As an aside, one of the two South Park/Team America guys (I believe Trey Parker) was interviewed by Terry Gross last week and I think he said that it was OK to make racist caricatures of Arabs and Kim Jong IL because they are our enemies.
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Yup, that is indeed what he said. I just finished listening to Terry Gross' interview with Trey which is available for your listening pleasure here:
<http://freshair.npr.org/day_fa.jhtml?display=day&todayDate=10/14/2004 >
That statement grew from a comparison he was making between what I suppose we might call the 'spirit' (for lack of a less annoyingly overused word) of "Team America" and a 1943 Warner Bros Donald Duck short titled "Der Fuehrer's Face".
A few stills here -
<http://www.rotten.com/library/culture/banned-cartoons/ >
And a surprisingly detailed synopsis here -
<http://www.wordiq.com/definition/Der_Fuehrer%27s_Face >
According to Trey, just as those ancient Warner Bros animaters used racist imagery to "lessen American's fears" of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan (the Tojo caricature is especially over-the-top) he and Matt are trying to do the same for us with our present crop of 'enemies'.
This was delivered, I thought, as a bit of a toss off; a full figured sound bite. Something to say to fill the air with clever, pop culture archeology sweetened noise.
It might reflect his (or their) true intentions but is, it seems to me, deeply dumb-headed for a legion of reasons which I'm not sure Trey is able to perceive. For example, the Warner Bros team could have lampooned the Japanese militarists for being, well, rapacious militarists but chose to focus instead on a relentless smear of nearly all things Japanese. It wasn't what those particular Japanese did that made them bad; they were bad because they were Japanese and, incidentally, violent imperialists.
This was the 1943 animated short's message.
Thus was the target missed and old stupidities reinforced - ready for new applications once official hostilities ended in 1945.
Matt and Trey, by caricaturing Arabs in general (the Arab terrorist characters don't even speak Arabic but a mosh-up consisting of words like 'Allah', 'jihad', muhummad' intermixed with non-words) are doing precisely what the Warner Bros group did with "Der Fuehrer's Face".
.d.