Southpark, Scouting and Assholes On Twitter
an essay with lots of profanity, but it's all the same word.
Last night, the assholes on Twitter started attacking Boy Scouts of America over their new name, Scouting America. There are, honestly, quite a lot of assholes on Twitter, and they require another kind of asshole to counter their lack of intelligence. I’m just that kind of asshole.
I immediately identified where they went wrong in their thinking. Once people start throwing the word “woke” around, I know they’re not thinking things through completely. I also look for a blue checkmark. When I see a blue checkmark, I know there’s a ninety percent chance that I’m dealing with the wrong kind of asshole, and they don’t think things through completely. Checkmarks used to mean I was dealing with somebody who thought through what they were saying (except for Trump), but Elon Musk decided to change all that and make idiots pay for the blue checkmark with no qualifications. Thanks. Asshole.
Almost immediately, the blue-check assholes started using episodes of South Park to illustrate their point about why Scouting America is evil. That’s where I knew they went wrong. When it comes to episodes of Southpark, you don’t ever really know who is right and who is wrong until you get to the end of the show, and either Stan or Kyle says, “You know, I learned something today.” and then they explain it to you.
With that in mind, let me give you a run-down on how to interpret your average Southpark episode.
A lot of times, you’ll find yourself wanting to agree with Stan’s Dad, Randy or Cartman. It happens to me, too. Don’t do it. They are not the better angels of our nature. Cartman and Randy are assholes who think things part of the way through but not all of the way through. They are incredibly self-serving and will sacrifice the happiness and welfare of the people they love the most for their own comfort. It’s tricky because the show is written so that you’ll, at some point, say, “You know, Cartman’s not wrong…” But don’t do it.
In the first fifty episodes with Chef, he is always right. Always. This continues until the last episode with Chef, where the great Isaac Hayes, who wrote “Soul Man” and the theme from “Shaft” and voiced Chef, became obsessed with Scientology and turned into an asshole. I’m leaving some important bits out, but the upshot is that one of the great men of soul and blues music was turned into an asshole by a misguided Science Fiction writer that Forest J Ackerman once represented as his agent, but even Forry said he was an asshole. Token, or Token’s dad, now expresses most of the correct black viewpoints Chef used to have.
Kyle’s mom and dad are liberal, intellectual assholes. Don’t agree with them. There’s an episode where the Broflavskis learn to shit out of their mouth in San Francisco. Like with Randy Marsh, I often find myself identifying with Gerald Braflavski, but that’s because I’m old, and I’m an asshole.
Kenny is a perverted asshole who is often right. You don’t ever want to say you agree with Kenny, though, because your wife will get pissed.
Butters is almost always right, but Butters is never cool. In this life, right and cool are often fighting against each other. Make the correct choice between them, asshole.
Mr. Garrison and Mr. Mackey will almost always tell the truth, but they’re never right. The same is true of the Mayor. They usually represent taking shortcuts that please the ego but are nevertheless wrong.
Whenever Big Gay Al shows up in an episode, prepare for the whole show to make a point about how you’re the asshole. Always.
It’s almost always safe to agree with Kyle, Stan, Stan’s Mom and Cartman’s mom. Everybody else is an asshole. Got it?
Now, the thing the assholes on Twitter didn’t get is that Boy Scouts of America (now Scouting America) has been through absolute hell over the last fifteen years, with it really getting nasty in the last six years. Because scouting is a living thing, they responded to pain by evolving. Nobody wanted to change scouting. Nobody in scouting is “woke,” whatever that means. They chose to evolve scouting to continue its mission into and through the twenty-first century. They made the right choice.
That’s not to say scouting is faultless. If they had dealt with some of these issues when Bill Cheny and I were scouts, they wouldn’t be dealing with them now. I’ve talked to an awful lot of guys who were scouts when I was. So far, nobody has said they were in any way harmed by their experience in scouting, despite snipe hunts, purple nurples, and Chris Cheek lighting his farts. Some guys were hurt by poor decisions made by Scouting management when we were just kids, though, and now they’ve paid a price.
Doug Mann and I used to get drunk and solve the world’s problems. You assholes should listen to us. One night, we got to talking about the movie “The Time Machine.” In it, the time traveler leaves his own time and returns to the far-distant ruined future of the Eloi, the Morlocks, and Yvette Mimieux. (Some sacrifice, huh?) To help him rebuild the destroyed society and culture of the Earth, he takes with him three books and is never seen again.
Doug and I discussed what three books we would take if we wanted to rebuild the world because we loved Yvette Mimieux. We decided to take The Bible, The Constitution of the United States, and the Boyscout Handbook. The older Boyscout Handbook had all the information you needed on your quest to earn the specific merit badges; anyone with sufficient merit badges is qualified to rebuild society. They teach you first aid, citizenship, navigation, fire building, cooking, finding water, engineering, astronomy, horsemanship, and more. The exact title of the badges have changed through the years, but you get the idea. The point of scouting is to teach boys and (now) girls how to be useful in the world—and there’s nothing more important than being useful in the world.
These assholes on Twitter can think Scouting America is woke. That’s ok. A scout can start a fire without matches, they can stop the bleeding in a sucking wound, they can navigate their way through the woods without a compass (but they usually have one) they can build a bridge, they’ve read more than you, they’ve lived more than you, they can build a radio out of wire, a crystal and transistors, and they don’t care about what assholes on Twitter think.