed squarely at our sometimes-lethal addiction to our smartphones, as they stoke our heightened state of rapid-newscycle anxiety.
Parker and Stone said last month that they weren’t “actively” pursuing or avoiding Trump satire. Perhaps what they were really teasing is this: Over this season’s first two episodes, they are actively personalizing the political.
In this Wednesday’s episode, it is poor Tweek who has become a small, blond avatar for our heightened “headline anxiety,” as the Trump and Kim Jong Un characters rattle their sabres in a war of words both profane and inane. No amount of fidget-spinning can assuage him. Tweek seeks to awaken his blasé classmates to proper alarm through song, then sends North Korea a plate of cupcakes as a peace offering — which only serves to make him an individual target of the Hermit Kingdom (as Parker and Stone literally turn the political into the personal).
The adults, as it turns out, aren’t handling the hyper-driven Twitter news cycle any better.
While Cartman’s suicide-awareness campaign is an exercise in futility and ego, the school adheres to its “distracted driving ” awareness campaign. But try getting through to the grown-ups, who are too busy texting behind the wheel, when not obsessively reading the tweets of the Distractor in Chief.
The irony of what really is imperilling our children is the joke that “kills.”