George Carlin Won't Be Going to Heaven
Motivated by the recent death of George Carlin, I drifted over to YouTube to watch once again his celebrated “7 words you can’t say on television” routine. A tiny little memorial service just for one. Requiescat in pace, George.
It’s just as funny as it ever was. The observation of the ratio of seven words out of a whopping four hundred thousand, the mock “we’re going to get in trouble” whisper as he notes, “They must really be ba-ad…” The observation that “tits” doesn’t even belong in the same league as “motherfucker” and “cocksucker.” The thought police who fight to cleanse public speech of the seven naughty words portray it as an effort to protect our children, but I wonder. If the FCC can shut down media sources using these words, they could scour away the record of Dick Cheney telling the press to “go fuck yourself,” and John McCain calling his wife a cunt. Keep packing posts with party loyalists, and it’s just a matter of time before the rule is used only to protect those in power.
Which Carlin would have appreciated. His comedy had three major themes: vulgarity for its own sake, words as artifacts of culture, and bringing down the high and mighty and their instruments of control. And the last of these became ever more prominent in his routine as he aged. Carlin took his job as fool seriously. It was from Carlin, not the mainstream media, that I learned Ed Meese was the subject of three separate DoJ investigations on his appointment to attorney general, the nation’s leading law enforcement officer, and that the Reagan administration asserted the power to arrest American citizens if the police simply think you’re going to commit a crime. He nails the current political climate in his recent “You have no rights” routine. But he reserved special attention for religion, perhaps as the result of his Catholic grade school education—no place for a sharp and skeptical intellect. Although he would object to being enshrined as a powerful voice for atheism, he was.
When you watch a YouTube video, the page calls up links to a variety of related videos, a sort of “if you liked this, you’ll probably like…” service. Judging by these selections, it’s Carlin’s anti-authoritarian discourse which will survive. Nobody’s saving his undirected potty-mouth routines at all. His brilliant dissections of the word “stuff” and of the differences between baseball and football get listed, too, but in sheer number of recordings preserved on YouTube, they are swamped by screeds against censorship, neo-imperialist thought, and the sheer weirdness of our concept of God and its employment as a weapon of the far right.
It’s a good legacy to leave behind. The best weapon against tyranny has always been truth. The most effective vehicle for that kind of truth has always been ridicule. Carlin was a master of both.