Categorical Aperitif

So far, John Nichols has my favorite of the many online eulogies for George Carlin: "George Carlin, American Radical."

Not just aware of but steeped in the traditions of American populism -- more William Jennings Bryan and Eugene Victor Debs than Bill Clinton or John Kerry -- Carlin preached against the consolidation of wealth and power with a fire-and-brimstone rage that betrayed a deep moral sense that could never quite be cloaked with four-letter words.

"The real owners are the big wealthy business interests that control things and make all the important decisions. Forget the politicians, they're an irrelevancy. The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don't. You have no choice. You have owners. They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land. They own and control the corporations. They've long since bought and paid for the Senate, the Congress, the statehouses, the city halls. They've got the judges in their back pockets. And they own all the big media companies, so that they control just about all of the news and information you hear. They've got you by the balls. They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying -- lobbying to get what they want. Well, we know what they want; they want more for themselves and less for everybody else," ranted the comedian whose routines were studied in graduate schools.

"But I'll tell you what they don't want," Carlin continued. "They don't want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don't want well-informed, well-educated people capable of critical thinking. They're not interested in that. That doesn't help them. That's against their interests. They don't want people who are smart enough to sit around the kitchen table and figure out how badly they're getting fucked by a system that threw them overboard 30 fucking years ago. You know what they want? Obedient workers -- people who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork but just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shittier jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, reduced benefits, the end of overtime and the vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it. And, now, they're coming for your Social Security. They want your fucking retirement money. They want it back, so they can give it to their criminal friends on Wall Street. And you know something? They'll get it. They'll get it all, sooner or later, because they own this fucking place. It's a big club, and you ain't in it. You and I are not in the big club."

Carlin did not want Americans to get involved with the system.

He wanted citizens to get angry enough to remake the system.

Carlin was a leveler of the old, old school. And no one who had so public a platform -- as the first host of NBC's "Saturday Night Live," a regular on broadcast and cable televisions shows, a best-selling author and a favorite character actor in films (he was even the narrator of the American version of the children's show "Thomas the Tank Engine & Friends") -- did more to challenge accepted wisdom regarding our political economy.

I hope that in a box somewhere, I still have a cassette of Carlin that a friend gave me some two decades ago. Sometime back in the late '80s Carlin played a college show in Atlanta, and my friend, who was working the event, made a bootleg tape right off of the main audio feed. I'm not sure where that tape is, or even whether I still have it—but suddenly I have a desire to hear it again. Goodbye, George Carlin, and thank you many times over for the hard laughs and the hard thoughts. We'll miss you.

"The owners of this country know the truth: It's called the American dream because you have to be asleep to believe it."