The Ultimate South Park and Philosophy (29 page)

The libertarianism of Parker and Stone places them at odds with the intellectual establishment of contemporary America. In the academic world, much of the media, and a large part of the entertainment business, especially the Hollywood elite, anti-capitalist views generally prevail.
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Studies have shown that business people are usually portrayed in an unfavorable light in movies and television.
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South Park
takes particular delight in skewering the Hollywood stars who exploit their celebrity to conduct liberal or left-wing campaigns against the workings of the free market (Barbra Streisand, Rob Reiner, Sally Struthers, and George Clooney are among the celebrities the show has pilloried).
South Park
is rare among television shows for its willingness to celebrate the free market, and even to come to the defense of what is evidently the most hated institution in Hollywood, the corporation. For example, in the ninth season episode “Die Hippie Die,” Cartman fights the countercultural forces who invade South Park and mindlessly blame all the troubles of America on “the corporations.”

Of all
South Park
episodes, the second season “Gnomes” offers the most fully developed defense of capitalism, and I will attempt a comprehensive interpretation of it in order to demonstrate how genuinely intelligent and thoughtful the show can be. “Gnomes” deals with a common charge against the free market—that it allows large corporations to drive small businesses into the ground, much to the detriment of consumers. In “Gnomes” a national coffee chain called Harbucks—an obvious reference to Starbucks—comes to South Park and tries to buy out the local Tweek Bros. coffee shop. Mr. Tweek casts himself as the hero of the story, a small business David battling a corporate Goliath. The episode satirizes the cheap anti-capitalist rhetoric in which such conflicts are usually formulated in contemporary America, with the small business shown to be purely good and the giant corporation shown to be purely evil. “Gnomes” systematically deconstructs this simplistic opposition.

In the conventional picture, the small business operator is presented as a public servant, almost unconcerned with profits, simply a friend to his customers, whereas the corporation is presented as greedy and uncaring, doing nothing for the consumer. “Gnomes” shows instead that Mr. Tweek is just as self-interested as any corporation, and he is in fact cannier in promoting himself than Harbucks is. The Harbucks representative, John Postem, is blunt and gruff, an utterly charmless man who thinks that he can just state the bare economic truth and get away with it: “Hey, this is a capitalist country, pal—get used to it.” The irony of the episode is that the supposedly sophisticated ­corporation completely mishandles public relations, naively believing that the superiority of its product will be enough to ensure its triumph in the marketplace.

The common charge against large corporations is that, with their financial resources, they’re able to exploit the power of advertising to put their small rivals out of business. But in “Gnomes,” Harbucks is no match for the advertising savvy of Mr. Tweek. He cleverly turns his disadvantage into an advantage, coming up with the perfect slogan in his circumstances: “Tweek offers a simpler coffee for a simpler America.” He thereby exploits his underdog position, while preying upon his customers’ nostalgia for an older and presumably simpler America. The episode constantly dwells on the fact that Mr. Tweek is just as slick at advertising as any corporation. He keeps launching into commercials for his coffee, accompanied by soft guitar mood music and purple advertising prose; his coffee is “special like an Arizona sunrise or a juniper wet with dew.” His son may be appalled by “the metaphors” (actually they are similes), but Mr. Tweek knows just what will appeal to his nature-loving, yuppie customers.

“Gnomes” thus undermines any notion that Mr. Tweek is morally superior to the corporation he’s fighting, and in fact the episode ­suggests that he may be a good deal worse. Going over the top as it always does,
South Park
reveals that the coffee shop owner has for years been overcaffeinating his son Tweek (one of the regulars in the show) and is thus responsible for the boy’s hypernervousness. Moreover, when faced with the threat from Harbucks, Mr. Tweek seeks sympathy by declaring: “I may have to shut down and sell my son Tweek into slavery.” It sounds as if his greed exceeds Harbucks’. But the worst thing about Mr. Tweek is that he isn’t content with using his slick advertising to compete with Harbucks in a free market. He also goes after Harbucks politically, trying to enlist the government on his side to prevent the national chain from coming to South Park. “Gnomes” thus portrays the campaign against large corporations as just one more sorry episode in the long history of businesses seeking economic protectionism—the kind of business/government alliance Adam Smith criticized in
The Wealth of Nations
. Far from the standard Marxist portrayal of monopoly power as the inevitable result of free competition,
South Park
shows that it results only when one business gets the government to intervene on its behalf and restrict free entry into the marketplace.

Mr. Tweek gets his chance to enlist public opinion on his side when he finds out that his son and the other boys have been assigned to write a report on a current event. Offering to write the paper for the children, he inveigles them into a topic very much in his self-interest: “how large corporations take over little family owned businesses,” or, more pointedly, “how the corporate machine is ruining America.” Kyle can barely get out the polysyllabic words when he delivers the ghostwritten report in class: “As the voluminous corporate automaton bulldozes its way …” This language obviously parodies the exaggerated and overinflated anti-capitalist rhetoric of the contemporary left. But the report is a big hit with local officials and soon—much to Mr. Tweek’s delight—the mayor is sponsoring Proposition 10, an ordinance that will ban Harbucks from South Park.

In the ensuing controversy over Prop 10, “Gnomes” portrays the way the media are biased against capitalism and the way the public is manipulated into anti-business attitudes. The boys are enlisted to argue for Prop 10 and the man from Harbucks to argue against it. The presentation is slanted from the beginning, when the moderator announces: “On my left, five innocent, starry-eyed boys from Middle America” and “On my right, a big, fat, smelly corporate guy from New York.” Postum tries to make a rational argument, grounded in principle: “This country is founded on free enterprise.” But the boys triumph in the debate with a somewhat less cogent argument, as Cartman sagely proclaims: “This guy sucks ass.” The television commercial in favor of Prop 10 is no less fraudulent than the debate. Again, “Gnomes” points out that anti-corporate advertising can be just as slick as corporate. In particular, the episode shows that the left is willing to go to any length in its anti-corporate crusade, exploiting children to tug at the heartstrings of its target audience. In a wonderful parody of a political commercial, the boys are paraded out in a patriotic scene featuring the American flag, while the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” plays softly in the background. Meanwhile the announcer solemnly intones: “Prop 10 is about children. Vote yes on Prop 10 or else you hate children.” The ad is “paid for by Citizens for a Fair and Equal Way to Get Harbucks Out of Town Forever.”
South Park
loves to expose the illogic of liberal and left-wing crusaders, and the anti-Harbucks campaign is filled with one non-sequitur after another. Pushing the last of the liberal buttons, one woman challenges the Harbucks representative: “How many Native Americans did you slaughter to make that coffee?”

Prop 10 seems to be headed for an easy victory at the polls until the boys encounter some friendly gnomes, who explain corporations to them. At the last minute, in one of the most didactic of the
South Park
concluding message scenes, the boys announce to the puzzled townspeople that they have reversed their position on Prop 10. In the spirit of libertarianism, Kyle proclaims something rarely heard on television outside of a John Stossel report: “Big corporations are good. Because without big corporations we wouldn’t have things like cars and computers and canned soup.” And Stan comes to the defense of the dreaded Harbucks: “Even Harbucks started off as a small, little business. But because it made such great coffee, and because they ran their business so well, they managed to grow until they became the corporate powerhouse it is today. And that is why we should all let Harbucks stay.”

At this point the townspeople do something remarkable—they stop listening to all the political rhetoric and actually taste the rival coffees for themselves. And they discover that Mrs. Tweek (who has been disgusted by her husband’s devious tactics) is telling the truth when she says: “Harbucks Coffee got to where it is by being the best.” Indeed, as one of the townspeople observes: “It doesn’t have that bland, raw sewage taste that Tweek’s coffee has.” “Gnomes” ends by suggesting that it’s only fair that businesses battle it out, not in the political arena, but in the marketplace, and let the best product win. Postem offers Mr. Tweek the job of running the local franchise and everybody is happy. Politics is a zero-sum, winner-take-all game, in which one business triumphs only by using government power to eliminate a rival, but in the voluntary exchanges a free market makes possible, all parties benefit from a transaction. Harbucks makes a profit, and Mr. Tweek can continue earning a living without selling his son into slavery, but above all the people of South Park get to enjoy a better brand of coffee. Contrary to the anti-corporate propaganda normally coming out of Hollywood,
South Park
argues that, in the absence of government intervention, corporations get where they are by serving the public, not by exploiting it. As Ludwig von Mises makes the point: “The profit system makes those men prosper who have succeeded in filling the wants of the people in the best possible and cheapest way. Wealth can be acquired only by serving the consumers. The capitalists lose their funds as soon as they fail to invest them in those lines in which they satisfy best the demands of the public. In a daily repeated plebiscite in which every penny gives a right to vote the consumers determine who should own and run the plants, shops and farms.”
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But what about the gnomes, who, after all, give the episode its title? Where do they fit in? I never could understand how the subplot in “Gnomes” related to the main plot until I was lecturing on the episode at a summer institute and my colleague Michael Valdez Moses made a breakthrough that allowed us to put together the episode as a whole. In the subplot, Tweek complains to anybody who will listen that every night at 3:30 a.m. gnomes sneak into his bedroom and steal his underpants. But nobody else can see this remarkable phenomenon happening, not even when the other boys stay up late with Tweek to observe it, not even when the emboldened gnomes start robbing underpants in broad daylight in the mayor’s office. We know two things about these strange beings: (1) they are gnomes and (2) they are normally invisible. Both facts point in the direction of capitalism. As in the phrase “gnomes of Zurich,” which refers to bankers, gnomes are often associated with the world of finance. In the first opera of Richard Wagner’s Ring Cycle,
Das Rheingold
, the gnome Alberich serves as a symbol of the capitalist exploiter—and he forges the Tarnhelm, a cap of invisibility.
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The idea of invisibility calls to mind Adam Smith’s famous notion of the “invisible hand” that guides the free market.
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In short, the underpants gnomes are an image of capitalism and the way it is normally—and mistakenly—pictured by its opponents. The gnomes represent the ordinary business activity that’s always going on in plain sight of everyone, but which they fail to notice and fail to understand. The people of South Park are unaware that the ceaseless activity of large corporations like Harbucks is necessary to provide them with all the goods they enjoy in their daily lives. They take it for granted that the shelves of their supermarkets will always be amply stocked with a wide variety of goods and never appreciate all the capitalist entrepreneurs who make that abundance possible.

What is worse, the ordinary citizens misinterpret capitalist activity as theft. They focus only on what businesses take from them—their money—and forget about what they get in return, all the goods and services. Above all, people have no understanding of the basic facts of economics and have no idea of why businesses deserve the profits they earn. Business is a complete mystery to them—it seems to be a matter of gnomes sneaking around in the shadows and mischievously heaping up piles of goods for no apparent purpose. Friedrich Hayek noted this long-standing tendency to misinterpret normal business activities as sinister:

Such distrust and fear have led ordinary people to regard trade as suspicious, inferior, dishonest, and contemptible … Activities that appear to add to available wealth, ‘out of nothing,’ without physical creation and by merely rearranging what already exists, stink of sorcery … That a mere change of hands should lead to a gain in value to all participants, that it need not mean gain to one at the expense of the others (or what has come to be called exploitation), was and is nonetheless intuitively difficult to grasp … Many people continue to find the mental feats associated with trade easy to discount even when they do not attribute them to sorcery, or see them as depending on trick or fraud or cunning deceit.
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Even the gnomes don’t understand what they are doing. Perhaps
South Park
is suggesting that the real problem is that entrepreneurs themselves lack the economic knowledge that they would need to explain their activity to the public and justify their profits. When the boys ask the gnomes to tell them about corporations, all they can offer is this enigmatic diagram of the stages of their business: