George Carlin: The legendary comedian was right even when he was wrong

Revisiting George Carlin’s prophetic 1992 performance at Madison Square Garden immortalized on HBO. From the philosophical to the profane, Mr. Carlin peered decades into the future…  

“You know my favorite part of that war?”  The legendary comedian George Carlin remarked in one of his many HBO Specials.  “It’s the first war we ever had that was on every channel, plus cable.”  The year was 1992 and his comments were concerning the first war in Iraq, but the words ring truer than ever more than 30 years later.  “And the war got good ratings too, didn’t it?”  He continued.  “Well, we like war!  We like war!  We’re a war-like people.”  At the time, I don’t think many realized how prescient Mr. Carlin would prove to be.  The audience at Madison Square Garden laughed with perhaps a little more nervousness than usual.  America had not been involved in a major conflict since Vietnam, which ended close to 20 years earlier.  The first War in the Persian Gulf was widely seen as a righteous action against the tyrant Saddam Hussein, and the rapid achievement of our military goals made it broadly popular with the American people.  Little did anyone know that the United States would be embroiled in Afghanistan in less than ten years, then back in Iraq for a much more disastrous second act in eleven, only to be stuck in both for almost two decades.  This was all before the conflict in Ukraine, though not before sideshows in Libya (leading from behind) and Syria (targeting ISIS, which spawned primarily in Iraq).  Putting this another way, our modern era of endless war had not yet begun.  I was only sixteen at the time and had been unable to truly appreciate Mr. Carlin’s insight.  He wasn’t done yet, either.  “We like war because we’re good at it…And it’s a good thing we are, we’re not very good at anything else anymore!  Can’t build a decent car, can’t make a TV set or a VCR worth a fuck.  Got no steel industry left, can’t educate our young people, can’t get healthcare to our old people, but we can bomb the shit out of your country all right!”

Comedian’s don’t often include such scathing commentary in just a few lines, much less a few lines that could be delivered just as easily thirty years later and likely get even more of a laugh if only out of desperation.  American manufacturing, particularly for electronics and cars and raw materials like steel, remains far from the envy of the world despite a supposed political focus on it for the past four Presidents and numerous bills including the recent CHIPs Act, which was supposed to bring back microchip production by effectively paying off some of the most profitable companies in the world.  The  poor performance of our educational system and healthcare has also been fodder for politicians since at least Jimmy Carter, if not earlier.  Fodder for politicians who pass laws claiming to solve the problem, but somehow never do, always eager to come back for more.  In retrospect, some might argue that we are not very good at war after suffering an ignominious defeat in Afghanistan and achieving almost none of our goals in Iraq, but pay closer attention to Mr. Carlin’s choice of words.  “We can bomb the shit out of your country alright.”  He was referring to our ability to destroy targets, not actually win, much less rebuild countries.  He repeats the phrase complete with a bomb sound effect, and then goes even further into territory more suited to the modern era.  “We can bomb the shit of your country all right, especially if your country is full of brown people!”  Is there a better line that typifies the current state of our discourse?  Phrases such as “brown” people and “people of color” are all the rage today, but they were not in widespread usage before intersectionality went mainstream.  “Oh we like that, don’t we?” He continued, painting with a colonial brush decades ahead of its time.  “That’s our hobby.  That’s our new job in the world:  Bombing brown people.  Iraq, Panama, Grenada, Libya, you got some brown people in your country, tell them to watch the fuck out or we’ll goddamn bomb them…just because they’re brown.”

This too was greeted with nervous laughter, but then Mr. Carlin turned the attention on himself, and his reasoning for these beliefs, leading to another monologue that should be required listening in today’s disinformation age.  He started by noting that the audience is probably aware he doesn’t feel the same way about the war as the government would like him to.  “Now, you probably noticed I don’t feel about that war the way we were told we were supposed to feel about that war, the way we were ordered and instructed by the United States government to feel about that war.  You see, I’ll tell ya’, my mind doesn’t work that way.  I got this real moron thing I do, it’s called ‘thinking’ and I’m not a very good American because I like to form my own opinions.  I don’t just roll over when I’m told to.  Sad to say, most Americans just roll over on command, not me.  I have certain rules I live by.  My first rule:  I don’t believe anything the government tells me.  Nothing, zero, no.  And I don’t take very seriously the media or the press in this country, who in the case of the Persian Gulf War were nothing more than unpaid employees of the Department of Defense, and who most of the time, most of the time, functioned as a kind of unofficial public relations agency for the United States government.”  If that sounds eerily familiar to the tragic situations that would unfold in Afghanistan, Iraq again, and now in the Ukraine, as well as throughout the pandemic, it certainly should.

The media was far from trustworthy in 1992, but have since devolved even further when institutions such as The New York Times regularly serve as publisher’s of government propaganda, writing supposed reports based entirely on anonymous sources that clearly have an agenda.  As Glenn Greenwald has pointed out many times, the media employs a battery of ex-intelligence service employees whose sole skill is lying and propaganda.  Turn on CNN, and chances are they will have a former spy on as a commentator to explain the news to you.  Ironically, the politics underlying this monologue have shifted.  Thirty years ago, liberals would be far more likely to cheer such commentary while conservatives bemoaned the lack of patriotism.  The two sides have almost completely reversed in the intervening decades, and today progressives regularly cheer for more censorship and limitations on speech, arguing that too much speech is simply too dangerous.  Just last week, they were bemoaning a judge who blocked the Biden Administration from colluding with social media companies to police content, claiming “public health” requires the government to have essential veto power over what the average person can post online.  The establishment meanwhile continues to have an endless appetite for war.  Also last week, it was announced that we are sending cluster bombs to Ukraine – a weapon so heinous and deadly we stopped using them ourselves in 2006 and President Biden’s previous press secretary, Jen Psaki, called their use a war crime.  What cluster bombs are going to do when missile systems, tanks, and even jets have failed to turn the tide in Ukrainian favor is left completely unsaid, and no one in the media appears interested in asking, so long as the money gets spent.

One of Mr. Carlin’s gifts was an ability to veer from the borderline philosophical, wielding the wit of a great satirist like Kurt Vonnegut, to the everyday, crass, and even vulgar.  After lambasting the war, America, the media, and foreign policy in general as being driven by who has a bigger dick, he was onto what he considered the things that bind us together, but even here we see an incisive mind at work.  He begins this segment by noting that politicians and the media spend an inordinate amount of time focused on our differences.  “That’s all you ever hear about in this country, is our differences.  That’s all the media and the politicians are ever talking about.  The things that separate us, things that make us different from one another.  That’s the way the ruling class operates in any society.  They try to divide the rest of the people, they keep the lower and the middle classes fighting with each other so that they, the rich can run off with all the fucking money.  Fairly simple thing…happens to work.  You know, anything different, that’s what they’re gonna talk about:  Race, religion, ethnic and national background, jobs, income, education, social status, sexuality, anything they can do to keep us fighting with each other so that they can keep going to the bank.”  Once again, if that sounds familiar, it certainly should.  The past thirty years have only seen an acceleration of this principle, sadly, and today every single issue is seen through the prism of what divides us to the point where roads are deemed racist.  Sexuality looms larger than ever as well, despite broad public acceptance of gay marriage and alternative lifestyles.  You are still transphobic, however, if you have the temerity to suggest that women shouldn’t box men, or a male professional tennis player would best Serena Williams.  If Mr. Carlin rose from his grave tomorrow, it’s unclear to me whether he would be pleased at his farsightedness or horrified.  On stage at least, he delighted in chaos and claimed he was looking forward to the collapse of our civilization and the extinction of the human race.

In fact, Mr. Carlin used something as simple as the quality of the local tap water as an entry point to discuss our looming destruction long before the revelations of the Flint Water Crisis and the realization that the Environmental Protection Agency can’t be trusted for something as simple as monitoring the water supply.  “Everywhere I go, I say, ‘How’s the water?’ Haven’t gotten a positive answer yet, not one.  Last year, I was in 40 states, 100 cities.  Not one audience was able to say to me, ‘Yes, enjoy some of our fine local water!  It is pure and it is good.’  Of course, I know a lot of people don’t talk that way anymore, but no one trusts the local water supply.  Nobody, and that amuses me, I like that.  I admit I am a bit perverted but it amuses me that no one can really trust the water anymore and the thing I like about it the most is it means the system is beginning to collapse and everything is slowly breaking down.”  The coming collapse of the system was something of an obsession with Mr. Carlin throughout the remainder of his life.  It’s unclear if this was simply part of his act or if he truly believed the end was neigh, but after 1992, he steadily grew even darker, believing humanity’s days were numbered and that we deserved it.  Fifteen years removed from his death, these segments have not aged nearly as well, though they certainly reflect the increasingly shrill tenor of the environmental movement and we might even call him prescient in that regard.  These days it seems not a day can go by without some claim that our days are numbered.  Last week, the idea that the earth experienced the hottest day ever was broadcast far and wide with little or not attention paid to the evidence.  In fact, there is a so-called “Climate Clock” that tracks the time left to save the planet by the second.  As of this writing, the deadline is 6 years, 12 days, 1 hour, 51 minutes, and 15 seconds.  This follows a profusion of such claims over the past two to three decades, meaning the cultural elite at least have adopted Mr. Carlin’s position, whether real or feigned, that we are on the verge of a societal collapse if not an all out extinction event.

Interestingly, Mr. Carlin himself rejected some of these claims in 1992.  “We’re so self-important, so self-important, everybody’s gonna save something now.  ‘Save the trees!  Save the bees!  Save the whales!  Save those snails!’  And the great arrogance of all:  ‘Save the planet!’  What are these fucking people kidding me?  Save the planet?  We don’t even know how to take care of ourselves yet.  We haven’t learned how to care for one another!  We’re gonna save the fucking planet?”  Here, Mr. Carlin demonstrated his willingness to highlight perceived insanity, arrogance, and hypocrisy on both sides of the political divide.  Generally speaking, he did not have much faith in religion and regularly skewered the far right, but neither did he have much interest in what would essentially become secular religions in the years to come.  “I’m tired of these self-righteous environmentalists, these white, bourgeois liberals who think the only thing wrong with this country is there aren’t enough bicycle paths.  People are trying to make the world safe for their Volvos!”  In Mr. Carlin’s view, people were the problem, not the solution.  “There’s nothing wrong with the planet, nothing wrong with the planet.  The planet is fine.  The people are fucked!” He declared with no small amount of delight.   Whether real or feigned, he delighted in chaos until the end, and once again managed to highlight the increasingly voyeuristic aspects of our society.  Before the internet and streaming video, before smartphones with fancy cameras, he was talking about how much he liked to watch disasters unfold on TV.  “I enjoy chaos and disorder not just because they help me professionally, no…they’re also my hobby…the whole social structure, just beginning to collapse, you watch, just beginning now to come apart at the edges and the seams, and the thing I like about that is that it makes the news on television more interesting, makes the television news more exciting, makes it more fun.  I watch television news for one thing and one thing only:  Entertainment!  That’s all I want from the news:  Entertainment.  You know my favorite thing on television:  Bad news!”  These days, bad news is all you get for better or worse, and it’s a good thing most of us seem to enjoy it like George Carlin.