Quote:
Originally Posted by Hank Chinaski
Sebby I’m watching a Carlin bio. Very good.
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Yup. It's excellent. Apatow did a really good, evenhanded job with it.
I miss him. He was basically like a north star for me as a kid. My folks would be away and we had HBO as soon as it came out. I remember feeling like I was being bullshitted by almost every institution around me. This started, of course, with religion. It was impossible to hear that shit, even as a small kid, and not conclude (Carlin voice), "That's fucking nonsense! The fucking plot doesn't make sense even as fiction!"
But one could never utter that. The devout were all around. I could and did say it to my parents, who'd shrug and remind me that social propriety dictated keeping that sort of opinion quiet. "Be on the team." Of course. Dad got money from the devout. They liked to see the people they worked with in the pews on Sunday.
The assessment most authority is half full of shit, to be generous, only deepened as I got older. The more I looked, the more I understood, Religion is the Grand Exalted Emperor of Bullshit. But it has a very large Court, including almost every institution one is told deserves respect first, scrutiny second.
Carlin stood for the proposition that authority is inherently suspect and probably, inevitably, to some extent, corrupt and interested most in self-preservation. It deserves respect only after proving, despite all those flaws and built in conflicts of interest, it is somehow managing to do the right thing. (And if it didn't have the monopoly on coercive violence [jailing, fining, etc.] it probably wouldn't receive much of any
de facto respect at all.)
The notion one should rotate every issue from every angle and examine it fully without bias, and put to scrutiny the aims of every "movement" or institution that seeks power is sadly missing from the debates these days. Instead of smart scrutiny, we've conspiracy theorists, eager to "believe" contra positions rather than carefully assess anything.
Carlin was called a nihilist, or a pissed off idealist. Both miss an essentially positive message in the background. This, from an interview with John Stewart in 1997, best encapsulates it:
"People are wonderful. I love individuals. I hate groups of people. I hate a group of people with a 'common purpose'. 'Cause pretty soon they have little hats. And armbands. And fight songs. And a list of people they're going to visit at 3am. So, I dislike and despise groups of people but I love individuals. Every person you look at; you can see the universe in their eyes, if you're really looking."
That's true. It covers about 75% of my world view. And that last phrase is the thing makes life terrifically interesting.
