It struck me today that as we get older, everyone that we admired as kids will start dying off with increasing frequency. All of the authors, comedians, musicians, actors, directors, poets, teachers, friends– everyone. Bobby Fischer. Peter Jennings. Kurt Vonnegut. Arthur C. Clarke. And now George Carlin.
Growing up, I knew Carlin as just another brilliant comedian. I remember watching his “a place for your stuff” routine with my dad in, what, 1986? We laughed until we cried and still quote bits of that act to one another to this day. It wasn’t until much later when I heard his stuff on religion that he became truly influential to me. The last 10 minutes of his 1999 show “You Are All Diseased” are amazing.
Trillions and trillions of prayers every day asking and begging and pleading for favors. ‘Do this’ ‘Gimme that’ ‘I want a new car’ ‘I want a better job’. And most of this praying takes place on Sunday. And I say fine, pray for anything you want. Pray for anything. But…what about the divine plan? Remember that? The divine plan. Long time ago god made a divine plan. Gave it a lot of thought. Decided it was a good plan. Put it into practice. And for billion and billions of years the divine plan has been doing just fine. Now you come along and pray for something. Well, suppose the thing you want isn’t in god’s divine plan. What do you want him to do? Change his plan? Just for you? Doesn’t it seem a little arrogant? It’s a divine plan. What’s the use of being god if every run-down schmuck with a two dollar prayer book can come along and fuck up your plan? And here’s something else, another problem you might have; suppose your prayers aren’t answered. What do you say? ‘Well it’s god’s will. God’s will be done.’ Fine, but if it gods will and he’s going to do whatever he wants to anyway; why the fuck bother praying in the first place? Seems like a big waste of time to me. Couldn’t you just skip the praying part and get right to his will? –George Carlin, from You Are All Diseased
But it wasn’t just his stuff on religion that blew me away. The rant below is from his next to last HBO special, back when there was much talk about the privatization of social security.
Who Owns You by George Carlin
There is a reason education sucks and its the same reason that it will never, ever, ever be fixed. It’s never going to get any better, don’t look for it, be happy with what you got. Because the owners of this country don’t want that. I’m talking about the real owners now. The big, wealthy business interests that control things and make all the important decisions.
Forget the politicians, they are irrelevant. The politicians are put there to give you the idea that 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 have long since bought and paid for the senate, congress, the state houses, the city halls. They’ve got the judges in their back pockets and they own all the big media companies. They control just about all of the information you get to hear. They’ve got you by the balls.
They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying to get what they want. Well we know what they want. They want more for themselves and less for everybody else. 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 is against their interests. They don’t want people who are smart enough to sit around the kitchen table and figure out how badly they’re getting fucked by a system who threw them overboard thirty fucking years ago. They don’t want that.
You know what they want? 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 shitter jobs, the lower pay, the longer hours, the reduced benefits, the end of overtime, and the vanishing pensions that dissapears the minute you go to collect it. And now they’re coming for your Social Security money. They want your fucking retirement money. They want it back so they can give it to their criminal friends on Wall Street.
And you know something? They’ll get it. They’ll get it all from you sooner or later because they own this fucking place. It’s a big club and you ain’t in it. You and I are not in the big club. By the way, it’s the same big club they use to beat you over the head all day long when they tell you what to believe. All day long beating you over the head in the media, telling you what to think, what to buy.
The table is tilted, folks. The game is rigged. But nobody seems to notice. Nobody seems to care. Good, honest, hard-working people; blue collar, white collar, doesn’t matter what color shirt you have on, people of modest means continue to elect these rich cocksuckers who don’t give a fuck about them. They don’t give a fuck about you. They don’t care about you. At all.
But nobody seems to notice. Nobody seems to care. And that’s what the owners count on. The fact that Americans will remain willfully ignorant of the big red white and blue dick that is being jammed up their assholes every day.
Because the owners of this country know the truth. It’s called the American Dream because you have to be asleep to believe it.
Just 4 days ago it was announced that Carlin will be awarded the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor. The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts said he would be honored for his 50-year career as a Grammy-winning stand-up comedian, writer, and actor.
He was a genius and a legend.
