Seven Dirty Words_ The Life and Crimes of George Carlin - James Sullivan [77]
The question was similar to those posed by a mysterious linguist called Quang Phuc Dong, whose satirical paper, “English Sentences Without Overt Grammatical Subjects,” had been an underground source of amusement on college campuses for some time. The author’s affiliation—the South Hanoi Institute of Technology, or SHIT—gave the parody away. Unlike a simple grammatical construction such as “Close the door,” the author wrote, the phrase “Fuck you” cannot be considered an imperative statement. Saying “Fuck Lyndon Johnson,” he claimed, was an epithet, not necessarily “an admonition to copulate with Lyndon Johnson.” The writer was later revealed to be University of Chicago professor James D. McCawley, who was credited with establishing the fields of “pornolinguistics” and “scatolinguistics.” Carlin, despite his ninth-grade education, was carrying out the professor’s inquiry.
As part of the Lunchpail discussion, Gorman played Carlin’s just-released “Filthy Words” routine. He prefaced the broadcast with a warning to listeners that if they were likely to be offended, they might want to change the station and return at the end of the hour. Except for the Carlin routine, the Lunchpail discussion was not played for laughs. It was, Gorman recalled, about the power of words—“the moral consequence of words, and the fear we have of words, and the way words arise from the culture and the way the culture redefines itself through its use of words.”
Though its origins were benign, WBAI had developed a reputation for probing the issues of tolerance and provocation. A well-to-do New Yorker named Louis Schweitzer purchased the station in the mid-1950s as a pet project—he wanted to hear more classical music on the radio. The station began turning its first profit by the end of the decade, when it attracted new listeners seeking news and information during a newspaper strike. Schweitzer quickly grew discouraged by the amount of advertising required to make a commercial radio station profitable, and he decided to give it away. He contacted Harold Winkler, the president of the Pacifica Foundation, operator of the first listener-supported station in the country, Berkeley’s KPFA, and a sister station, KPFK, in Los Angeles. Assuring Winkler he wasn’t a crackpot, Schweitzer convinced Pacifica to take over the station.
WBAI began establishing its own identity when the radio novice Bob Fass urged the new owners to let him try out the after-hours show that became Radio Unnameable. “He played all kinds of records; he interviewed all kinds of people,” writes the author of a history of alternative radio. “He allowed musicians to jam, live, in the studio; he did news reports, took listener calls, and sometimes, his colleague Steve Post recalls, simply rambled, ‘free-associating from the innards of his complex mind.’ Fass also pioneered the art of sound collage: He was surely the first DJ, and perhaps the last, to play a Hitler speech with a Buddhist chant in the background.”
As the sixties progressed, WBAI became a well-known staging ground for liberal thinking in the New York area. The station’s Vietnam coverage was groundbreaking, as was its reporting on the civil rights movement. Paul Krassner, a regular participant whose voice was doubtless familiar to listeners of Fass and Post’s eccentric shows, once pretended to be a Columbia University student “liberating” Post’s time slot during the occupation of the university by students.
About a month after Gorman broadcast the Carlin routine, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) received a complaint from a Manhattan man named John H. Douglas. The correspondent alleged that he had been driving in his car with his son—some accounts claim the boy was twelve at the time, others, fifteen—when they heard Carlin’s “Filthy Words.