Personally it’s been awhile since I watched SP, but I thought I’d check this episode out. I really expected more. While it’s obvious that the conspiracy theories often go overboard, the bottom line is that the official story does not account for the entirety of the events of September 11th, and that the official story is, by definition, a conspiracy theory.
Due to the mixture of gung-ho nationalist sentiments, the media and political interests, and the all-eggs-in-one-basket alternative conspiracy theories, I doubt we’ll ever know the truth about 9/11. It’s sad and shameful that we are forced into believing either the government was responsible or that the “facts” that we’re told about things like Building 7 make sense. I don’t buy either one, but the third option isn’t for me to offer a new conspiracy, just to remind everyone that we should have had a full investigation (and kept the debris to examine it thoroughly).
We shouldn’t have had 9/11 and yet no one blames Bush for letting it happen. I’m not saying he knew about it; I’m saying whether he knew about it or not they did not respond properly to the attacks. He’s never taken blame for it. He plies his rhetoric about defending the country being his most important job. How he can reconcile that with his failure to do the same is beyond me. Anyone with any integrity in any job would not behave as he has in the face of such an unbelievable failure.
Of course, you don’t see the SP boys using their soapbox to bring these points to bear. Instead they’re lost in their world of a few boner jokes, a few shit in the urinal jokes, and wrap it up in a “conspiracies are retarded” bait and switch. I’ll be the first to admit that conspiracies are, as a rule, way off base; alternatively the general sentiment that drives the theorists to seek answers is usually a mixture of genuine want of truth and a coping mechanism to deal with the cognative dissonance.
Such dissonance is formed by the unending rhetoric of protectionism by the government after 9/11 and the actual realities of 9/11, the anthrax cases, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. They see their fellow citizens supporting the president, the wars, the new laws, and the profits of large corporations that clean up (both literally and figuratively) as a result of disasters. So their attempt to reconcile these things is to construct intricate stories (on the scale of at least Biblical/Mythological story telling to explain the unknown). What’s more, their reaction is in many ways fueled by the coping mechanism of a majority who felt the need to quell their dissonance by increasing consonance as patriotism, nationalism, etc.
Yeah, I guess it would be unfair for me to expect South Park to deal with these things. It’d be nice if someone did, though.