George Carlin RIP

I first heard of George Carlin when I saw one of his specials on HBO when I was in 6th grade. I've never laughed harder. For all the people I never met who shaped my outlook on life, his influence easily carried the most weight. George Carlin loved words, and loved exposing the hypocrisy and pathos that lay beneath them in our culture and society. He probed their meaning, and skewered any and all attempts to soften, or lessen, the affects that real speech had on us.

He railed against phrases such as, "pre-boarding" ("to get on before you get on?"). He lamented as toilet paper became "bathroom tissue" and partly cloudy was now, "partly sunny." And, then seemingly much crasser, why handicapped people still weren't called "cripples." But, under that crassness there was truth behind his questions and tirades.

I was never more affected than his chronicle of the term "Shell-shock" to it's present-day form of "Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder." "Still eight syllables, folks...but we've added a hyphen!" He remarked that if we'd still been using "shell-shock" instead of watering the term down for our own psychological benefit, maybe those veterans would be receiving the treatment they actually deserved.

And of course, while he was most famous for his "7 Words You Can't Say On Television," but I also loved him for his outright silliness blended with his profanity - a juxtaposition of childlike and adult. This skit below, from that HBO Special I first saw, (Carlin on Campus, 1984), was my very first impression of him, and will stay with me forever:



Go well, George. Great work.

At Least He's Consistent

Back during the 2002 run up to the Iraq War, Christopher Hitchens penned an extraordinarily divisive piece in The Nation that ignited a firestorm of debate between conservatives and liberals. He announced he was firmly behind the Bush administration, could no longer count himself as a Liberal, at least as defined by his association with The Nation, and called his last piece for the publication.

I have a couple of very righteous, conservative right-wing, and "foward button" happy members of my family. One uncle in particular. The Hitchens firestorm was hilarious to him, as in his mind, it discredited everything people questioning the march to war were saying.

I will give Hitchens this: he was purely arguing, however, from a moral standpoint of "these people are maniacal religious fanatics who kill indiscriminantly so let's get them out of there" and I don't think he was really buying into the whole WMDs thing. Or at least he conveniently ignored it. Still a flawed argument of course, since:

1. There was no link to Saddam Hussein and ANY religious fanantics. In fact, he despised that kind of thinking and brutally suppressed any fanaticism. All you have to do is look at Iraq right now to see what's happened now that sectarianism has been allowed to flourish.
2. Did he really think the people who engineered this whole war actually care about people of Iraq since they were the one's who put Hussein in power in the first place?

Anyways, as much as I hate this Hitchen's opportunism and sycophantic cynicism, at least he's consistent with his new book. I don't have to time to rant and rave about religion - I could go on and ON about stem cell research and evolution and the oppression of women (and maybe when I have time tonight I will) but I will say this: Religion begins where science ends. And the recent efforts in the areas mentioned above to actually fucking roll back science are mind-boggling, and very, very sad.

Anyways, I've forwarded the interview and book info to the aforementioned uncle, and asked him if he's still on board with Hitchens reasons for supporting the war. Heh. No answer yet.

Now we know why Alec Baldwin was so good in Glengarry Glen Ross:

He wasn't acting.
http://www.aolcdn.com/tmz_audio/0419_baldwin.mp3

Although to be fair, this is nothing. My dad has yelled at me far worse for far lesser infractions. For example, when I was 12, I finished all the ice cream, except for maybe a spoonful, and left the carton in the freezer. My dad was on the way out of the house after dinner and wanted a little dessert before he left and couldn't have any.

He bounced the empty box off the top of my head.

I would've done the same thing. I totally deserved it.