TheMillerCircle.org

John Nichols, writer for The Nation and author of several important books on contemporary politics, wrote an excellent eulogy on George Carlin, whom he knew and with whom he maintained a dialog over the years. His article is well worth reading, because it crystallizes many of the seminal areas in which Carlin’s comments, through his comedic performances, made us laugh during their delivery, but wince when later thinking about their relevance. Carlin put up a mirror in front of us, forcing us to laugh and cry at our changing World. Carlin could succinctly summarize the Reagan administration, when he said (from Nichols’ article), at the Park Theater in Union City, New Jersey (recorded in 1988 and found in Carlin’s album "What Am I Doing in New Jersey"),

"I really haven’t seen this many people in one place since they took the group photograph of all the criminals and lawbreakers in the Ronald Reagan administration." I liked that one, because it was right on the mark and included, among many others, pointing a finger at the haughty Lt Colonel Oliver North who might well have received a hefty sentence as a convicted felon for the illegal Iran-Contra affair, and also for helping smuggle drugs into the US for an additional source of funds to support the Contras. According to North, he was supporting "Freedom Fighters" (this is the group of torturers who were trained by ex-Natzis, including Claus Barbi, who also murdered nuns and priests).

On the revival of the "war on terror" by GW Bush (Reagan was the first to mention a "war on terror," as a floater to see if he could come up with a new enemy should the Cold War end prematurely) and his insistence that he is supporting "Freedom Fighters," Carlin’s response to that assertion went like this (again from the Nichol’s article):

"Carlin echoed James Madison’s thinking with a simple question: "Well, if crime fighters fight crime and fire fighters fight fire, what do freedom fighters fight? They never mention that part to us, do they?""

The more you look at Carlin’s long history of political commentary, the more you realize that he didn’t miss much and was fearless in his ability to succinctly get at the real nature of our government and the continuous assault on our constitutional freedoms and our economic security. The right wing has always been obsessed with fighting communism and could always find them in places where most people didn’t care to look. Though Oliver North escaped imprisonment and a felony conviction (he was granted partial immunity to testify before congress, then his congressional testimony was foolishly used to convict him, so the ACLU assisted in getting his conviction thrown out), he failed in his bid for the US Senate in Virginia in 1994 (defeated by Charles Robb) and he is still banned from visiting Costa Rica for his apparent drug-running activity, some of which involved events in that country. North’s 2006 visit to Nicaragua to support Daniel Ortega’s opponent, Jose Rizo, may have been an appearance that helped elect Ortega, his sworn enemy, on the first ballot.

Carlin’s website has a fitting farewell description of how he wanted his remains to be handled. As Nichols put it "No one, not Obama, not Hillary Clinton and certainly not John McCain, caught the zeitgeist of the vanishing American dream so well as Carlin." I completely agree with Nichols when he said "In fact, George Carlin was, like the radicals of an earlier age, an idealist — and a patriot — of a deeper sort than is encountered very often these days." Carlin was the indispensable weather-vane of our fading culture. At least if our culture was going to disappear, Carlin made sure we would laugh about it. Whatever the future holds, for us, we have Carlin to thank for insisting that something important is going away and it will take great courage to get it back.
In one of Carlin’s last interviews, he said "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." George Carlin was indispensable and irreplaceable.