Seven Dirty Words_ The Life and Crimes of George Carlin - James Sullivan [115]
Not only did he distrust liberals as much as conservatives—he wasn’t interested in third parties, either. The “fashionable” and “faintly dangerous”-sounding Libertarianism was, for him, “just one more bullshit political philosophy.” He sided only with H. L. Mencken, who declared, “I belong to no party: I am my own party.”
Carlin’s extensive history of expressing his distrust of religion made him an unofficial spokesman for nonbelievers. “When it comes to God’s existence,” he joked in When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops?, “I’m not an atheist and I’m not an agnostic. I’m an acrostic. The whole thing puzzles me.” Science, logic, and reason were his religion. Despite his disdain for New Age ideas, he told one magazine that he felt like a “star child.”
I read somewhere that every atom in us—because we’re all made mostly of heavier elements—came from the inside of a star. Had to be. Couldn’t come from any other place. So we’re all star children, and we’re all identical in that sense. We have identical atoms. And they’re just rearranged differently. You’re the same thing as a Coke machine down the hall in your office, and a cigarette butt in the Buffalo airport.
He sincerely tried to believe in God, Carlin said at the end of You Are All Diseased. But there were these nagging little clues to the contrary, such as “war, disease, death, destruction, hunger, filth, poverty, torture, crime, corruption and the Ice Capades. . . . If this is the best God can do,” he said, “I am not impressed.”
If God was the cause of so much catastrophe and cataclysm, he was happy for the spectacle. His working title for the next HBO special was I Kinda Like It When a Lot of People Die. For the cover of the compact disc, he began working with the San Francisco punk collage artist Winston Smith, who has done artwork for Playboy and the bands Green Day and Dead Kennedys. A man with an apocalyptic vision of American folly, who took his assumed name from the protagonist of Orwell’s 1984 and still wears a fedora, Smith is another example of Carlin’s kind of guy. When Carlin explained his idea for the cover art, Smith knew they were simpatico. Among the reams of images from old magazines he clips and saves for his work, “I’ve got volcanoes, earthquakes, you name it—I’ve got all kinds of disasters,” he says.
The HBO show date was set for November 2001, with the CD to come out a month later. Smith was fast approaching his deadline for the cover art when, on the morning of September 11, he got a call from Carlin. Both men were watching the live footage of the collapse of New York’s two World Trade Center towers. “He was hastily getting me to get our stories straight,” says Smith, who was not surprised when Carlin said he’d have to change the name of the show. (Carlin eventually settled on Complaints and Grievances.) “I thought, under the circumstances, that was probably a wise decision,” says Smith. “His reaction was, ‘Yeah, the record company—they got no balls.’”
For weeks after the 9/11 attacks, the country was paralyzed by a collective sense of disbelief, and humor seemed to many commentators like an unacceptable extravagance. Comedians fretted publicly about their role at a time when few felt like laughing. A teary David Letterman told his audience, “I don’t trust my judgment at a time like this.” When Bill Maher agreed with a guest’s contention that the Al Qaeda hijackers who flew the planes into the World Trade Center could not reasonably be called “cowards,” as President George W. Bush had suggested, the host of ABC’s Politically Incorrect was widely denounced. Declining advertising support soon led to the show’s cancellation.
A little over two months after