WE'RE ALL FUCKED

George Carlin died Sunday from his 4th heart-attack. In memorandum, today I'll be wearing all black while high on pain killers and booze. Happy fucking Monday. 50 years in the business, 35 years of marriage and a life of humanitarian pique - I respect Carlin for what and how he delivered.

So get your workweak started off right and read the following quote below from his interview with the Onion...

"I look at it this way... For centuries now, man has done everything he can to destroy, defile, and interfere with nature: clear-cutting forests, strip-mining mountains, poisoning the atmosphere, over-fishing the oceans, polluting the rivers and lakes, destroying wetlands and aquifers... so when nature strikes back, and smacks him on the head and kicks him in the nuts, I enjoy that. I have absolutely no sympathy for human beings whatsoever. None. And no matter what kind of problem humans are facing, whether it's natural or man-made, I always hope it gets worse."

There is a certain amount of righteous indignation I hold for this culture, because to get back to the real root of it, to get broader about it, my opinion that is my species—and my culture in America specifically—have let me down and betrayed me. I think this species had great, great promise, with this great upper brain that we have, and I think we squandered it on God and Mammon. And I think this culture of ours has such promise, with the promise of real, true freedom, and then everyone has been shackled by ownership and possessions and acquisition and status and power.

And perhaps it's just a human weakness and an inevitable human story that these things happen. But there's disillusionment and some discontent in me about it. I don't consider myself a cynic. I think of myself as a skeptic and a realist. But I understand the word "cynic" has more than one meaning, and I see how I could be seen as cynical. "George, you're cynical." Well, you know, they say if you scratch a cynic you find a disappointed idealist. And perhaps the flame still flickers a little, you know?

And so, there's a part of me that is angry. Not in the sense of, "Gee, George is an angry guy!" I mean, anyone who's been with me five minutes, five years, whatever, they would tell you they've rarely seen me in a moment of anger. Yes, I can become highly irritated in a line that's moving slowly, or with a clerk who's incompetent. But I don't yell. I don't get rude. I am clear about what I expect. In a store, my mother always told me, "Ask for the manager immediately. It changes the tone of the conversation." [Laughs.]

So I am not a difficult man by any stretch, and I'm saying that with a full and honest inventory going on. I'm not. And I'm not angry on stage. There is a heightening. There is an intensification of the feelings on stage in order to let them carry the room. There is a theatricality about it. The whole thing is oratory, so there's persuasion involved. There's the art of rhetoric involved. And so, with hyperbole and with the desire to really punch the thing home, some of it reads a little more angry.

Now, it's true that the direction of the material changed, at least in part. Because I had always featured language stuff that was fairly simple and innocent and honest and even sweet and childlike, and other things like, "Oh, did you ever notice between your toes, you have these things." I still did all that stuff. But I began to tap into that other part of me that would've been a great protest singer. I just began to let that part of me grow and live. It was a natural thing, and it just went from one level to another. And there's a lot of that social criticism in the shows now, because what I'm really trying to say to people is, "Don't you see what the fuck you're doing here? What you've done to yourselves? Can't you see what you're letting them do to you?" I mean, that's sort of the subtext. "Aren't you aware of what the fuck is going on, you folks?" That's kind of what I'm thinking in my heart.

WIKI | ONION INTERVIEW | OFFICIAL