I don’t consider the late, amazing George Carlin to be just a comedian. I think of him as one of our most sagacious philosophers and social critics. And I think some of his central premises would be good to recall now as Bernie fights the system and the establishment as an outsider on the inside, like Carlin was. Each became who they are because they didn’t seek establishment endorsement. Instead it was speaking truth to power that filled the seats and pulled the voting levers.
For me most of the great comedians also fall into that category, which would also include Richard Pryor, Bill Hicks, Lenny Bruce and Chris Rock (not all but most of his stuff). Lee Camp is also worth checking out. Rock quipped about today’s current climate in which the 99% are forced to rummage through the wreckage the Economic Terrorism of Wall St, reflecting on the first class lounge privileges he enjoys while flying said, “If poor people knew how rich rich people are, there would be riots in the streets.”
This quote is Carlin’s preface to his book “When Will Jesus Bring The Pork Chops?” and I think it fairly describes and authenticates Bernie’s role too:
"I'm an outsider by choice, but not truly. It's the unpleasantness of the system that keeps me out. I'd rather be in, in a good system. That's where my discontent comes from: being forced to choose to stay outside.
My advice: Just keep movin' straight ahead. Every now and then you find yourself in a different place."
On occasion Carlin has admitted to the old adage about himself, “if you scratch a cynic you’ll find a disappointed idealist.” He was many things to people including, what Colin Quinn called him, “a priest to all the damaged Catholic people.” But at his highest evolution he arrived at taking a completely detached view of the human race, at which point he wrote some of his most searing and incisive truths about people and society.
By now unless you’ve been living under the rock you’re probably familiar with one of Carlin’s most incisive pieces about politics, called The American Dream. If you’re not, you’re in for a treat.
Bernie, like George, has a long track record of telling it like it is, no matter how unpopular or against the grain it was at the time. Both have proven to be manifold in their prescience on a whole range of issues and subjects. Neither could ever be thought of as being expedient for laughs or for votes. Both challenge the listener to seek deeper truths, confront preconceptions and often wind up taking their audience on a cathartic transformation.
Carlin’s “American Dream” stands as an all-time classic. It’s been a salve to people who have always known better and have acknowledged the nagging truth of it but haven’t heard it articulated so clearly and honestly. For me during Occupy it breathed life into everything we were standing for, with such incandescent searing Truth about the elephant in the room that is Money in Politics and the fraud of Wall St’s destructive dominion over government and all of our collective lives. Carlin also tackles the all-important, and linchpin for me, of an education system purposefully designed to churn out obedient consumers who clutch to the ever-elusive dangling carrot, that just keeps getting pulled further and further away, of pulling yourself up by the bootstraps or getting in on the next Get-Rich-Quick scheme so you too can achieve the “American Dream.”
Every single word, turn of phrase, paragraph and distinct idea deserves to be parsed and ruminated over again and again, to get the full import of how dead-on right he is about exactly what politics in America has become.
Here it is in prose:
There’s a reason education sucks, and it’s the same reason it will never, ever, ever be fixed. It’s never going to get any better, don’t look for it. Be happy with what you’ve got.
Because the owners, the owners of this country, don’t want that. I’m talking about the real owners now, the BIG owners! The Wealthy… the real owners! The big wealthy business interests that control things and make all the important decisions.
Forget the politicians! They are irrelevant. The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice…You don’t. You have no choice.
You have Owners. They own you.
They own everything. They own all the important land. They own and control the corporations. They’ve long since bought—and paid for—the Senate, the Congress, the state houses, the city halls, they got the judges in their back pockets and they own all the big media companies, so they control just about all of the news and information you get to hear. They got you by the balls.
They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying, to get what they want. Well, we know what they want. They want more for themselves and less for everybody else, but I’ll tell you what they don’t want:
They don’t want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don’t want well-informed, well-educated people capable of critical thinking. They’re not interested in that. That doesn’t help them. That’s against their interests. That’s right.
They don’t want people who are smart enough to sit around a kitchen table and think about how badly they’re getting fucked by a system that threw them overboard 30 fucking years ago. They don’t want that!
You know what they want? They want obedient workers. Obedient workers:
People who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork. And just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shitty jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, the reduced benefits, the end of overtime and vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it.
And now they’re coming for your Social Security money. They want your retirement money. They want it back so they can give it to their criminal friends on Wall Street—and you know something? They’ll get it.
They’ll get it all from you sooner or later ‘cause they own this fucking place!
It’s a Big Club, and you ain’t in it! You, and I, are not in the Big Club.
By the way, it’s the same big club they use to beat you over the head with all day long when they tell you what to believe. All day long beating you over the head with their media telling you what to believe, what to think and what to buy.
The table has tilted, folks. The game is rigged and nobody seems to notice. Nobody seems to care! Good honest hard-working people; white collar, blue collar it doesn’t matter what color shirt you have on. Good honest hard-working people continue—these are people of modest means—continue to elect these rich cock suckers who don’t give a fuck about you. They don’t give a fuck about you… they don’t give a fuck about you.
They don’t care about you at all, at all… AT ALL.
And nobody seems to notice.
Nobody seems to care.
That’s what the owners count on. The fact that Americans will probably remain willfully ignorant of the big red, white and blue dick that’s being jammed up their assholes everyday, because the owners of this country know the truth:
It’s called the American Dream—because you have to be asleep to believe it.
The American Dream. So maligned from its original meaning, of an egalitarian society in which everyone has access to basic necessities and free from need, and distorted by propaganda to become something entirely different as an ugly free-for-all, stampede of “getting mine.” It is now a purposely elusive dangling carrot being pulled ever further away, of being just one Get-Rich-Quick scheme or a tightening up of the bootstraps away from joining the Big Club. More on that another time.
I’d like to add a couple of other things also, because I think Sanders is more hopeful than Carlin about certain things. I agree with both in certain ways.
Two other quotes come to mind that reflect the great revolutionary spirit the Sanders campaign has engendered.
In particular it warrants a response to the critics hung up on Sanders’ apparent anger. If you’re not at least a little pissed off you definitely aren’t paying attention. People are seeing unarmed young black and brown men gunned down like dogs in the street, watching their neighbors get kicked out of their home because a predatory bank is repossessing their house, families trying to finesse less money coming in with rising cost of living, wondering how their children will ever be able to pay their staggering college student debt, hearing stories of friends and loved ones forgoing medical treatment because they can’t afford it, bogus austerity measures taking away local social programs. There is a very real roiling anger out there, for anyone who is paying attention. If that doesn’t convince you maybe checking the percentages of people who still have faith in government and Congress’s approval numbers will.
“Hope has two beautiful daughters. Their names are Anger and Courage.
Anger at the way things are, and Courage to change them.”
St. Augustine of Hippo
This quote should be the response to all detractors who complain and concert troll about Bernie’s “anger” issue.
And to all my brethren dreamers, who reject the safe and narrow of pragmatism that translates to the dispiriting “No We Can’t” from the moderates on other side and the media lapdogs who concern troll, I’ll leave you with this to ponder.
"All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dreams with open eyes, to make it possible. This I did."
T.E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom (1922) "Lawrence of Arabia"
Stay angry Bernie.
It’s giving us Hope, and the Courage to fight.
Everything good starts first with a Dream.
(More Carlin sagacity in life nuggets here, as he tells his own):