Proj1

Section 1: Empathic Arguments

1. The Concerned Parents

2. Sympathetic/Apathetic Parents

3. School Administration

4. Empathic Appeal to Concerned Parents

5. The "Rove Figure"

Section 2: Plot Synopsis

Scene 1: School’s Argument

The fifth graders of South Park Elementary, including Stan, Kyle, Kenny, and Cartman, are in art class. Instead of Ms. McGee, a new art teacher, Ms. Adkins, greets the children and announces she’ll be their art teacher now. Stan asks why, and Ms. Adkins tells the children about the parents’ complaints against Ms. McGee and the school’s decision to fire her. Kyle demands an explanation for why the school fired her. Ms. McGee presents the school administration’s argument. See Section 1, 3.

The scene ends with Stan, Kyle, Cartman, and Kenny angrily discussing Ms. McGee’s firing.

Scene 2: Chef’s Spooked

The children go to Chef for advice about Ms. McGee’s firing. In response to their requests that he sing them a song involving making sweet love down by the fire place, Chef nervously accuses the kids of making up crazy stories. When the kids persist Chef yells at them, warning them that they’ll get him fired, and telling them to get the hell away from him before anyone hears. The kids’ discontent grows.

Scene 3: The Broflovskis

Kyle comes home. Mr. and Mrs. Broflovski are on the couch watching television. Kyle starts to relay news of Ms. McGee’s dismissal, but his parents tell him that they already know all about it because the principal called a special-purpose PTA meeting to get the parents’ approval before firing McGee. Kyle asks whether they stood up for Ms. McGee and made the sort of impassioned pleas to save her job that he himself would make. No, they didn’t. First, they attempt to justify their acquiescence as tolerance. Kyle is having none of it. Privately, Mr. Broflovski fesses up to Kyle that delivers the the “pick your battles” argument.

Scene 4: The Marshes

Stan comes home and discusses Ms. McGee’s firing with his parents. Unlike the Broflovskis, they stood up for Ms. McGee in the best way they knew how: by calling the concerned parents ignorant fundamentalist hillbillies. Kyle’s father explains that vicious name-calling in the purpose of social change is the “spirit of the Sixties.” Nevertheless, their efforts were unsuccessful, and ABC’s primetime lineup is far more important these days than pursuing doomed but socially just causes to their bitter end.

Scene 5: Monday Lunch

Kyle, Stan, Cartman, and Kenny pick up their lunch trays and go over to Chef’s station. To their surprise, they find a skinny white guy in a chef’s hat behind the lunch counter. Chef has taken a job at another school, fearing that he would soon be fired. He has left the boys a note: “Dear Children, I’m leaving before your crazy cracker-ass parents fire me too. Good luck, Chef.” This is the last straw; the children resolve to act. After a brief huddle, Stan, Kyle, Cartman, and Kenny circulate throughout the lunchroom, spreading the word…

Scene 6: The Walkout

Back in their regular classroom, the children, led by Stan, refuse to go to their new art class, staging a walkout in the playground as a protest of the school’s treatment of Ms. McGee and the loss of Chef. Mr. Garrison doesn’t particularly give a damn, and is already reading an Us magazine as the kids walk out. One child refuses to join the protesting kids and is dragged out by Kyle, Cartman, and Kenny.

Scene 7: Rove Revealed

It turns out that the kid who refused to walk out with the others is the child of the heretofore anonymous complaining parent, Carter Rove (yes, he is essentially a parody of Carl Rove). Rather than being upset by Ms. McGee’s firing, he is proud of it, as it shows his father’s influence and prowess. The kid (little Billy Rove) tells the story of how his father, a jackass but not a religious fundamentalist, resolved to get Ms. McGee fired. See Section 1, 4.

Scene 8: Concerned Parents

The Scene cuts to South Park church. Inside, Rove, with Father Maxi’s help, has gathered like 20 parents to have a meeting about this catastrophe of which Rove has just been informed. Rove begins getting the evangelicals fired up by talking about the school’s betrayal of their values and showing the parents poster-sized pictures of the statues the children saw. Note: these pictures are from the Dallas Museum of Art’s website and are listed as part of the museum’s permanent collection. In reality, no one knows exactly which works the children saw, but these are the likely candidates.

The concerned parents then give the Concerned Parents’ Argument. See Section 1, 1. At then end, one of the parents asks “Well what can we do about it?” Rove knows exactly what to do about it.

Scene 9: The Walkout Fails

Cut back to the playground. Billy Rove explains how his dad took all the “religious nuts” to Principal Victoria’s office and demanded that she fire Ms. McGee. Then Billy describes how Rove had everyone but his son leave the room so that he could play some hardball with the Principal, threatening to use these crazed evangelicals (and the vast memberships of their churches) to stir up the press, protest the school, and generally make it impossible to run the place. He’ll have the religious kooks of South Park, along with his golf buddies on the school board, get Principal Victoria fired, and perhaps run out of town altogether, if she doesn’t get rid of Ms. McGee.

After Billy finishes his story, and exchanges insults with Stan and Kyle, their friend Craig informs them that the walkout is about to disband. Terrence and Philip is about to come on (for those who are not South Park fans, T&P is a cartoon about a pair of flatulent Canadians who fart on one another’s heads), and it’s a particularly compelling episode involving the pair being locked in a baked beans factory. The playground rapidly empties, leaving Stan, Kyle, and Kenny (obviously Cartman has run off) to contemplate their failure.

Scene 10: The PTA Meeting

Despite Principal Victoria’s objections, the superintendent has demanded another special PTA meeting, in view of the recent student protests, to consider reinstatement of Ms. McGee. At the new meeting, things seem to be going to plan. The concerned parents reiterate their argument and express their gratitude to the sympathetic/apathetic parents for those parents’ support. A sympathetic parent reiterates the phony tolerance argument. Then, Mr. Marsh, and his small and angry cadre of dissenters, barges into the gymnasium to renew his verbal onslaught on the “Bible-thumping rubes” who refuse to reinstate Ms. McGee. Verbal hostility degenerates into physical hostility, and as the parents fight, Stan and the other fifth graders grab the opportunity to take the podium. Kenny’s inevitable accidental death in the melee (for non-South Park fans, Kenny dies every episode, or used to), chastens everyone sufficiently so that they cease hostilities and give Stan a minute to speak. He makes the empathic argument to the concerned parents.

As between the clichéd happy ending and the darker, potentially realistic ending, I’m having trouble choosing. The happy ending would demonstrate the power of empathic argument to change minds. The concerned parents would agree to reinstatement of Ms. McGee (though not necessarily to drop their grudge against her entirely). With the concerned parents reasonably placated, the sympathetic/apathetic parents would happily vote to give Ms. McGee her job back, and the school administration would too. The darker ending would be for Rove to point out that in his little speech, Stan employed the word “penis” as in “when those kids saw that statue’s penis” and that that’s the sort of filth everyone can expect if Ms. McGee comes back to school. Incensed anew, the concerned parents hold fast to their conviction that McGee must go; the sympathetic/apathetic parents accordingly fall in line and the school reconfirms its decision to fire Ms. McGee. Stan is left to ponder the boundless idiocy and pettiness of grown-ups.