It's disappointing. As I said before, George Carlin
wrote a great piece about what we could expect when Bob Hope died: an excess of fanfare. When Hope actually died a few years later it didn't get as much ceremony as George had predicted because the Bob Hope generation had largely passed on already, so hours of TV coverage probably wasn't considered commercially viable.
George Carlin's fans spanned several generations, though, and the majority of them are still alive and kicking. So why is it the media, who celebrated a non-influential figure like John Ritter for weeks (I liked "Three's Company" but he got more coverage than the Kennedy assassination), only gave the man who single-handedly shifted public discourse in this country a quick footnote at the end of the evening news, then hurriedly kicked the last scoop of dirt on his grave?
I don't know, but I'll pause to think about George Carlin often for the rest of my life. In the same way Tim Russert's example made me want to be a better person (if that's possible), I can only dream of articulating timeless truths with the panache Carlin did.
So if you'll indulge me, let me round out this week by quoting another great George Carlin routine I discovered only this week. This is called
The Owners of This Country:
"The politicians are irrelevant. The politicians are put there to give you the idea you have freedom of choice. You don’t. You have no choice. You have owners. They
own you. They own everything. They own all the important land. They own and control the corporations. They’ve long since bought and paid for the senate, the congress, the state houses, the city halls. They've got the judges in their back pockets, and they own all the big media, so they control just about all the information you get. They've got you by the balls. They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying, lobbying to get what they want. Well, we know what they want.
"They want more for themselves, and less for everybody else. But I’ll tell you what they don’t want: they don’t want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don’t want well-informed, well-educated people capable of critical thinking. They’re not interested in that, that doesn’t help them. That’s against their interests. They don’t want people that are smart enough to sit around a kitchen table and think about how badly they’re getting screwed by a system that threw them overboard 30-fucking-years ago. They don’t want that.
"You know what they want? Obedient workers. Obedient workers: people who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork, and just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly-shittier jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, the reduced benefits, the end of overtime, and vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it. And now they’re coming for your social security money. They want it back so they can give it to their criminal friends on Wall Street. And they'll get it, because they own this fuckin' place. It's a club, and you ain't in it, and I ain't in it...
"...Good, honest, hard-working people -- white collar, blue collar it doesn’t matter what color shirt you have on -- good honest hard-working people continue, people of modest means, continue to elect these rich cocksuckers who don’t give a fuck about you. They don’t give a fuck about you.
They don’t give a fuck about you. They don’t care about you at all...at all...at all. And nobody seems to notice. Nobody seems to care.
"That’s what the owners count on."
Thanks for the tip, George. So what do we do next? George?
If you're beefing up your Carlin collection, I highly recommend "Parental Advisory: Explicit Lyrics" (1990) George really turned a corner on this album. It is wicked.
All three books are excellent.
I had no idea that when I turned my Carlin calendar at work before I left last week that he'd be gone before I got back. A true American icon silenced.
Someone posted a link to the video of that "Owners of This Country" thing on DemocraticUnderground.com. We can't get YouTube at work, so I looked up the text, and it blew me away. So I posted the text so you could encounter it as I had.
Then I put the video link below just as evidence George really said it. On his site he said several essays were circulating on the Internet with his name on them that he didn't write: "Paradox of Our Time," "I'm a Bad American" and "Sittin' on My Butt in New Orleans." In the case of the New Orleans one he said he couldn't figure out why someone had attributed it to him unless they wanted to give him a bad name. Beware of fakes!
Being "owned" only started occuring to me in the past eight years, too. My dad has said something similar to that all my life, but around 2000 I started believing it. We're ants in a colony organized by somebody.
But as we're playing clean up here, I'll give you more than one reason to hope that you don't turn out as corrupt as 'ol Timmeh was in the end:
"How the Russert Test Failed America"
Comment
By Linda Hirshman, The Nation
June 19, 2008
[http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080707/hirshman/print]
"The Russert Test was a disaster because it rewarded people willing to lie unabashedly on TV. They lied because they could not truthfully defend their positions. But Russert's famed "gotcha" research couldn't catch them. Much has been said this eulogizing week about Russert's hard-working ways assembling the material in advance of the show. Old metal. When someone told a new lie on Meet the Press, such as when Dick Cheney flat-out denied he had ever said that intelligence confirmed the Al Qaeda/Iraq link, Meet the Press had no procedure for producing the contrary evidence. This would hardly have been difficult, given Google, an earpiece and a producer to do instant research. As it happened, NBC had the rebuttal to Cheney's lies in its own archives, but it remained for The Daily Show to do the research.
Since MTP was always looking back, the Bush Administration had a big advantage. Their new lies to Meet The Press were halfway round the world while The Daily Show was putting its boots on.
Russert's sunny manner also concealed that he was anything but a neutral journalist, advancing, somewhat covertly, the conservative trifecta: War on terror, war on women's reproductive rights, and war on Social Security."
Read about Humble & Hardworking Timmeh here too: [http://dailyhowler.com/] Just enter in Russert into the search box, and you'll be occupied for Hours. Literally. The stench of 'official Washington corruption' only Starts with the politico's, it also extends to their whores & courtiers in the press. And we've got the documents and cites to prove it too. Cheers, 'VJ'