George Carlin: A Comic Philosopher of Hope and Despair for the Trump Era

By Eric Van Vleet

The election of Donald Trump is still shocking. Upon returning to the US, we have met many people still visibly shaken by it. The most troubling moment will be when we cease to find it so. We need to remain vigilant so that the unceasing avalanche of disturbing news does not become all too commonplace and normalized.
In order to cope with the ongoing shitshow, sometimes Lili and I binge watch videos from comedians/satirists like Samantha Bee, Seth Meyers, John Oliver, Trevor Noah, Stephen Colbert, Bill Maher and others who seem to offer an almost unlimited supply of send ups and takedowns of the Old Fat Orange One. Yet the comfort they offer is only fleeting. Though funny enough at the time, their work is often far too superficial and impermanent to offer any real and lasting relief.

Times like these call for a visionary comedian; they call for George Carlin. Even though he died in 2008, long before the shocking election of Donald Trump and even before the historic election of Barack Obama, Carlin’s comedy all but prepared us for Trump. Listening to him will make you laugh far deeper than today’s ‘political’ comedians, because of the way that he is chasing truth with a kind of boundless, free-flowing, biting stream of logic that is art, even if Carlin himself calls standup comedy a “small art”. Above all, Carlin has an amazing detector; nobody’s got a better detector than him, for that all-pervading facet of American life-- bullshit. It is his piercing logic and ceaseless quest to uncover bullshit that makes Carlin’s comedy so vital.

Carlin’s true genius comes from his outlook as a comic philosopher that does not focus on a single issue but instead on America as a whole, which he describes like so:

“I sort of gave up on the human race; I gave up on the American dream and culture and nation and decided that I didn’t care about the outcome. And that gave me a lot of freedom from a distant platform to be sort of amused… to watch the whole thing with a kind of combination of wonder and pity and to try to put that into words....Not having an emotional stake in whether this experiment with human beings works. I really don’t care. I love people as I meet them one by one. People are just wonderful as individuals. You see the whole universe in their eyes if you look carefully. But as soon as they begin to group, as soon as they begin to clot…they begin to change, they begin to sacrifice; they sacrifice the beauty of the individual for the sake of the group. I decided that it was all under control of the group now whether it’s business, religion, political people or whatever, and I would distance myself from wishing for a good outcome. Let it do what it’s going to do and I’ll enjoy it as an entertainment.”

Led by such a worldview, Carlin is not digging through the minutiae of a single political race, but through a wide-angle lens that captures a critical and original view of America as a whole. I did not realize when I used the phrase “garbage in, garbage out” in a previous Biencuits blog piece about the unofficial Trump Diet that it was not my own coinage, but is actually the incisive phrase with which George Carlin describes an oblivious US citizenry who elect terribly corrupt politicians. As Carlin says “if you have selfish, ignorant citizens, you will have selfish, ignorant leaders.” “Draining the swamp” is not exclusive to Washington DC, but to America as a whole.

It is not merely that the choices presented to us are unseemly and that we actually accept such paltry choices by voting, but terrifyingly, that these are the ‘best’ candidates the country could produce from its failing institutions. These politicians reflect the quality of the public that they represent. Changing these circumstances is not simple because as Carlin says, “this country was bought, and sold and paid for a long time ago.” According to Carlin, the fact that this ethos of “garbage in, garbage out” persists is no accident considering who the real “owners” of the country are. Therefore, the situation is far more complicated than merely voting for good politicians and driving out the bad ones. Carlin says that by voting, we are consenting to what they do once elected, whether your candidate wins or not. When you don’t vote you are not lending legitimacy to an often ludicrous process. With such terrible choices, Carlin stays home on election day.

It is through Carlin’s powerful logic and his massive linguistic power that he can convincingly make an argument against voting. In fact, Carlin is an ever astute observer and lover of the English language. For him it is not only through bills and executive orders alone that politicians wield power but through language as well. His most famous monologue was his dissection of the seven words you could not say on television, which was very much itself an explicit and powerful free speech manifesto.

For Carlin, it is not that there are intrinsically “bad words” but “the context that makes them count, that makes them good or bad… You can’t be afraid of words that speak the truth, even if it is an unpleasant truth.” It is our current inability to understand nuance and the context of speech that allows many to somehow excuse all of Trumps many egregious insults.

Ever in search of truth and clarity, Carlin is horrified by the prevalence of euphemisms, which reflect how “Americans have a lot of trouble in dealing with reality.” Carlin then dissects such evasions of reality in how the word for psychologically wounded soldiers became increasingly bloodless through time. He states that after WWI the word used was “shellshock”, which captures how violent and unsettling of a phenomenon it is. Yet such proportionally strong language for such horrible effects waned through time. The very same condition in WWII was called “battle fatigue.” By the time of the the US war in Korea it was called “operational exhaustion”. After the War in Vietnam and onto today the US military has calls it “post-traumatic stress disorder”.

As such euphemisms drift further from the truth, Carlin notes how “the pain is completely buried under jargon.” Provocatively he argues that the way in which politicians use language itself is a political act because it helps to shape material reality: “I’ll betcha if it was still called ‘shellshock’ some of those Vietnam veterans might of gotten the attention that they needed at time.” Such language according to Carlin “takes the life outta life.” Similarly in using words like “redundancies” instead of firing, Carlin argues that “smug, greedy, well-fed white people have invented a language to conceal its sins.”

Here political correctness is not, as conservatives like to claim, some liberal conspiracy to quell straight talk and free speech but instead a way for the powerful to evade the real damage that they inflict on the weak. Conservatives have managed to invert reality in claiming to be the defenders of freedom of speech, or at least the kind of limited freedom from speech that offends everyone but themselves. Their claims of defense are actually disguised attacks. Or as Carlin says: “Pro-life is anti-women!”

These days, the refusal by conservatives even to utter the phrase “black lives matter”, while stating instead that “all lives matter” is yet another pernicious example. This phrase creates an alternative reality where black people have not been disproportionately impacted by violence at the hands of the police. They are using nefariously twisted pseudo-PC notions of unification and equality to maintain their positions of power while not actually doing anything to try to stop the very real violence taking place. I can only imagine the blisteringly funny tirade Carlin would launch against their “all lives matter” bullshit.

With such phrases, bullshit has in no way diminished since Carlin’s passing. We need to follow his example and make sure that we have turned on and tuned up our bullshit detectors. We will need them in order to peel back the euphemisms that deny help to those most in need. We need to demand dramatic improvements made to our institutions, abandon ideas that one day an amazingly virtuous politician will emerge from a broken system and that “resisting” against a single politician is enough. Yet, all the while we need to laugh. We need the kind of deep and enduring laughter that listening to George Carlin brings, while adopting his uncompromising view of the problems of America. Only then can we continue to call out bullshit and begin to dream of and demand something new, something far more different than we have ever demanded.

It's a Wonderful Brexit?: Tales from an American Itinerant Farm Volunteer in Britian

By Eric Vanderrama

The UK has done it. They have invoked Article 50 and started the two-year-long process of leaving the European Union. Instead of making amendments to Brexit that would have allowed EU citizens to stay in Britain and their own citizens to remain in Europe, they decided to use the reciprocity of these millions of people as a bargaining chip in future trade negotiations with Europe. Leave voters forced everyone to gamble everything, while hoping that Europe will bow down to their every demand. They likely did not realize how Brexit would affect nearly every facet of their lives. Soon, when the actual outcomes of Brexit become clearer, many surprises await them.

Instead of taking such a complicated situation as Brexit on all at once, I will regale you with my experiences as a vendor at the Chester Christmas Market, a market where often neither the products sold nor the people selling them were British. As an American involved in this Christmas market, I could not help to think about a Christmas classic from my homeland, It's a Wonderful Life. For anyone who has somehow missed it, the film is a dark Christmas fable where everyman George Bailey from the idyllic small-town of Bedford Falls contemplates suicide on Christmas Eve, but is saved by a guardian angel who shows George how his actions protected his town from Mr. Potter whose greed would transform it into something entirely different-- a monopolistic dystopia called Pottersville. I began to wonder if it would be a wonderful Brexit. I wondered how even the few city blocks like those of the Chester Christmas market change without non-British products and people, resulting from a hard Brexit? Would it remain Bedford Falls or would it degenerate into a Pottersville? I further realized that the leave and and remain voters could not even agree on who exactly was the protagonist, George Bailey, and who was Mr. Potter, the antagonist.

Walking through the Chester Christmas Market showed how un-British this British Christmas market really was. First of all, the idea behind such Christmas markets belongs to Germany, not Britain. The busiest stalls sold prepared foods, which were staffed by Italians and Spaniards, whose tan skin and violent shivering bespoke of balmy Mediterranean origins. They sold everything from Nutella pancakes to American-style hamburgers, to Colombian coffee laced with French Cognac. The stall to our right was staffed by a surly British lady who sold a horrible mish mash of Chinese made tchotchkes that ranged from faux-American “dream-catchers” to poop emoji plushies, which all should have been Brexited long ago.

Her neighbor was a Dutch hipster lothario who used his charming smile to sell Spanish garlic graters to the usually ‘invisible’ 50-year-old female British set. Across from our stall, a sausage man with a thick German accent would incessantly shout “no soya, starches, or fillers... in Bavaria we don’t do funny business.” Customers seemed overjoyed to learn that their Debreceners were made in Bavaria and not Britain. They eagerly scooped up these insipid industrial links, seemingly because they came in bicep-building quantities and with a free plastic bag all for a tenner. When one little boy yelled “These smell like dog food,” the chorizo man said without missing a beat, “Well, dogs love them!”

Like the German sausage man, our accents betrayed us. Many of our customers were less than discreet and would often yell out, “But you’re not British!” because we were Americans selling British artisanal products made by British citizens. In the post-Brexit world, they already were policing their borders and bluntly critiquing all that was not British. I cannot imagine the same words being uttered at a pair of boots made in India but sold at Mark & Spencers.

Many would-be British customers professed loving the sampled products made on a family owned and operated Organic farm, until they saw the price tag. They would tell us instead they would be buying a mass-produced Asda cheese variety pack for half the price. They loved the idea of products made in Britain, until the price was actually remunerative to the British people making them and more costly to them. On the other hand, a global customer base found the prices fair. We sold cheese and spirits to many tourists, including Brazilians, French, Ecuadorians, Indians, Dutch, Americans, Spaniards and of course British as well.

With a hard Brexit now a reality one must now imagine a future Chester Christmas Market without this diverse international clientele, its German sausage vendor and sausages, vociferous Americans selling artisanal Organic gin, handsome Dutch lotharios and polyglot Italian food venders. Without them, there hardly would have been a Christmas market at all last year. Yet the leave voters must deny any positive contributions by non-Brits. For leavers, anything from Europe or elsewhere must be treated with great suspicion if not derision.

Beyond your ordinary xenophobia, there seems to be another kind of delusional thinking fueling Brexit. Evidently, leavers assume that somehow British people will seamlessly step in to make these products and sell them in their own stalls, all at big box chain store low prices. Somehow people will get paid more while the cost of goods and services will decline. Supposedly, there is pent up and untapped entrepreneurial spirit and artisanal skill that ‘evil’ Europe and Europeans are somehow suffocating. Only once this supposed dead weight is removed, will they put the “great” back in Great Britain. The Chester Christmas Market suggests otherwise. Brits had just as much right to make products and have a stall at the market as did non-Brits, though they were clearly not taking advantage of it. How they will somehow be caught by a newfound entrepreneurial spirit post-Brexit was best left unexplained by leavers.

It is distressing that Brexit is in effect pulling a reverse It’s a Wonderful Life and doubling down on what would happen if millions of people had to leave. Instead of affirming the contributions of the ordinary non-British person, they are willing to let George Bailey metaphorically drown as millions of people may have to leave Britain if they curtail reciprocal freedom of movement between the UK and the EU. They are like Mr. Potter yelling at George Bailey to disappear so that they can take over. It is sad that they need to create a tight monopoly over their labor market just so it can be finally fit their rigid definition of what is “British”.

If the Chester Christmas Market is any indication, the UK seems to be careening towards Pottersville. These international vendors and customers were not the enemy. Instead they were like George Bailey, saving Britain from a boring and monotone dystopia. Vendors sat in the cold for 31 straight days and brought life to a market that was staffed mainly by non-Brits. Non-British customers bought products made by Brits and non-Brits. Yet these contributions were still somehow off-putting to leave voters whose perverse version of Britishness has thrown the lives of these hard workers into greater precarity. They have strengthened their grips on a monopoly for British jobs, irrespective if British people actually have the skills to staff them. With such Mr. Potter-like greed and callousness it is impossible to hope that it’s a wonderful Brexit.