“South Park” is framing your choice for you, America. Do you want to slip into becoming a lazy, fat and backward-looking nation that forever clings to the warmth of fuzzy but uncritical memories … or do you want Hillary Clinton?
Such are the options as painted in Wednesday night’s episode of “South Park,” titled “Fort Collins,” which continues the season’s arc that characterizes the presidential race as an unsavory choice between the “Giant Douche” and “Turd Sandwich.”
Amid story lines that satirize Julian Assange and the motivations of Internet trolls, this season has also been a referendum on the crippling ability of nostalgia to render our minds into mush.
And with “Fort Collins” — Matt Stone and Trey Parker’s last new episode before the real U.S. election – a vote for “President-elect Sandwich” (Clinton’s avatar) is not only a vote against Donald Trump; it also represents a stand against the latest “Star Wars” film, director J.J. Abrams and the entire evil empire that is mind-melting nostalgia.
In this scenario, Trump is not a Nazi as much as he is a Fonzie.
Mr. Garrison, the show’s Trump stand-in, won the political spotlight through button-pushing anger and crass vulgarity. Now enlightened, he appeals to America to not vote for all he represents – a fear-based regression to the familiar. “Remember that every vote for Hillary Clinton,” Garrison tells the nation, “is a vote that shows the world we agree that ‘The Force Awakens’ was more like a ‘Happy Days’ reunion special than a movie.”
The addictive appeal of sweet nostalgia has been given physical form here in wee, purple Member Berries. Throughout the ages, the irresistibly cute fruit of unexamined memory has lured too-large civilizations to their mass slackerly downfall, the show posits. They may look like charming cartoon grapes, but they spell Fruit of the Doom.
“There’s only one thing that matters now,” Mr. Garrison tells the populace. “On Nov. 8th, you must vote against me and show the world that you didn’t think the new ‘Star Wars’ was all that good.”
Consider that “South Park’s” backhanded endorsement of Hillary “Sandwich” Clinton – and its forehanded insult of J.J. Abrams.