George Carlin: American Radical
posted by John Nichols on 06/23/2008 @ 10:29am
Carlin did not want Americans to get involved with the system.
He wanted citizens to get angry enough to remake the system. Carlin was a leveler of the old, old school. And no one who had so public a platform – as the first host of NBC's "Saturday Night Live," a regular on broadcast and cable televisions shows, a best-selling author and a favorite character actor in films (he was even the narrator of the American version of he provided the narrative voice for the American version of the children's show "Thomas the Tank Engine & Friends") – did more to challenge accepted wisdom regarding our political economy.
"Let's suppose we all just materialized on Earth and there was a bunch of potatoes on the ground, okay? There's just six of us. Only six humans. We come into a clearing and there's potatoes on the ground. Now, my instinct would be, let's everybody get some potatoes. "Everybody got a potato? Joey didn't get a potato! He's small, he can't hold as many potatoes. Give Joey some of your potatoes." "No, these are my potatoes!" That's the Republicans. "I collected more of them, I got a bigger pile of potatoes, they're mine. If you want some of them, you're going to have to give me something." "But look at Joey, he's only got a couple, they won't last two days." That's the fuckin' difference! And I'm more inclined to want to share and even out," he explained in an interview several years ago with the Onion.
...............
There will, of course, be those who dismiss Carlin as a remnant of the sixties who introduced obscenity to the public discourse – just as there will be those who misread his critique of the American political and economic systems as little more than verbal nihilism. In fact,
George Carlin was, like the radicals of an earlier age, an idealist – and a patriot --of a deeper sort than is encountered very often these days. Carlin explained himself best in one of his last interviews. "There is a certain amount of righteous indignation I hold for this culture, because to get back to the real root of it, to get broader about it, my opinion that is my species--and my culture in America specifically--have let me down and betrayed me. I think this species had great, great promise, with this great upper brain that we have, and I think we squandered it on God and Mammon. And I think this culture of ours has such promise, with the promise of real, true freedom, and then everyone has been shackled by ownership and possessions and acquisition and status and power," he said. "And perhaps it's just a human weakness and an inevitable human story that these things happen. But there's disillusionment and some discontent in me about it. I don't consider myself a cynic. I think of myself as a skeptic and a realist. But I understand the word 'cynic' has more than one meaning, and I see how I could be seen as cynical. 'George, you're cynical.' Well, you know, they say if you scratch a cynic you find a disappointed idealist. And perhaps the flame still flickers a little, you know?"
more at:
http://www.thenation.com/blogs/thebeat/331953
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