George Carlin: American Radical

"The real owners are the big wealthy business interests that
control things and make all the important decisions. Forget
the politicians, they're an irrelevancy. 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
statehouses, the city halls. They've got the judges in their
back pockets. And they own all the big media companies, so
that they control just about all of the news and information
you hear. They've got you by the balls. They spend billions of
dollars every year lobbying ­ lobbying to get what they
want. Well, we know what they want; they want more for
themselves and less for everybody else," ranted the
comedian whose routines were studied in graduate schools.

"But I'll tell you what they don't want," Carlin continued.
"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.
They don't want people who are smart enough to sit around
the kitchen table and figure out how badly they're getting
fucked by a system that threw them overboard 30 fucking
years ago. You know what they want? Obedient workers ­
people who are just smart enough to run the machines and
do the paperwork but just dumb enough to passively accept
all these increasingly shittier jobs with the lower pay, the
longer hours, reduced benefits, the end of overtime and the
vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to
collect it. And, now, they're coming for your Social Security.
They want your fucking 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,
sooner or later, because 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."


"Let's suppose we all just materialized on Earth and there
was a bunch of potatoes on the ground, okay? There's just
six of us. Only six humans. We come into a clearing and
there's potatoes on the ground. Now, my instinct would be,
let's everybody get some potatoes. "Everybody got a
potato? Joey didn't get a potato! He's small, he can't hold as
many potatoes. Give Joey some of your potatoes." "No,
these are my potatoes!" That's the Republicans. "I collected
more of them, I got a bigger pile of potatoes, they're mine. If
you want some of them, you're going to have to give me
something." "But look at Joey, he's only got a couple, they
won't last two days." That's the fuckin' difference! And I'm
more inclined to want to share and even out," he explained
in an interview several years ago with The Onion.

"I understand the marketplace, but government is supposed
to be here to redress the inequities of the marketplace,"
Carlin continued. "That's one of its functions. Not just to
protect the nation, secure our security and all that shit. And
not just to take care of great problems that are trans-state
problems, that are national, but also to make sure that the
inequalities of the marketplace are redressed by the acts of
government. That's what welfare was about. There are
people who really just don't have the tools, for whatever
reason. Yes, there are lazy people. Yes, there are slackers.
Yes, there's all of that. But there are also people who can't
cut it, for any given reason, whether it's racism, or an
educational opportunity, or poverty, or a fuckin' horrible
home life, or a history of a horrible family life going back
three generations, or whatever it is. They're crippled and
they can't make it, and they deserve to rest at the
commonweal. That's where my fuckin' passion lies."


Carlin explained himself best in one of his last interviews.
"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," he said. "And perhaps it's just a human weakness
and an inevitable human story that these things happen.
But there's disillusionment and some discontent in me about
it. I don't consider myself a cynic. I think of myself as a
skeptic and a realist. But I understand the word 'cynic' has
more than one meaning, and I see how I could be seen as
cynical. 'George, you're cynical.' Well, you know, they say if
you scratch a cynic you find a disappointed idealist. And
perhaps the flame still flickers a little, you know?"