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.Thus, in  Die Hippie, Die contemporary hippies bring a musical fes-tival to the town of South Park to help raise consciousness about the collu-sion of corporations with the military.Yet, instead of addressing this issue, thehippies spend most of the time partying and talk only vaguely of a utopiansociety.The townspeople, who initially welcomed the newcomers, quicklyfind they are being overwhelmed by hippies and plot to drive them away.Similarly, Stan and Kyle, who at first sympathized with the hippies, eventu-ally reject them as foolish.This episode therefore contends that the hippiecounterculture s  politics of pot and rock (Starr) creates only a hazy left-lib-eral politics that is ultimately ineffectual.Such satirizing of the 1960s left-liberal youth culture is frequent in SouthPark, and it speaks to a broader antipathy among Gen Xers toward the babyboom generation.The baby boomers were born during a period of highbirthrates from the late 1940s to the early 1960s and comprise a massive gen-erational cohort (around 75 million).As children, they were affected by fearsof communism, tremendous affluence, suburban quiescence, racial segrega-tion, rigid gender and sexual norms, and other characteristics of thepost World War II consensus culture (Hodgson).As they came of age in the1960s, highly visible, predominately white and middle-class segments of thebaby boomer generation began to rebel against what they saw as oppressiveand repressive elements in this consensus culture.Hence, radical studentgroups such as Students for a Democratic Society joined with black civilrights workers to end southern racial segregation through voter registrationdrives, whereas the hippie counterculture hoped to effect change throughradical cultural politics, such as countering status quo sexual mores with anethos of free love.Unlike the baby boomers, the much smaller birth cohortof Generation X matured during a period of economic decline, high rates ofunemployment and divorce, the onset of the AIDS epidemic, massive mili-tary expansion, and the dismantling of domestic programs designed to helpyouth and other vulnerable populations.For Gen Xers, the harsh environ-ment of Reagan s America in which they matured suggested that left-liberal154 Matt Beckerpolitics of 1960s youth had not only failed, but were possibly responsible forthis harsh environment.Did the rising divorce rate of the 1980s, for instance,relate to the loosening of sexual mores and gender norms during the 1960s?Worse still, as the baby boomers aged, many seemed to embrace materialismand other values that they had condemned in their youth.Little wonder thatone writer describes Parker and Stone as representative of a generation thatis  as suspicious of hippie arrogance as they are amused by rampant youthfulignorance (Wild 68).This disdain for 1960s youth culture is common in the popular culturegenerated by Generation X.At the beginning of Reality Bites (1994), perhapsthe most emblematic Gen X Hollywood film, a main character muses in hervaledictory address:  And they wonder why those of us in our twenties [.]aren t interested in the counterculture that they invented, as if we did not seethem disembowel their revolution for a pair of running shoes. In South Park,hostility toward 1960s youth culture, namely hippies, is expressed most vehe-mently by Cartman.His hatred of them is, in fact, a running gag.Cartman rou-tinely derides other kids as  hippie and has nightmares about hippies.In  DieHippie, Die, he is portrayed as an exterminator of hippies who is the only onein town that instantly recognizes the threat these  parasites pose.Cartmandespises hippie traits (for example, hygiene customs, fashions) and values (forexample, environmentalism, nonviolence).And like many Gen Xers, heabhors them as deeply hypocritical.Thus, in  Cartman s Silly Hate Crime2000, when a lawyer accuses him of hating African Americans, Cartmanresponds,  No! I hate hippies! [.] I mean, the way they always talk about  pro-tectin the earth and then drive around in cars that get poor gas mileage andwear those stupid bracelets I hate  em! I wanna kick  em in the nuts!Cartman s hostility toward hippies is representative not only ofGen Xers, however, but also of right-conservatives.Indeed, he verbalizes abroader backlash against the 1960s that has been championed by severalright-conservative luminaries, ranging from George Wallace and RonaldReagan to Rush Limbaugh and Bill O Reilly.At the center of this backlash isa desire to restore a  traditional American way of life that was supposedlydisrupted in the 1960s by radical youth, African Americans, feminists, andother New Social movements when they challenged law-and-order policies,racial hierarchies, sexual mores, and gender norms.Not surprisingly, backlashpolitics appeal particularly to white males, who perceive these challenges asattacks on their social status.And because blatant racism, sexism, and homo-phobia are now considered vulgar in official culture (as Anderson might putit, because PC has prevailed), this backlash is often directed at the  big gov-ernment of the supposedly activist liberal state that facilitated the success ofthese challenges and continues to encourage them.In the 1970s, the quintessential backlash stereotype was All in the Fam-ily s Archie Bunker, whose belligerent racism, anti-Semitism, and open hos- I Hate Hippies 155tility toward feminists, homosexuals, and hippies was provocative, offensive,funny, and, for some, admirable.Parker and Stone looked to this characterwhen they created Cartman, who they describe as a  misguided ArchieBunker (qtd.in Bianculli).Like Bunker, Cartman is vigorously anti-Semiticand chauvinistic.He takes racial stereotypes at face value and, along with theother South Park kids, uses the term  gay disparagingly [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]