Coin' Down To South Park

Reason, May, 2000 by Barry S. Fagin

When I was growing up in the '60s, our house had three networks, two TVs, one time when we could watch a television show, and no real choice. We had to watch what was on, when it was on. Today, my house has more than 60 TV channels, every one of which competes with the Internet and the video store down the street. In our house, TV loses so often that we pay our cable bill only so we can get the Weather Channel. (And if we parents do want to watch something on TV, and it doesn't fit our schedules, we can tape it.)

Having more choices wakes you up as a parent: It makes you realize how much you can do for your children, and it helps you shape their environment to be more in tune with your values. It may be counterintuitive, but for an alert parent more options means more control.

Let me stress this again: South Park is no ordinary cartoon. Don't watch it with your kids unless you're prepared to talk about homosexuality, profanity, and fart jokes. Don't show your kids any South Park episode unless you've taken the time to watch the whole thing first, to make sure it's right for your family. You're a parent. That's your job.

But if South Park isn't Sesame Street, it isn't poison either. Given the opportunity, parents can find moral education and artistic value in surprising places--even in a video called "Conjoined Fetus Lady." When our family sits down to dinner and 10-year-old Erica starts riffing on a South Park episode, we share the kind of connection that cultural conservatives claim is all too scarce in American family Life. When her big brother Max chimes in with his Cartman imitation and we all start laughing uproariously, that's a moment of closeness I treasure. And it's a moment made possible by the delicious anarchy of American popular culture. If this is a moral sewer, it's one I'm proud to swim in.

Barry Fagin (fagin@rmi.net) is a professor of computer science at the U.S. Air Force Academy (his opinions are his alone) and a senior fellow in technology policy at the Independence Institute. He and his wife are co-founders of Families Against Internet Censorship (www.rmi.net/[sim]fagin/faic).