Georgie, we hardly knew ye.
Yes, you were a prophet, our long-haired bard, our poet with an out-fucking-standing command of the English language. A rare bird.
The Times is calling him "irreverent," today, in their obit headline, which is patronizing. If we're going to call him a "rev" anything, it would be a revolutionary.
Carlin, born in 1937, was prescient. What he said forty years ago about the War Machine, the crucifixion of the First Amendment, the abuses of the Church, industrial pollution, the corporate indifference to... well, everything— his speeches could have been written yesterday.
His most radical satire, his decision to take off the suit, grow out his beard, and damn the establishment torpedoes, was his enduring contribution to American democracy.
I've been looking at a lot of my "Carlin Archives" this morning, grieving him, and thinking how influential he's been on my thinking since I first heard him, when I was in 7th grade.
I remember playing "Class Clown" for my mother— a woman whose first twenty years were entirely dominated by the Irish Catholic Church— and it was a comic exorcism for her. She peed in her pants! She was cured in one LP!
Carlin had a real gift for telling the story of his life, and in later years, I enjoyed listening to his reminiscences at the Actors' Studio.
Last year, he ripped at a gigantic Narcotics Anonymous meeting, where he described turning seventy-years-old as "69, with one finger up your ass." He eloquently described the virtues of being an "old fuck," and what it's like to go through your address book, "crossing out the dead people."
This November, he was due to accept the Kennedy Center's Mark Twain Prize for Humor, which truly puts him next to his peer— someone who could bullseye hypocrisy when he saw it, and leave us in hysterics at our own death wish.
Carlin would say, "Just because you got the monkey off your back doesn't mean the circus has left town."
And Twain might've replied with his own: "Don't go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first."
Photo Credit: L.A. Times. Carlin was arrested on July 21, 1972, at Milwaukee's Summerfest and charged with violating obscenity laws, after performing "Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television."
