Cocooning with Team America

Inspired by an early movie review, I took the wife to a sneak preview of Team America: World Police. Overall, I liked the movie and would give it a B. As I expected, conservatives Trey Parker and Matt Stone produced not the Fahrenheit 9/11 clone some liberals seemed to be hoping for, but something a bit more decidedly pro-American.

What did surprise me is that they seem to have gotten away with it! They did so for the same reason that the LA Times called California a lock for Kerry and said Arizona was "in play" despite the fact that Kerry led by 15 in CA and Bush by 16 in AZ! Namely, liberals live in a cocoon: Isolated from reality, they fall victim to their own wishful thinking.

How does this phenomenon manifest itself with Team America? This passage from the review provides the clue: "Team America, you see, boldly goes where no one has gone before, sending up post-9/11 terrorism, Arabs, Koreans, the CIA and liberal-minded Hollywood actors all at the same time." This assessment of the satirical target is typical of other reviews I've seen of the movie. Another reviewer even went so far as to claim that Parker and Stone "mock right-wing American machismo, self-centeredness and the love of gratuitous destruction; however, they are also savage toward those on the left who automatically take the side of the countries opposing America no matter what...." Yes, the creators of South Park do make jokes at everyone's expense, but the Hollywood Left and Kim Jong Il are the ones taking the real beating. Yes, the Americans do blow up a few prominent Parisian landmarks. Yes, this elicited laughter. But only a blowhard liberal convinced that we Neanderthals on the right "love" gratuitous destruction would regard this as a "send-up" of the same order as that received by Hollywood or as a "mockery" of Americans. The Louvre and the Eiffel Tower fell because our heroes were klutzes and that's the end of it. Whence the comments here and elsewhere about Americans being satirized when the fun was good-natured? We were the good guys, after all.

Here's my stab or two. Theory one: obviously, those in favor of the war efforts are brutes, so Parker and Stone were obviously making fun of them, meaning "us." Theory two: Parker and Stone are so funny that some reviewers don't want to believe they're on the "Dark Side." My advisor in grad school reacted this way when he learned about my political convictions. Despite the fact that I was past thirty at the time, he said something to the effect that I'd "outgrow" them. Either theory would explain that reaction: either I wasn't a complete adult or I was "too good" to be a real conservative based on other things he knew about me. The common denominator is that the liberal, confronted with someone who disagrees with him, discounts the disagreement instead of looking a little harder at his own beliefs. No matter which theory might be true, Parker and Stone get away with a well-aimed kick in the seat of the pants of the Left. Our left-wing critical corps are simply unable to believe that a parody of their own ideological kind could possibly spare the nincompoops on the other end of the political spectrum.

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Postscript to yesterday's entry: The joke on the liberals, for all their biliousness, is that they can't assassinate Bush, as the Guardian would like! Liberals are so blinded by hatred that they fail to see when they would merely be jumping from the frying pan into the fire! After all, wouldn't that leave Dick Cheney, the evil former CEO of Halliburton, in the Oval Office? This election has been an interesting window into the mental health of the Left as a whole!

-- CAV