Instinct Trumps Imagination: How "South Park" and "King of the Hill" Are Taking on American Fascism

I was asked this week for a piece examining how King of the Hill, a beloved animated series that just returned after a 16-year hiatus, and South Park, one that appeared a few months after King of he Hill’s debut in 1997 and has never gone away, are confronting the sociopolitical milieu of the Trump era. I didn’t have a lot of time, and I hadn’t watched or thought about South Park in more than 20 years. I’d never been a habitual King of the Hill viewer, though I enjoyed it whenever I happened to see it.

I’m pleased enough with how the piece turned out, though I lament my observation that South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone scoring their highest ratings in 25 years with their Trump-trolling episodes parallels Charlie Chaplin’s career-rejuvenating success with The Great Dictator in 1940 had to go. Chaplin’s relevance had been in decline since sound came to the movies. But when he became one of the few artists brave enough to mock the Axis Powers in a time of fascist aggression, his audience rewarded his courage. There’s a lot more to this — the CBS 60 minutes settlement and the Paramount-Skydance merger of it all. I did what I could in the time and space I had. Here’s the piece.

Trump's "A Salute to America" is just a lame reboot of 1970's "Honor America Day."

A dollar well spent.

I’ve bought an embarrassing number of weird old records over the last several years, some of them priced considerably higher than the $1 I dropped on Proudly They Came… to Honor America. The double LP was a memento from "Honor America Day," a 1970 Independence Day observance organized by President Nixon's inaugural committee chair.

I'd never heard of that event until I found this record, but when I read up on it, mostly in Kevin J. Kruse's 2015 book One Nation Under God, it struck me as similar in intention to the self-aggrandizing “Salute to America” that President Trump has announced for this Thursday, but far less dire and militaristic. I wrote about all this for the Washington Post. .

Dealer's Choice: The Trump Card, reviewed.

Mike Daisey performs The Last Cargo Cult at Woolly Mammoth in 2010 (Stan Barouh).

This took a few days longer to appear than it should've, for boring reasons only partly within my control. Anyway, last Friday I attended a workshop of a new monologue by Mike Daisey — an artist I've written a lot over the last six or seven years. I didn't find room in the piece to mention that the monologue was directed by Isaac Butler, who has been doing some terrific writing on the theatre for Slate. The oral history of Angels and America that he and my sometimes-editor Dan Kois posted this week is marvelous piece of historical journalism. Anyway, my Washington City Paper review of the still-developing The Trump Card is (finally) here.