I just watched a video posted by the deep-digging, hard-hitting news crew over at CNN in which it was suggested that South Park may have gone “too far” in making fun of Tom Cruise.

First off, Tom Cruise, as some of us noticed during an interview a few months ago, is an asshole. He calls his actor friends and tells them that they’re communist pinko mind lepers for wanting to take antidepressants. That’s not the kind of compassionate response to something as serious as depression that I’d expect from a friend.

If you missed it, one of the people Tom chided was Brooke Shields. She was suffering from (and has since helped spread the word on) postpartum depression. To put it simply, it’s a type of depression that some women experience after giving birth.

Tom, who has of course given birth on many occasions and fully understands the physical and mental challenges involved, took it upon himself to wag a finger at Brooke and try to make her feel like a big dummy for having treated her postpartum with antidepressants.

Way to go, Tom. You big dickface.

This is a guy who should be made fun of, and I don’t see a limit in sight. He’s pompous, arrogant, and ignorant. The only thing he seems to be any good at is marrying girls one tenth his age and somehow getting away with it (whether or not that’s a skill is a matter of taste).

So, that’s Tom. Tom the puddinghead.

The voiceover in the CNN video also touched on the way South Park made fun of Scientology. We’re talking about a “religion” founded by a paranoid nutbar who thought the entire psychiatric community was out to get him, who had to take his business dealings to international waters when no country wanted to accept him on its land, and who made a business out of bleeding dollars from stupid people.

Now, while I think L. Ron Hubbard was an even bigger dickface than Tom Cruise, I can’t fault him for having decided to make money on stupid people. The fact is, by populating Scientology centers all over the world with people who are willing “to work very long hours for little or no pay” (that’s taken from a local ad for Scientologists that ran a few years ago in the paper), L. Ron Hubbard almost single-handedly weeded the lowest levels of functional stupidity out of the general population. Frankly, I’m kind of fond of the idea of increasing the average IQ on the street by removing the offending societal element and moving it indoors to centers of concentrated beefheads.

I also think that Scientology is fantastic. I love reading about it. Fewer things in life have induced as much laughter in me as some of the bizarre rituals and beliefs involved. After paying several hundred thousand dollars in useless counseling type sessions, some of these people have been let in on the Big Secret of Scientology, which is that Earth (formerly known as “Teegeeack”) has been around for something like seventy-five trillion years, and that it was a prison planet for an alien called “Xenu” who was stuffed inside a volcano that exploded, sending nasty little spirits all over the world that are still plaguing us today.

Yeah. Chew on that for a minute. The great part is that I’m not kidding. This is what is revealed in the upper echelons of Scientology (specifically, a rank known as “Operating Thetan Level III” – and if that title alone doesn’t vibrate your funny bone into a bodyquake, then I don’t know what will).

However…

Even though I’d like for Scientology to stick around for the rest of eternity, acting like fly paper for the terminally retarded, the CNN announcer said of the South Park show that, “There is no question – they are presenting Scientology as a cult.” (This isn’t an exact quote, but it’s pretty damned close.)

I thought to myself, “And…?”

It didn’t seem at all strange to me to think of Scientology as a cult, and yet here was a big, intelligent newsperson who wanted to draw attention to what might have been a mislabeling of a proper religion.

Giving CNN the benefit of the doubt, I went over to Merriam-Webster online and checked out the definition for “cult.” I figured that at least one of the given meanings would map to Scientology. What I didn’t expect was that all of them would apply:

1. formal religious veneration : WORSHIP

Check. Scientology centers hold regular services.

2. a system of religious beliefs and ritual; also : its body of adherents

Check. To become an official non-profit organization (generating millions for Hubbard), Scientology took status as a religion.

3. a religion regarded as unorthodox or spurious; also : its body of adherents

Check. Note that slightly modifying the definition to read, “a religion regarded as really fucking stupid” would also be appropriate in this case.

4. a system for the cure of disease based on dogma set forth by its promulgator

Check. L. Ron wrote a book about how radiation sickness can be cured with sauna treatments and niacin. Scientology also has a spinoff organization called Narconon which gets people off of drugs by introducing a system of centralized, concentrated stupidity, and music that’s so bad it should be illegal.

5a. great devotion to a person, idea, object, movement, or work (as a film or book); especially : such devotion regarded as a literary or intellectual fad

Check. Dianetics: the “Modern Science of Mental Health” is the work of fiction that kicked this whole thing off. (It’s too bad that, alongside science, literature, and other academic disciplines, we never teach people in this country how to think critically.)

5b. a usually small group of people characterized by such devotion

Check. Scientology claims, at any given time, around seven to eight million adherents worldwide, while nobody outside the organization has ever seen a proper breakdown of where these people are coming from. The general assumption right now is that Scientology has as few as a couple hundred thousand, or as many as a couple million followers right now, making it about as popular as Esperanto, which didn’t exactly take off like wildfire (that said, Esperanto is about 10,000 times cooler than Scientology).

Given all of this, I think I’d have to disagree with the suggestion, made by CNN, that South Park may have gone too far in making fun of Tom Cruise.

I actually think they may not have gone far enough. We need an entire network dedicated to programming that raises awareness of the human capacity for stupidity.

Actually, we need a network that does this job intentionally. CNN isn’t cutting it.