America?... Fuck Yeah!

Team America: World Police is a Bush Era satire discussing a great many issues that have been posed in the post-9/11 world. The guys who made South Park use (cheap) marionettes to lampoon U.S. foreign policy and the war on terror, the action films of Michael Bay, liberal Hollywood actors, and everyone else for that matter. Gary Johnston is a skilled actor who joins Team America, a group of five counterterrorists whose preferred method involves lots of explosions. The leader, Spottswoode, wants him to go undercover to discover the next terrorist plot, dubbed "9/11 times a thousand" (911,000). Unbeknownst to our heroes, North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Il is secretly funding and arming the terrorists. He is also encouraging the Film Actors Guild (FAG) to shut down Team America and its ultra violent antics.

What's interesting about this movie is that it presents an actual, functioning moral system to why horrible things happen on such a large scale, and the checks and balances that a culture provides, and needs to deal with such atrocities. 

In the movie, and more specifically the theme song (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IhnUgAaea4M) there are a lot of buzz words that are parts and pieces of essentially what is thought to make up the idea of what America is, (Liberty, Walmart, Porno, Apple Pie, etc.), satirizing the concepts that are being protected by going to war. As Kant insists, this is a necessary part of war, to understand the opponent as other. To conceptualize your opponent as evil, you must conceptualize yourself as good. So when fighting for America, you have to break down everything America is supposed to stand for, while having a blind fervent patriotism and allegiance to these vague, and ultimately empty concepts.

But, it is exactly these concepts, and the abstraction of these concepts that make war so complicated in this day and age. If you were to read Xenophon's March of 10,000 (or just watch The Warriors) he'll exactly dehumanize both parties in the same way that they are today. Break down both the Greeks and their honor and reason from the Persians and their cruelty and savagery. But there is no suggestion of seeing the other as complex human beings, because they were at war. There was a distinct place for war, separate and sacred from peacetime, and therefore a different way of thinking of others. But today, war and peace exist at the same time. Where in the world isn't some sort of armed conflict happening? And we're made aware of it on such a high level through the media that we can't separate it mentally. Thus, our civilian morality mixes with our war morality. And Team America: World Police explains this interesting system of checks and balances.

In the famous "dicks, pussies and assholes" speech. Team America, the "dicks" fight for good causes, protecting the innocents and serving justice to the evil, but can go too far. The "pussies", F.A.G. and the rest of the world, can tell when the "dicks" are out of line, but can become evil if they are too self-righteous. The "assholes"- Kim Jong Il and terrorists, are "pussies" that went too far at some point. So the real problem with war is getting too carried away during, and loosing your base, or focus.