Newsday from New York, New York • 78

B6 CULTURE WATCH mi' Tom Carson Gross Anatomy of American Childhood 2 Remember when the stuff that puts the in pop culture used to bubble under the surface for years with nonfans being none the wiser? Even Rocky Horror Picture the granddaddy of modem cult phenomena was old hat on the midnight-movie circuit it helped invent long before more straitlaced folks even started wondering just what those strangely costumed young people were up to queueing outside theaters at such ungodly hours not how it works now Comedy animated series has only been on since last summer and by or even Texas standards its audience is minuscule But even if never watched the show you help but be familiar with it if only from all the tie-in merchandise that popped up in the blink of an eye at malls all over this great land Not only that but TV Guide latched on to straightaway what kind of world is this when cultmongers even count on TV Guide to be clueless anymore? All the same I be surprised if in hip 8th-grade circles as well as among the older know-it-alls who discovered the series back in mid-1997 a fondness for Cartman Stan Kyle Kenny Chef and Mr Garrison is already considered slightly corny These days with the help of your neighborhood mall you can OD on a cult phenomenon before even hooked in this case taken all of nine months Or a bit longer if lucky enough to count yourself among the online cognoscenti who downloaded the earliest incarnation of once it went public cm the Net some months before the debut This was Spirit of a five-minute video clip commissioned as a for-friends-only 1995 Yuletide greeting by then Fox executive Brian Graden and put together by untutored animators Trey Parker and Matt Stone for the lavish sum of $2000 Climaxing with a martial-arts dustup between Santa Claus and his chief rival for control of the meaning meet again a baleful St Nick snarled facing down his haloed arch-enemy the video was more scurrilous than Comedy toned-down series version which also cuts back on the gleeful abundance of four-letter words Still interesting to see how many of the most recognizable elements were part of the package from the start notably the setting an absurd Colorado town whose atmosphere owes more to than to the late John Rocky Mountain highs and the quartet of roundheaded bleak-eyed tykes that your children if not you have likely come to know and love That would be fat enraged Cartman pensive Stan bewildered Kyle and last and usually least poor incomprehensibly gibbering Kenny who suffered a horrible death in Spirit of He must be getting used to it since now he dies gruesomely every week Peculiarly diligent-looking rats usually devour his body immediately afterward What happens to Kenny is just one tipoff that Comedy Central toned down Parker and razzmatazz anywhere near enough to satisfy Mrs Grundy The main thing that everybody who seen Park" has heard about the show is that it sure is pottymouthed and it sure is Even if the network does bleep out the naughtiest vulgarisms a lame form of censorship that seems even sillier than usual here there are still enough unedited lesser ones to earn this cartoon the rating it sports with some pride Nor is the impudence confined to words even a jaded viewer (and devotee) like me is often dumbfounded by how much the series gets away with Just for instance there was this full-fledged Christmas Trey Parker and Matt show a delirious poop joke in which happy Mr Han key becomes a talking embodiment of the substance that parents teach their toddlers to call Number Two For sheer outrageousness that topped even the episode where for reasons too complicated to go into even if I were sure I remembered them an elephant was mated with a pig As the eyes widened at the prospect Chef our sole repository of adult reason which mystifies him almost as much as it does them and also one of the few African Americans in sight in this vanilla cosmos gloomily muttered I know how all those white women (Chef by the way is also prone to crooning lewd soul ditties at the drop of a hat and you deny got a right: Isaac Hayes does his voice) Clearly the series shy about inviting the wrath of any viewer who not only finds such crudities appalling and at some level we all do even though why some of us are laughing our heads off but believes that offensiveness or the lack of it settles all arguments about a quality It of course has merits undreamed of ter or two much-loved or anyhow much-watched laugh-fests whose puerilities seem to bother anybody besides aesthetes Even if Parker and Stone are mainly in it for the laughs on their way to being in it for this money this show is an uncannily convincing depiction of childhood a condition anarchic and demented as well as bewildered and powerless and not forget pottymouthed It looks like the work of pbople who grew up Continued on Page B15 AP Photo Stone the creators of Tom Canon is television critic far the Village Voice LES PAYNE Scary Hussein Assassination Mongers crackdown on Africans opposing apartheid During a heated exchange over the Reagan administration policy of constructive engagement with the white racists Sen Joseph Biden (D-DeL) suggested the inevitability that continued American support for the Boers might precipitate increased violence in South Africa Schultz replied hate to hear a senator of the United States calling for The pleas for violence had indeed been mantra during his many trips to Capitol Hill seeking arms and equipment for the contras of Central America Jonas Savimbi of Angola and other assassins and assigns on the executive payroll Schultz in fact had been barely able to contain himself two months earlier when sorties of American F-llls dropped 2000-pound bombs on the desert compound of Col Moammar Gadhafi An ebullient Schultz was quoted as saying of the colonel had it This UK assassination attempt on Gadhafi from a flying chariot succeeded only in cratering the sand and killing innocent Libyans Woolsey seemed to have learned practical lessons about the difficulty of killing such cunning dictators in their home country It would do well now for certain congressional leaders to learn as well the ethical pitfalls of plotting the assassination of world leaders should not be used as a tool of reminded no lesser a book-thumper than James Woolsey a CIA director during President Bill first term Woolsey ruled out such a UiL-backed murder plot as sending the wrong signal to other nations in this post Cold-War era Besides with clever well-disguised movements assassinating him would be all but The UN settlement has not made UxL assassination plotting moot Should Kofi pact with Hussein such as it is pull apart the witches of murder and overthrow will fly back The recent crisis saw a doubling of the UK basic force of 15000 troops some 120 planes and aircraft carriers in the region at a stepped-up annual expense of $13 billion Should the balloon go up again Sen McCain his POW experience pressing upon him will seek not to risk a single life or limb of a UK soldier Besides the covert plan including assassination is likely moving forward apace through the intelligence channels Such dangerous folly recalls the more dangerous Cold-War period of the Reagan years when America at its brash arrogant and raw-boned worst was selectively denouncing one act of terrorism while directing another At one such moment in the summer of 1986 Secretary of State George Shultz hid his battle ax and went before the Senate to defend the HAS BEEN EERIE listening in on assassination plotting It help that the voices are those of high US officials many enlivened by accents from southern states where such barbarism is not unknown as a way of settling scores Hussein is a war said Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott of Mississippi hinting of no further need for evidence or even a tribunal the for getting rid of the Iraqi leader Lott said should be considered He was incensed that in wrangling a settlement from Hussein UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan had dared repeat the Iraqi reference to UK members of the international arms inspection team as eliminating Hussein involves CIA covert activities I personally think fine" Lott said Sen John McCain (R-Ariz) who spent all those painful years in a Vietnam POW camp called for the overthrowing or outright killing of Saddam Hussein Making it dear that he wanted not a whisker of the moustache left bristling McCain sighed for a proposal to overthrow Saddam With no less a wiggle House Speaker Newt Gingrich seemingly threw in his girth on the side of elimination by extreme prejudice Is this any way for a lone superpower to deal with an enemy? 1 1 I I rrrrr TTTT? a.