Seven Dirty Words_ The Life and Crimes of George Carlin - James Sullivan [114]
“Our Last Best Angry Man Takes on God, Children, and Testosterone,” read the sticker on the CD version of Carlin’s next HBO special, the charmingly titled You Are All Diseased. He had looked around and decided that children were the last sacred topic in America, and he directed his attention accordingly. Kids are overprotected, overscheduled, and overrated, he fulminated, when they’re really just like other people—“a few winners, a whole lotta losers.” He quickly dispensed with any potential criticism: “I know what you’re thinking—you say, ‘Jesus, he’s not gonna attack children, is he?’ Yes, he is. And remember, this is Mr. Conductor talking. I know what I’m talking about.”
One segment of the “Kids and Parents” bit featured Carlin’s rant about school shootings and the grief counseling that follows. Two months after You Are All Diseased had its HBO premier, two students at Columbine High School in suburban Colorado went on a shooting spree, killing thirteen and injuring twenty-one before committing suicide, in the deadliest such incident in an American high school.
E-mail in-boxes were soon filled with forwarded messages attributed to Carlin (or, alternately, to a Columbine student who witnessed the attack). On first glance, “The Paradox of Our Time” read like it could have been Carlin, with its rhythmic reliance on juxtapositions: “We have taller buildings, but shorter tempers; wider freeways, but narrower viewpoints. . . . We’ve added years to life, not life to years.” But Carlin had nothing to do with it. The homily was eventually revealed to have been written by a Christian pastor from Seattle named Dr. Bob Moorehead, who was subsequently dismissed from his post in the wake of sexual assault allegations. Carlin, who had concluded his latest performance with a long diatribe about the awesome bullshit propagated by organized religion, was vehement in denying his connection to the Internet chain letters, which spread exponentially. For one thing, he pointed out in a post on his Web site, he was emotionally divorced from the future of mankind. Besides, he wrote, “It’s not only bad prose and poetry, it’s weak philosophy.”
For some time Carlin’s name remained an Internet sensation, with anonymous e-mailers attributing various jokes and lists to him. One hoax involved an inane manifesto from “a BAD American . . . George Carlin.” Misleading information about Carlin on the Internet was understandable for one very good reason: He had earned a reputation, and not just among devoted fans, for profundity. Even in his thirties and forties, he had been comedy’s wise man. Now, officially entering his senior years, his white hair and beard made him seem that much more a comic philosopher. “Life is a festival only to the wise,” wrote Emerson. Carlin saw his country as a never-ending festival for his own amusement. When you’re born, you get a ticket to the freak show, he said. “If you’re born in America, you get a front-row seat. And some of us get to write about it and talk about it.”
Carlin “had an instinctive knowledge of how persuasion, propaganda, and influence work, from all directions, by all parties,” says Jello Biafra, former frontman for the punk-rock group Dead Kennedys. The comedian’s punk attitude—his insistence on telling his audience the truth as he saw it, regardless of its popularity—was ahead of its time, says Biafra, who was a candidate for the Green Party’s presidential nomination in 2000 and has since campaigned vigorously on behalf of Ralph Nader.
Though Carlin was occasionally asked whether he would ever consider a third-party candidacy, his response was always the same. He had no faith in the voting process. He hadn’t voted in a presidential election