The Ethos of South Park

I don't watch the show myself, but Peeve Farm has a good essay up about the conservatism of the raunchy South Park animated series. It gives more insight into the whole idea, often mentioned by Jonah Goldberg and other NRO writers, of "South Park Republicans".

Excerpt:

The South Park flavor of social-conservatism is a common-sense thing, an appeal to us to scoop up the fragments of our parents' world into a basket before they all get scattered and blown away, so we can at least sift through them at our leisure and see which shards we might want to keep, even if just as mementoes. The more we allow our public policy to be made by the predations upon "traditional values" by the parties of the young, the untested, the rootless, the uninvested, the inexperienced, the idealistic college students and professional activists and chronically unemployable and those who are easily led about by fashion and peer pressure, the more we thoughtlessly throw away the experience of dozens of generations in favor of mantras like "change" and "diversity" whose long-term consequences we won't even allow ourselves to contemplate.

I understand the impulse to follow this link (Not Safe For Work), in which some guy chronicles the former nude-photo-posing life of the young Dr. Laura Schlesinger, and then castigates her for presuming to lecture the country on the subject of "morality":

Note: Too bad Dr. Laura doesn't have the guts to stand up to the pictures she took when she was in her 20's. This only proves that she has many hang ups with her body and is not really fit to help others with their problems because she is too full of her own. There is no reason to be ashamed of these pictures. In my opinion, if you have a nice body and want to show it off, then go for it! She claims that she is an "improved" woman because she is no longer an Atheist! I happen to be an Atheist and I think that it is much better to be a fun loving Atheist than a crusty old witch!

Fine, hypocrisy sucks. But note that the title of the page is "What Went Wrong with Dr. Laura?" —the implication, of course, being that being an atheistic libertine is "right", and becoming an uptight moralist is "wrong". Posing nude? What could possibly be objectionable about that?

If the first Rorschachian reaction one has to the word "morality" is a negative one, then something's gone badly wrong with someone's value system, wouldn't you say?