Tuesday, September 13, 2016

“The artificial weeping in this country... is embarrassing and unnecessary, and it just shows how emotionally immature the American people are.”

Carlin, from beyond the grave, still speaks wise.  Fifteen years after 9/11, we can hear the only bit George Carlin ever cut for taste - The Washington Post: "I spoke to Carlin only once, in 1999, and pressed him on a school shooting bit, which he did the night of the Columbine High School massacre in Littleton, Colo. “How can you still do that joke?” I asked. “Boy, you need that joke more than ever now,” he said. “The artificial weeping in this country, this nationwide mourning for dead people is just embarrassing, and these ribbons and these teddy bears and these little places where they put notes to dead people and all this s---. This is embarrassing and unnecessary, and it just shows how immature, how emotionally immature the American people as a class are.”"

 "Toward the end of the album, Carlin implicates the audience more clearly in his death obsession. “I know some people think these kind of thoughts are ghoulish and demented and sick, but I know they’re not,” he says. “I know these things are normal and quite common. . . . Society has told you that nice people don’t take pleasure in mass death. But you’re wrong, because I think mass death is terrific, and I’m a really nice fucking guy.” Speaking in a menacing, devilish growl, Carlin gives voice to a dark part of us that eagerly, and at times almost giddily, consumes the wall-to-wall media coverage that certain kinds of mass-death events generate. “The only thing I care about is fun. That’s all. Entertainment,” he says. He explains the excitement he feels when watching fatal disasters as a visceral, animal response. The appeal he is making to members of the crowd, as he is getting them to laugh, is to consider this almost reflexive fascination, and to deny even a germ of it in themselves."


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