George Carlin and trump

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donbosco

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We kind of hid our George Carlin albums from our parents. After all his irreverence gave us the “7 Words You Can’t Say on TV.” That joke went all the way to The Supreme Court. That was back when jokes visited the SCOTUS rather than being permanent fixtures. The ever-shifting and unstable Sirius XM often has a George Carlin Channel. I drive the NC to NYC and back route often and that media is a great help. Late once when driving north through the dark Pennsylvania night I tuned in and Carlin carried me along for many miles. His comedy was philosophy.

Turns out that Carlin grew up just a few blocks from our apartment in NYC in an area he dubbed ‘White Harlem.’ ( 121st and Amsterdam). He was Irish Catholic (his dad immigrated from Ireland). He attended several schools - evidently he was a bit of a rounder - no surprise there - but finally settled into the Corpus Christi School. If you’ve listened to his comedic musings you know that his association with the Church and organized religion made for much fodder. Corpus Christi is on the block where he lived.

He made many albums and for one the cover shows him standing in the street in front of ‘The Miami,’ at #519 121st Street. That’s the building where he and his family lived. Carlin died in 2008. Some disingenuous or dishonest (or both) folk in recent times have tried to say that Carlin had an affinity with what passes for metaphysics among the MAGA crowd. That would be laughable were it not so typical of the alternate reality that trump and trumpism have so destructively inserted into society to hoodwink so very many sad souls. The truth is that it is a shame he wasn’t around for retched, rotten maturation of trumpism. He hated hypocrisy and turned his voice brutally toward exposing it. In 1989 when asked about a much younger but no less publicly dishonest and disgusting donald trump, Carlin was on target with his three-letter description of the real estate shyster as simply a “rat” that ought to be “run over by a truck.” See here the video:




After he passed in 2008 Carlin’s friends and fans asked the city to commemorate him in his childhood neighborhood by renaming his old block for him. Corpus Christi Church fought against it - they clearly held a grudge. For six years the struggle carried on and eventually the block adjacent - not Carlin’s (or the church’s) — was retitled: ‘George Carlin Way.’

George Carlin, irritating hypocrites from the grave. Seems perfect.
 
Yes, people are often arguing about where Carlin would fit into the current political zeitgeist. MAGA folks love to post his old bits where he lampooned political correctness as evidence that he would be opposed to everything "woke" and on their side. But liberals point to his strong critiques of religion, and especially the infiltration of religion into politics, as evidence that he would be on their side. Ultimately I think it's likely that he would be pretty critical of both sides of the political aisle in this current moment - as he was critical of both sides during his heyday - and adopt mostly a "pox on both their houses" approach. But even without the above clip, I'm confident he would absolutely despise the political version of Trump.
 
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