George Carlin: Al Gore's Nemesis
June 25, 2008
George Carlin died on June 22. I won't say that I will miss him. I had not paid much attention to him since the late 1960's, when I enjoyed his routine: the personalities on a local TV station. He played all the characters. The two segments I recall are Al Sleet, the hippie-dippie weatherman (either on drugs or else a recent victim) and Biff Barf's Sportlight Spotlight.
He was a master of language. He knew all the convenient but low-content catch phrases, such as "outside the box," and made us realize how dependent on them we are. When he says, "I'm a modern man," he buries us all verbally with our own thoughtless verbiage. Another George, Orwell, warned us about this two generations ago. George Carlin drives home the point by stringing together the verbal shortcuts of our era. He does this without profanity, which indicates just how much of a master of language he could be.
Carlin took on everyone's deepest commitments. Nobody was safe.
He did not like religion. He ridiculed Christianity. But he also ridiculed that other religion of our day, the creation of the media, environmentalism.
He understood the meaning of cosmic evolution in its original Darwinist version -- that all life is meaningless, that most species go extinct, that when you talk of an earth that is 4.5 billion years old, man is an afterthought.
Because I believe in Christianity, I think he was wrong: man is not an afterthought. This is why I am not a Darwinist. If you are a Darwinist, then you should think as Carlin thought.
The following routine is truly brilliant. He makes the audience laugh at the religion of environmentalism. There were a few yelling protesters, who resented his public act of sacrilege, but they could not compete with him. He takes the logic of Darwinism where Darwinists don't want to go.
In neo-Darwinism, there was no meaning or purpose until man evolved out of meaningless animal life. At that point, we are assured, the world gained meaning. Carlin did not buy this, the most important intellectual sleight-of-hand operation in modern thought. The Darwinists have palmed off purpose and meaning for man, based on a random mutation in some ancient chromosome. Baloney, Carlin said, or a word to that effect.
Had this routine not relied on his expletives -- had he expleted them -- the damage he inflicted would have been greater. (Redd Foxx on "Sanford & Son" proved that he was a master comic, which had not been equally clear with his under-the-counter recordings.)
Al Gore, meet your nemesis.