Aquarian Weekly 7/9/08
REALITY CHECK

GEORGE CARLIN 1937 - 2008

What's all this favoritism towards the dead? Why should the dead get a moment of silence? Fuck the dead! Let's have a moment of muffled conversation for those who were treated and released.
- George Carlin

For over a half century George Denis Patrick Carlin was the standard bearer of the principles on which this space was founded: Nothing is Sacred and Truth Need Not Apologize. He stomped that terra without fear; took names, laid waste and left volumes of incredible material to prove it. Only Mark Twain, H.L. Mencken, Lenny Bruce, Hunter S. Thompson, Dick Gregory, Kurt Vonnegut, Randy Newman, the first four years of Saturday Night Live, or those wonderful maniacs who pen The Simpsons have tread the same plain of his satirical mastery.

For my money his passing is a true American tragedy; a significant loss to the alternative voice, a rare and dying breed.

I love and treasure individuals as I meet them; I loathe and despise the groups they identify with and belong to.

George Carlin was the patron saint of the wayward radical without a home politically, spiritually or philosophically. It was Carlin who made sense of taking the thought less traveled -- possessing an intrinsic ability to detach and reform from weird angles -- then make it sing. He had what the bodhisattva might call The Third Eye. Carlin viewed life through a prism of individuality, and like all great artists, baring its results became the universal language.

By and large, language is a tool for concealing the truth.

Language and words were Saint George's tools, his play toys -- the penetrating microscope into the human condition. He massaged their beauty by deconstructing their gruesomeness, regurgitated their nuances, idiosyncrasies and then exposed their inaccuracies like a mad poet street troubadour bip-bopping megaphone. Language was his instrument and the words soared like notes from it.

You can prick your finger -- just don't finger your prick.

The truly magical times came when the words would possess him, contort his face and jangle his lips, his voice raising and dipping, his timbre guttural and hoarse, eyes bulging, teeth gritting maniacally until you could no longer breathe with laughter. He would blurt out "There is no blue food! Where is the blue food?" and you were gone. Only Carlin could use everyday musings as machine gun concussion to make you cackle until you could no longer draw air. He did it to me all the time, since I was eight years old.

I will never forget the first Carlin. It woke me up, bub. It gave me a sense that there was true grace in this world if you were willing to uncover the deeper regions. Knowing Carlin (Class Clown, Occupation Foole, Take Offs & Put-Ons, Toledo Window Box, AM/FM) meant survival was not having to be the strongest, coolest, most popular; only funny -- funny and witty and ready to bring the goods, funny as a defense, hypotheses, elixir. But you had to have the inflections down, and the timing. You had to hit the marks like the master, and only then were you cruising.

The very existence of flamethrowers proves that sometime, somewhere, someone said to themselves, "You know, I want to set those people over there on fire, but I'm just not close enough to get the job done."

Sharing Carlin meant friendships. If you knew Carlin, then you were in. If you saw him on Flip Wilson last night, stayed up for his Tonight Show appearance for the new rant then you could recite it the next day and be the hero. My good friend Ken Eustace called it "releasing crucial endorphins", extending your life, or extending the child in you who could see in all things humor. Another long time friend Chris Barrera said it best when he left an honorary voice message which concluded with "Man, did we laugh."

The sun did not come up this morning; huge cracks are appearing in the earth...details at eleven.

Before books or protest songs, before causes and ideologies there was Saint George around my house. We celebrated his absurdity because Carlin was the neighborhood kid. Born and bred on the corners of New York City. He went to my dad's high school, talked about the same lunatics and recounted all the same shit. He had the NYC madness in him; something the cursed can understand immediately when we hear it. It is a rhythm, a cadence, a parry and jab resolve, metaphysically unable to surrender. Fight on for no other reason but joy. It makes noise. It makes trouble. Most of all, it is damned funny.

The reason they call it the American Dream is because you have to be asleep to believe it.

I was watching an old Carlin thing a few days before he died. He was doing the riff on the Seven Dirty Words, the one that made him famous, the one that went all the way to the Supreme Court. And he was jamming like Coltrane or Monk or Charlie Parker. It was like jazz, I told my wife a few days later; a few days after that he was gone.

It got me thinking about what my friend, a damned killer satirist himself, Dan Bern wrote about my work in the preface of my last book, how I had this "bullshit meter". And I thought about how I was given the keys to it by Saint George all those years ago.

So I bid farewell to another of a dwindling circle of influences who've molded this voice into the lovable cynical, ball-breaking hack jockey he is today.

This country was founded on a very basic double standard: A bunch of slave owners who demanded to be free. So they killed a lot of white English people in order to keep owning their black African people so they can wipe out the rest of the red Indian people and move west and steal the rest of the land from the brown Mexican people, giving them a place to drop their weapons on the yellow Japanese people. You know what our motto should be? "You give us a color, we'll wipe it out."

Half a century will have to be enough.

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