Let George Do It 2

These are actually warmed-over Thoughts from LAST Thursday. Sorry, but I don't think as fast as I used to.

Actually, the delay was partially because Tommy and I wrote this together, in a truly tedious exchange of email. The British slang is his; the sprinkling of alliteration is mine. He's gonna put it on YouTube; I'm putting it here.


Imagine for a moment that Billy Graham is dead.

Imagine the outpouring of grief and sorrow that would follow. To Christians, his passing will seem a tremendous loss: Since 1943, Graham has been a prominent and moving voice of their beliefs.

And the lifelong devotees will be joined by hundreds of thousands who never heard him speak, never read his books. He has been around their whole lives. He represents constancy and stability, and his passing will conjure up frightening realizations that nothing and no one lasts forever.

Billy Graham is still alive and reasonably well at 90, but this description is an attempt to show how we reacted to the death of George Carlin last week.

Since 1960, Carlin has been a loud, influential, and damned funny voice about so many things that truly matter: both the remarkable power and sometimes utter idiocy of language, the banal stupidity of day-to-day life, and the immoral domination of big government and big religion and the unthinking foolishness of humans who allow themselves to be dominated.

Carlin warned us repeatedly that too many of us are willing to sacrifice freedom from oppression in order to continue to comfortable status quo we’ve lived our lives in. He wasn’t the first. Circa the year 100, the Roman poet Juvenal said the same thing, that the people would tolerate all kinds of government corruption and tyranny so long as they still got their “bread and circuses.” In 1787, after a woman asked Benjamin Franklin what type of government the newly signed Constitution would create, he replied, “A republic, if you can keep it.”

But we didn’t keep it. We let insiders take it from us. Multi-generational dynasties of “the right people” who all belong to the same clubs and get educated at the same schools. This includes the current president: he may pretend to be just another West Texas good ol’ boy, but he’s the private school-educated son of a former president and grandson of a US Senator who reportedly sold weapons to his much admired Adolf Hitler. And this is not to blast Republicans: the other party is just as bad. Too many insiders retaining power and information to themselves and working hard to make the voters feel effectual. They didn’t need to rig elections: they just had to make sure that all the “real” candidates were their kind of people.

And we let them. Instead of bread and circuses, we sold our democratic republic for fast food and cable TV, Starbucks and online access. Keep us fat and entertained, and we won’t rock the boat hard enough to drown the bastards in charge before they steal the lifeboats and sink the rest of us.

Government wasn’t Carlin’s only target. Though he refused to call himself an “atheist” — making himself, by default, a “theist” — he did speak out against the bullshit of organized religion. It gives us flimsy excuses offered to cover up the inconsistencies of what’s said to be consistent and hide the flaws in what’s thought to be infallible. And always there’s a push to spread the word, to recruit more sheep to the flock, to shove doctrine down the throats of those who disagree.

And here Carlin was spot on.

At a time when the powerbrokers have the bogeyman of terrorism to scare more citizens into shutting up and saluting the flag, and when religions are driven to new lengths by increasing numbers of people abandoning religion for reason, we need people like George Carlin to point at the naked emperors and draw attention to the bullshit.

For 48 years, he was there, talking loudly about things that mattered and making us laugh while we learned. He was hilarious. He was intelligent. He was thought-provoking and far more important to this nation than many realize.

Well done, George, and thank you. We’ll take it from here, and we’ll try not to let you down.

George Denis Patrick Carlin
May 12, 1937 – June 22, 2008

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