Last night’s episode of South Park was pure genius. Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the show’s creators and writers, drew the analogy of lice living on a person’s head to humans living on planet earth. The real analogy, however, is not that humans are like wingless phthiraptra, but that the earth has a consciousness just like the planet of the lice (a humans head).
When one of the children washed his hair with a prescription shampoo to kill the lice, the lice reacted to the “catastrophe” by running for their lives to escape environmental destruction. The louse hero tried to warn his fellow lice that their “planet” had a consciousness and was reacting with harsh purposefulness. Rebuking the hero, and much like our contemporary world, there were political lice who stated that planets (nature) don’t have a life force or a consciousness, and that the catastrophe which wiped out the majority of the lice population was a “natural disaster,” a pure accident of nature.
People can say what they want about the alleged offensiveness of many South Park shows, but in my opinion, it is the most original thing going, on today’s networks anyway. We need more intellectual offensiveness.
