George Carlin's Gift To Apocalypse
By Carolyn Baker
26 June,
2008
Carolynbaker.net
This morning as I began gathering
Truth To Power's Daily News Stories, I opened Energy Bulletin's site
and found a stunning article by Kathy McMahon "26
Things You Can Do Right Now To Manage Your Anxiety." Although
she doesn't directly talk about humor, numbers 20 and 21 in the article
which refer to protecting one's mental health and cultivating healthy
pleasures certainly include it.
References on the internet to George Carlin since his death earlier
this week are ubiquitous. All the photos and video clips have taken
me back to the early seventies when I first discovered him as "the
hippie-dippie mailman with your hippie-dippie mail--Man." More
recently he gave us priceless routines such as "The
American Dream" and "7
Words You Can't Say On Television". Like all skillful
court jesters, George made us take a second look at the insanity of
our world and our government, put it in perspective, and see it for
what it is-unequivocally absurd. Of course, that does not erase the
lethality and horror of it, but it offers another way of looking at
and living with it. Humor has always empowered the victims of oppression,
even as they know that it cannot make it go away. Not a few holocaust
concentration camp inmates were able to maintain some sense of humor,
however faint, amid the horrors of their daily lives. Sanity and human
dignity are always augmented when brutalized people are able to laugh
at their torturers.
It is impossible to listen to Carlin routines without sensing the
rage behind the humor. In fact, humor and anger are inextricably connected,
and in some situations, the only means of expressing anger is through
humor. One may not be able to obliterate one's oppressor, but one
can laugh at him, find him absurd or stupid and thereby exonerate
one's resistance to political and cultural tyranny. Moreover, in many
instances, the comedian, more than the writer, activist, or visual
artist, is able to facilitate cultural awakening through incisive
humor.
Over the course of three decades, George placed American capitalist,
consumeristic, imperialist culture under the microscope of humor and
dismembered its façade. We thought we had it bad during those
years, but little did we know what the twenty-first century would
bring us. Or maybe we did-maybe somewhere inside of us we knew what
the culture wouldn't let us know: that voracious consumption, endless
warmongering, and American entitlement would only consign us to the
fate of all the empires that existed before ours. Maybe George knew
that better than we did. As with so many funny men and women, maybe
his heart was breaking, and maybe it could no longer endure. I'm only
speculating here; I'm neither a psychic nor a medical intuitive.
What I do know is that while apocalypse will not allow us to laugh our way through it, we need all the humor we can get and create as we navigate the increasingly daunting days ahead. I now live in the Northeastern U.S. as opposed to the Southwest where I spent the last decade. I'm well aware that a lot of people are going to die here this winter because they will not be able to afford home heating or electricity. As I said, I'm not psychic, nor does one need to be. It only takes two or three brain cells to rub together to make sense of the brutal and very "cold", if you will, reality of Northeastern winters without heat. There's nothing inherently funny about that at all, but George with his anger/humor would have probably created an entire stand up routine around it had he remained with us.
So an Associated Press story from June 22 asks "Is
Everything Spinning Out Of Control?" with a sub
headline: the can-do, bootstrap approach embedded in the American
psyche is under assault. I for one am thrilled to see such an AP story
disseminated far and wide. This obsessive, myopic, control-freak culture
is reeling, and American individualism is out of steam. That lets
me know that collapse is more underway than I had even imagined and
that the first steps of transformation of human consciousness have
begun-even if I don't live to see it-even if it doesn't come to fruition
for centuries.
Readers of Truth To Power aren't surprised because they've been paying
attention for a long time or they wouldn't be reading this website.
Most of you already know that it's going to get much worse, and that
in the not too distant future, many of these blindsided kings and
queens of denial will be wistfully longing for the good ole' days
of June, 2008. But that doesn't mean the rest of us won't be hurting
too. It just means that we'll know why and how it all got to be so
terribly ugly.
As I've said so many times before, if we don't balance our logistical
preparation with emotional fortification, it won't sustain us for
long. Our psychological well being must include humor, even in the
darkest days of the end of the world as we have known it. We may not
be able to just click on You Tube whenever we want and let George
put us in stitches. There may be no internet or nothing to power our
computers with. Even if he were here, he might be inaccessible.
So we all have to become our own "Georges" and open the
channels of our individual irreverent and iconoclastic humor and let
it pour forth. In her book Dancing In The Streets, Barbara Ehrenreich
explains how empire has robbed us of our collective joy and how we
can begin to reclaim it: "People who are working for change need
to think about how to make their events draw on the solidarity and
creativity of lots of people together. That's been happening ... but
it's something we need to address. Bringing art and culture into politics
is a way to express what we are seeking, what our vision of the world
is."
Ultimately, one of the gifts of collapse will be the demise of empire's
barriers to fun, joy, play, comedy, art, dance, music, and unimaginable
human creativity. But in order to navigate collapse and hasten the
dissolution of those barriers, we must keep George's outrageous humor
alive within ourselves and our communities. As he said, the only way
you can believe the American Dream is to be asleep. George knew, as
we must, that laughing at the emperor's absence of clothes will indeed
help keep us awake.
