Go America! Go Broncos!

(South Park can be profane, gratuitous and sacrilegious and certainly isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, but I do think this one episode is worth watching. While it’s not something I’d watch with my grandma, it really isn’t that bad. I promise you you won’t go to Hell. Go to www.southparkstudios.com/episodes. It’s in Season 5 and is in between the somewhat less globally aware episodes, Towelie and How to Eat With Your Butt.)

It’s Sept. 11, and that means everyone’s thoughts turn to that Tuesday morning seven years ago when, to be blunt, life got a heckuva lot more scary.

For better or worse, we’ve mostly forgotten the sting we felt while watching TV and despite the omnipresent Orange Threat level at the airport, we’ve forgotten just how tense things were. The latter, point probably isn’t a bad thing. It’s good and healthy to remember how we felt, but it’s also important to move on and continue with life. Two specific things stick out in my mind that I found personally helpful when it came to resuming my everyday life. It’s pretty telling about my generation that those two things are Saturday Night Life and South Park.

The return of SNL and Rudy Giuliani’s monologue gave us “permission to laugh and be funny again.” Seeing Lorne Michaels and Mayor Giuliani banter back and forth in what would have normally been been very un-funny bit, surrounded by New York firemen and cops, was truly one of the great TV moments in history.

Then there's the first post-Sept. 11 episode of South Park, Osama bin Laden has Farty Pants. This show gave us permission to feel confused, indignant, angry, jingoistic and some good old fashion We’re Gonna Kick Your *** patriotism. While those emotions are obviously destructive and negative (patriotism at least deserves much finer nuance), it sure did feel good to feel and express those emotions. We got our anger out of its bottle and into the open. Once that first step was out of the way, dealing with life and reality in a modern age of terrorism could truly begin in earnest.

South Park’s 74^th episode, which aired 26 days after the attacks, was nominated for an Emmy. Largely, I think, because it embodied how I and many Americans felt. (The ultra-quick turnaround of South Park's crude animation style allowed Matt Stone and Trey Parker to write and produce such a topical episode in such a short time.)

The citizens of South Park, Colo. were not immune to the events of 9/11. Everyone is afraid of terrorists and common buildings in the show are draped with the American flag. The episode’s opening shot shows our four “heroes” at the bus stop, just like the opening of any other episode, but this time, they’re wearing gas masks and the police are checking their backpacks for anthrax and box cutters. It’s a pretty stark image and, even though I hesitate to put too much weight on a crudely animated cartoon’s shoulders, it lets us know that they (the writers, characters, Comedy Central) were also pretty freaked out. The opening lines, as the boys wait at the bus stop:

Stan: Remember when life used to be simple and cool?

Pause

Eric: Not really.

Butters enters, not wearing his gas mask.

Stan: Butters! What are you doing?

Butters: Just being a kid. Why?

Scatter throughout a hilarious Stevie Nicks/goat joke, the Tex Avery-style lampooning of bin Laden, the jab at America's addiction to cable news, the requisite scatological humor and a romance with a camel, I think you get a pretty good picture of American’s knee-jerk reaction to Sept. 11.

Then there’s the ending:

Stan: America may have some problems, but it's our home, our team. If you don't want to root for your team, then you should get the hell out of the stadium. Go America! Go Broncos!

It may be a little too simplistic and our nation is certainly the cause of our fair share of problems (concerned parents might label South Park as one of those problems), but I think that in this case, we can learn a little from South Park, if only about ourselves and our nation. I realize I’m treading dangerously close to endorsing what the show lampoons, but even today I can’t help but wave the Red, White and Blue and think that if you don’t want to root for your team, get the heck out of the stadium.

Go America! Go Broncos!