We never get used to it: People who lead us to sacred truths sometimes behave badly, sometimes very badly. They do wrong but that doesn’t mean they are wrong.
I was sick anyway over the weekend so I thought I might as well finally read Brian Anderson’s South Park* Conservatives. He points out how libertarian political perspectives are distinct from Tea Party conservatives, and distinct again for those I call truly principled conservatives. Trey Parker and Matt Stone are the former, and are well represented in media if not in electoral politics while principled conservatives have no one to represent them these days anywhere. Or so it seems to me.
So what does any of this have to do with the metaphysics of digital media in general and Kenny’s capacity to die and then not be dead, defying biological processes, but then so what? He’s a cartoon character. He is, at the same time, illustrative of a metaphysical truth: Time’s arrow is not simply bent. You might best imagine it pointed straight up so that it will go towards infinite space, and so it does.
Only narrative time has a beginning, middle, and end. And we just make that shit up.
That has little to do with US politics which isn’t about metaphysical time, but the present narrative time. Parker and Stone’s politics might be ethically offputting, even indefensible, the positions presented in their series sometimes despicable. They are still good at what they do, and it makes us laugh. Yet with respect to the metaphysical structure of the universe… they have a point and it’s funny too, seriously funny.
