Dear George Carlin,

July 1, 2023July 14, 2023 RilalyLeave a comment

George Carlin’s latest and last book: A Modern Man: The Best of George Carlin, includes a section of short takes called Short Takes. He almost wrote it as a letter to future readers, and it inspired me so much that I decided to write back.

“Most people aren’t particularly good at anything,” George Carlin wrote. “We’re all amateurs. It’s just that some of us are more professional about it than others.”

Most of the truly impressive people I’ve met, over the years, didn’t impress me at hello. My impressions of them involved a slow build that could take days, sometimes weeks to process, until it ends coming out on a little, yellow piece of paper, similar to those that came out of computers in old sci-fi shows. The primary reason most truly impressive types fail to blow us away in the intro is that they’re not trying to impress us. There are others, of course, and they usually greet us with a little something like this:

“Please, don’t call me Mr. Duggin,” those who’ve attained levels of authority often say in a handshake, “Call me Henry.”

“I understand that you’re trying to impress me with your humility,” we should say to Henry, “but could you wait until we’ve felt each other out here a little bit?” I could be wrong, of course, but I think they consider the ‘Call me Henry’ hello a shortcut to impressions through humility. They’re basically saying, ‘Hey, I’m not as impressive as you think. I’m just another peon, like you.’

‘All right, well, I didn’t consider you particularly extraordinary until you said that. Now, I’m just like wow, your humility is so impressive, but if you are truly humble, why do you need to impress it upon me? What are you hoping to accomplish here?’

Is Henry as impressive as he wants us to believe, or is so uncomfortable that he hasn’t adapted to the societal norm we all use to address someone we don’t know with a prefix followed by their surname? He has, of course, but Henry Duggin is hoping to short-circuit these dynamics, so we consider him more humble, more professional, and more impressive. Henry wants us to consider the idea that only an all-that-and-a-bag-of-chips guy would demand informalities.

When I had a “Please, call me Henry” as a boss, I tried to think of a time when I arrived at a familial link with a boss who allowed me to call him Henry in the privacy of a corporate boardroom. I know others enjoy this. I’ve seen that warm glow and those blushing smiles of euphoria on their faces when the boss dropped that invitation on them. They appreciate the gesture of a boss reaching down to touch them on a familial link, as God did in Michelangelo’s The Creation of Adam, but I see it as Henry’s method of reinforcing his leadership mystique.

“Why do you keep calling him Mr. Duggin?” they ask me. “He wants us to call him Henry.”

“Because that’s the way I was raised,” I lie. “I was taught to address a boss as Mr. or Ms. Duggin. It isn’t intended as a compliment or an insult that I refuse to call him Henry. It’s just the way I was raised.” In truth, I feel queasy calling him Henry, because I feel like I’m feeding into his narcissistic humility.

***

“Nothing rhymes with nostril.” –George Carlin

Thanks to the modern convenience of the search engine that George Carlin obviously didn’t use often enough, I found some words, austral, claustral, and rostral that rhyme with nostril. Sorry George! Now that we’ve established that, the next question is why haven’t any of the millions of lyricists (poets and/or songwriters), since Shakespeare, invented a more romantic, or utilitarian, word that rhymes with nostril? The Oxford English Dictionary claims that William Shakespeare invented 1,700 words, and other lyricists invented innumerable words to serve their cause, but none of them rhyme with nostril. If necessity is the mother of invention, why didn’t Mr. Shakespeare (“Please call me Willy”), or any lyricists since, invent a word to rhyme with nostril?

How many words have lyricists devoted to the eyes and the lips? Their beauty is so self-sustained that some artists have painted nothing but eyes and lips. Lyricists have written songs and poems about nothing more than a woman’s eyes, and we could probably create a War and Peace-length compendium to the space created for lips. Artists also focus effort on high cheek bones, or a high or low forehead, but they don’t put any effort, beyond necessity, to the size and shape of nostrils.

Some nostrils are thin, others wide, and some take on a more oval shape. There are even some that appear to take on an unusual pear-shape that almost achieves a point. We might think these variations would excite artists to invent words to capture the perfect nostril, but they haven’t, because the nostril(s) is never strikingly beautiful or ugly. They’re just there. They might be more attractive than the other orifices, but they’re never so stimulating that we would rank a persons’ degrees of attraction based on the size or shape of their nostril. To my mind there aren’t any subconscious visual stimuli regarding their sizes and shapes either. Maybe there are, and I just don’t know it.

Picasso believed beauty arrived in angles and symmetry, but if the nostril achieves either of these, the artistic credit goes to the nose. The point is, no artist I know of has expended artistic energy, beyond necessity, to the nostril. If they did, they might’ve invented a word that rhymes with it we all know by heart by heart, or they would’ve used some artistic license to use austral, but how does even the gifted lyricist, create beautiful rhyming sentences around a “southern” nostril, or a nostril from the south? If they attempted to soundboard a rhyme with claustral, what artistic benefit could they achieve with a nostril that is “secluded”. “I felt claustral in her nostril,” or “his nostril left me claustral.” The artist’s interpretation of such lyrics could lay in the affect of feeling lonely in her presence, which would be a beautiful sentiment worthy of exploration. If the lyricist was in a band, however, my guess is that his bandmates would suggest they know where the lyricist was headed, but they might caution him that the general public might misinterpret the lyrics to mean that his beloved is booger-free, except for him, dangling on a precipice. To declare that the poet’s lover was such a beauty that her nostril appeared rostral, or “a scale in reptiles on the median plate of the tip of the snout that borders the mouth opening”, just doesn’t achieve a level of artistic appeal most artists seek when they’re trying to impress upon others their talent for expression. So, we can’t fault George for not knowing that there are words that rhyme with nostril, because no lyricist has ever sought to capitalize on what could’ve been an artistic first for someone.

***

“Everything is still the same. It’s just a little different now.” —George Carlin

In the not-so-distant future, future earthlings will have not-so-distant emotions, if we believe George Carlin. If we believe time travel movies, however, we will all have exaggerated emotions. The characters therein are either overwhelmingly happy, in a creepy, surreal way that suggests they don’t question anything anymore, or they’re incredibly unhappy, because of that whole Armageddon thing. Some of these movies were made in the 50’s and 60’s, and in the 50’s and 60’s, we apparently thought that 2000 man would have all these exaggerated emotions. No one predicted that not much would change in the ways of human nature and human emotions. If we 2000 men and women could send a message back, we might write, “Everything is still the same. It’s just a little different now.”

With that in mind, how do we view 2100 man? We don’t, because to our figurative schemes of thought, if there is an Earth, it will be uninhabitable. Interpersonal relationships will evolve to intrapersonal relationships, or on the inside, or within. If we smile, it will be strained, and we will no longer feel the need to leave the house. In truth, the future will probably evolve to everything being the same, just a little different.

2100 man will also, apparently, lose any and all skills at problem resolutions, and they apparently won’t feel the need to survive either, if current time travel movies are to be believed. We won’t be happy or sad. We will enter an era of acceptance. We’ll just accept things the way they are, and the fact that life is rotten and death is close at hand. If these characters have water or food shortages, they just learn to live with it. Geniuses, who fix things, are apparently nowhere to be found in the future, and the only thing 2100 man will do is accept life the way it is and learn to accept the fact that they’re just going to die soon as a result. I would submit that these writers know as little about humanity as we do the future.

***

“Not only do I not know what’s going on, I wouldn’t know what to do about it if I did.” “The nicest thing about anything is not knowing what it is.” “When I hear a person talking about political solutions, I know I’m not listening to a serious person.” —George Carlin

Anytime someone proposes solving a problem with political solutions, the yang to that yin should be, “What then?” What happens when “we” attempt to resolve a problem from the outside in? Every effect involves a countereffect, and some unforeseen consequence that we forgot to imagine. “We just wanted to fix the problem?” the political solutions proponent says. Their intentions were more important to them, and hopefully to you, than their attention to detail. Political solutions involve the invisible hand putting a thumb on the scale, but most of us don’t know what’s going on, so we try to find someone who does. We turn to someone who has great hair, with a side part, 3-4 inches on top, and about an inch on the sides and back. He has a suave, confident hairstyle that matches what we associate with knowledge and power, and she has a chin that harmonizes with the face, and is well balanced. It’s not too small, too wide, or retracted. It’s also well-rounded, and she has beautiful arms. So, when our preferreds say something to us, it sticks, because in some way we haven’t fully explored, we want to be them. If we sound like them, because they sound like they know what they’re talking about in a way we find inspirational, we hope that we might be sound as inspirational as they do when we repeat it. We still won’t know what’s going on, and we wouldn’t know what to do about if we did, and now we know that they didn’t either. Their proposed solution now is to fix all of the problems their initial political solution created, with another political solution, but they sound like they know what they’re talking about now. Their presentations are so artful, no ums or uhs, and isn’t that somewhat, sort of, important enough? The “What then?” guys are often nerdy guys who wear some kind of gel (ick), and they wear some kind of clip-on to keep their ties straight.

Censorship Often Proves Counterproductive

February 27, 2023May 11, 2023 RilalyLeave a comment

Puffin, the children’s imprint of Penguin Random House recently hired sensitivity readers to go over some of their books. These readers discovered some problematic words in the collection of author Roald Dahl’s books that relate to weight, mental health, gender and race. Puffin decided to remove the words the sensitivity readers found offensive, fearing that they might insult future readers. Was this purely a business decision? Did Puffin fear getting sued, or did they simply not want those words associated with the children’s imprint of the “family friendly” Penguin Random House name. Puffin, Penguin Random House eventually reached a compromise with those who view this action as a form of censorship. Going forward, they will publish two versions of Dahl’s classic works, an unexpurgated, “classic”, version, alongside an edited, more sensitive version of Dahl’s works.

Prior to the compromise, author Salman Rushdie wrote, “This is insane, right? [Roald Dahl] was a bigot and he never supported me, but really? We can’t say fat or female? . . . Can we take some sort of stand against this? Or … pointless?”

In reply, PEN American Chief Executive Suzanne Nossel writes of the effort, “So many of us agree on the need to build a more inclusive, equitable world, and also that that quest need not – and must not – come at the expense of free speech, truth, and reckoning with what is difficult.”

Actor Tom Hanks, not responding directly to this exchange, said, “Let me decide what I am offended by.” It’s an excellent retort, and it leads to the question, why don’t they let us decide what is offensive for us, our children, and the world at large?

Two of the words that Puffin sought to expunge from Dahls’ works were ‘fat’ and ‘ugly’. No reasonable and thoughtful adult wants children to hear, learn, and use mean words to describe other kids, but does removing them from books, movies, and the town square, remove them from the lexicon of young children forevermore? Will this effort create a more inclusive and equitable future? If we remove these words from books, will kids evolve to full-fledged adults without ever hearing them? Perhaps the censors wanted to remove the words from books for those moments when teachers read these books aloud to a classroom. Kids are going to laugh, of course, but they might also look around the room for examples of those words, and further ostracize them or make the other kids feel ostracized.

My guess is that Puffin, the sensitivity readers, and the movement to censor books believe that if we can change the words kids use, in their formative years, those words might be out of sight, out of mind for the rest of their lives. We tried that, I would argue, for years, decades, and centuries. We tried to institute conformity of thought, censorship through public outrage against the use of obscenities, and we now acknowledge that that not only were those efforts ineffective, they actually proved counterproductive.

We can take offensive words out of books, but we cannot take them out of the mouths of babes on the playground or in the households around the world. Kids may not hear obscenities or insulting descriptions of others in some households, in their formative years, but households vary a great deal around the world. Even those raised in the optimum households, will eventually hear these terms for the first time. What happens when a kid hears a derisive term, or an obscenity, for the first time? What happens when there are no adults around to soften the blow for them when they do hear them? Removing these words is not the answer, in my humble opinion. Censorship might even be counterproductive, as removing words, even temporarily, only grants the words more of a taboo nature, and kids love violating taboos.

The best way to handle derogatory words, or swear words, if we hope that our kids don’t use those words regularly, is to try to somehow drain the words of their taboo nature. The person who can do this better than any sensitivity reader, publisher, or even a teacher, is the child’s parents. Every kid is different, and every kids’ parents are different, but there are numerous ways in which a parent can influence their child in day-to-day interactions, and the primary one is through example. Therein lies the key, not some publisher dictating what a child can or cannot read.

When I attempt to encourage friends and family to avoid swearing around my child, they’re embarrassed when they slip, but they add the line all adults do when they accidentally swear in front of a child, “He’s going to hear them anyway, and he’s eventually going to say them.” They’re right, of course, but I respond, “Well, he won’t hear them from me, one of the two most dominant influences in his life, and I would hope he doesn’t hear them from you either, because you have some influence on him too.” The question on both fronts is, again, what happens when he eventually hears these words? What happens when that child eventually hears the terms fat and ugly? He may not read them in Roald Dahl’s books, thanks to Puffin, but he will eventually. Will these “words you cannot say” efforts, prevent him from using them, or will his desire to find a way to define his independence from authority lead him to use them in a way that helps him define his maturity in the manner kids and teenagers naturally do?

If I were sitting in on Puffin board, I would remind them about the various obscenity laws we tried to enforce, and all of the other attempts to remove obscenities from the town square. I would ask them if any of them were successful? That question might elicit some giggles. “Exactly,” I would say. “I think we can all admit after all these years, that they were actually counterproductive.” The more effort religious puritans put into attempting to control our language, the more counterproductive it turned out being. How many times was Lenny Bruce arrested for his public use of obscenities? How many fights did George Carlin get into with the FCC over the years over the use of seven dirty words? How much power did these public seals of disapproval end up granting these words?

Some students of culture suggest that some of our most obscene words date back to the days of Geoffrey Chaucer and William Shakespeare. If that’s true, they weren’t very powerful back then. How did they amass such power over the last eighty years? I don’t know if my grandparents used such words, but I’m sure they knew of them. To my knowledge, they didn’t used them, even when I was not around. I know my parents used them, as I heard them used them to punctuate pain, frustration, and sometimes even humor, but they didn’t use them as casually as I did. I don’t think they ever heard or used these words so often that they eventually lost their taboo, as they did in my generation and beyond. Those efforts to inform us what words we cannot say were routinely mocked, ridiculed and soundly defeated. If we were to go on a timeline in which Bruce and Carlin never existed, would these words have as power as they do now, or was it an eventuality that would’ve occurred as our society grew courser? If Bruce and Carlin never existed, I think someone would’ve stepped into that vacuous hole and fueled the power of those words.

Those who fail to know history are doomed to repeat it. If we view the Roald Dahl episode as a war on words on par with the war against obscenity, we could say that the wars are basically the same, but the combatants have flipped sides. My guess is that the sensitivity warriors would’ve been in the “Freedom of expression” wars the Bruce/Carlin camp waged in the 50’s to the 70’s, but they’ve swapped uniforms in the modern era, and they wear different nobility badges on their lapels. The powers that be, in the 50’s to the 70’s fought for a more puritanical society, and they failed miserably. The powers that be in 2023 fight for a more virtuous society, and virtuous and puritanical are synonyms.

The effort to convince kids not to think in various terms such as ‘fat’ and ‘ugly’ is so similar to the war against obscenity that they strike me as similar to the psychologists who say don’t think pink. If they tell kids not to think pink, pink will be the only thing on their minds.

John Coltrane is a Bad Guy

December 26, 2022February 12, 2024 RilalyLeave a comment

“John Coltrane is a bad guy,” they say. “He’ll be whoever you want him to be, when you talk to him, and all that, but the one thing that you should keep in the back of your mind is that he’s just a bad person.”

“I don’t think that’s true,” we say.

“If he’s not a bad guy,” they say, “Who is?”

“It’s complicated.”

“It’s not complicated,” they say. “He steals money, because he wants more of it. He hurts people too. Some bad guys say they aren’t afraid to hurt anyone who stands in the way. It’s more than that for John Coltrane. He enjoys it, and he always has.”

“John Coltrane is a victim of circumstance,” we say. “Have you heard him talk about his childhood. His upbringing makes Oliver Twist read like a day at an amusement park, “and nobody ever talks about any of that,” he says. I think he’s right.”

“If he’s not outright lying about his circumstances,” they say. “He’s exaggerating. He’s not a victim of circumstance, unless we count the circumstances of his own making. He doesn’t steal, hurt people, and kill to support a cause, and he’s not poor or hungry, and he never has been. He’s not desperate to feed his children. He doesn’t have any. He tells us he has a son. He doesn’t have a son. He’s lying. That’s what bad guys do?”

“Why would anyone lie about something like that, something easily disproved?”

“That’s what bad guys do.”

“What does he gain?”

“He studies us,” they say. “He studies us a culture, and us individually. He tells us the tale we most want to hear. Has he ever prodded you? He prods me all the time, going deeper and deeper into an issue. I don’t think he prods to find weaknesses. I think that’s just what he does, but he uses the weaknesses he finds later. Finding our weaknesses is a byproduct of his constant prodding. The ‘I need to provide for my kid’ narrative is a powerful one, because it garners all types of empathy and sympathy from people like you.

“As for the more general search for truth,” they continue, “I don’t think he cares about what we call the truth, to be quite honest with you. I think he’s beyond caring about all that, or what we think the truth is. When we catch him fudging the truth, you know what he says? He says something along the lines of, “All right, all right, if it’s not that, what about this? Have you ever considered this?” How does someone do that when you catch him in a bold, irrefutable lie? He does it. He does it all the time. I’ve caught him lying so many times that I no longer believe him. Others do. They continue to believe him even though they know he’s lying to him, they have to know, but he’s so charismatic and convincing that they want to believe him, which says more about them than it does him.”

“That is fascinating,” we say. “I’m not saying I agree, because I don’t know him as well as you do, but it’s fascinating to think that even the modern bad guy learns that he has to change with the times. We all have figurative schemes of thought. When we create a vision of the future, for example, the audience expects some characteristics, flying cars, over population, and corporate monoliths constructed in a manner that makes them look creepy. We also expect some sort of corporate takeover of the planet that removes homes and anything green to feed the corporate monster. Ok, but who’s going to give the corporation money if it takes all the city blocks and drives out the innocent people, its consumer base. The answer obviously is, the corporate monster doesn’t need money in the future, and it doesn’t need people to run it anymore. It is now a self-serving monolith. This is supposed to be a horrifying view of the future, and the movie makers provide guidance for how to avoid this dystopian future, but it makes no sense to me. The same is true with the modern bad guy. The modern bad guy doesn’t do anything but sit around and be evil. He might look and act creepy, and he might promise to do evil things, but he doesn’t do any of them. Every time he appears, creepy music ensues, and we’re convinced he’s a bad guy, but he doesn’t actually do anything incredibly evil to them.

“Similarly Our definition of the modern bad guy requires that he follow all of the societal norms as best he can. The trope is that he can’t, because he doesn’t know any better, or he won’t, because he’s a bad guy, but the character adjusts to what the audience wants from a bad guy to fulfill their figurative schemes of thought. What the audience appears to want now is a bad guy who doesn’t do anything but sit there and be spooky. I was watching a fictional horror movie in which the bad guy kidnaps a kid, but he didn’t do anything to the kid, because that would’ve been too over the top for most audiences. So, he sat in another room with a weird mask on and acted spooky. We could probably say that everything, pro and con, boils down to John Coltrane’s youth,” we say. “You say he’s a liar, thief, and worse. I’ve known liars and thieves, and they, like Coltrane, often talk about how dumb and stupid they were. Coltrane often talks about how incredibly naïve he was, and how he found it so embarrassing.”

“Weren’t we all,” they say. “Didn’t we all stand at proverbial forks in the road. Didn’t we make decisions along the way that led us to where we are today? Didn’t we all have friends and family who point and counterpointed us to death? Did you ever have that guy, some guy you worked with at a dive restaurant, who told you everything you needed to know about the world from some deeply cynical and awful pocket of the world, his world? He told you that the world you were about to enter into was one big moral equivalence? Did you believe them, or did you see him as an embittered old man who got rolled over in life? Our lives are dotted with points and counterpoints from friends and family, and embittered dishwashers. Who takes advice from a forty-year-old who isn’t cut out for anything better in life than being a dishwasher. They have it all figured out, right? Some people, like John Coltrane, romanticize their notions so much that they begin to believe them. They think they’re cool and funny, and that they’ve unlocked some truths about life they’ve never heard before. If those who cared about him gave him counterpoints to correct the path he was headed down, he either didn’t hear them, or he decided not to abide them.”

“And you think John listened to them so much that he developed a life’s philosophy around them?” we ask.

“Philosophy is a stretch,” they say. “I don’t think John Coltrane ever developed a philosophy. I think he’s more of a code fella. Whether right or wrong, a philosophy involves a deeper understanding of complicated, almost literary grasp of the way the world works. People like John Coltrane don’t have philosophies, they have codes. It’s a fine distinction, I’ll admit, but a code might be, be nice to your mother, don’t poop where you eat, and don’t eat yellow snow. People like Coltrane prefer superficial, cinematic sophistry that everyone from your best friend to your aunt Donna says to get you to laugh. Deep, complicated, and conflicted bad guys with a philosophical understanding of human nature and the way the world works are a reflection on modern writers hoping readers see the same in them. Their bad guy chracters have vast amounts of knowledge that leads some of us to say, “If he’s so smart, why didn’t he land himself some sort of prosperous career?” No, most criminals are rejected by the greater digestive system of the world, until they fall out the rectum a professional dishwasher, or whatever job title John Coltrane gives himself.”

“I’ll admit I don’t know John Coltrane as well as you,” we say, “but he does have a deep philosophical take on life. I’ve heard it in the hours we’ve spent together. He has a good head on his shoulders, especially when it comes to self-importance. He asked me the other day, ‘who’s the most important person in your life?’ I gave him some answer I thought he wanted to hear. He said ‘Wrong, bongo, you should be the most important person in your life. Who is most affected by your decisions?’ I like that general thread, because it’s so unique in the modern era.”

“Hey, you’re not going to get me to say there’s something wrong with self-importance,” they say, “but at what point does it become delusional narcissism? We were all innocent and naïve at one point, and we were chiseled by the world around us. Some of us developed strong minds that could recognize the wrong read for what it was, and some of us didn’t. Some of us corrected our errors, and some of us developed excuses for who we are, but others just lash out at the world around them.”

“It’s the latter that really gets to me,” we say. “I don’t get the lashing out at the world in general. Let’s say you see an otherwise innocent bystander walking down the street by themselves. What prompts you, a relatively sound individual to rob him to rectify what everyone did to you as a kid? How would a John Coltrane square that?”

“Coltrane’s a big guy, tall, broad-shouldered, and all that, so my bet is no one would dare ask him that question,“ they say. “If they had, he’d have an answer. That answer might be meaningless to us as it is to him. It might deal with the general idea of innocence “Nobody is innocent,” is something his type often says. Here’s the most fundamental characteristic of John Coltrane that you need to know before you get to know him. The man always has an answer. If you asked him the question you just asked me, he’d give you an answer. He might give you an answer that strikes you as profound but strikes you as gibberish later, or vice versa. That answer would also be as meaningless to him as it is to him, and it might change if you ask him it a month later, or however long it takes for him to forget the first answer he gave you. Regardless the answer, he always has an answer. There’s always a quick, off the cuff answer that leads you to believe that he’s given this a lot of thought. He hasn’t. He just answers the question.

“The comedy comes into play when the question of morality arises,” they continue. “John Coltrane knows moral values. He has codes by which he thinks everyone should live, if they want their society and culture to advance. He might even have a long, engaging conversation with your paragon of virtue, your dad, and your dad might find him so pleasant and respectful, and right. The two of them might share so many principles and values, over that steaming bowl of soup, that a friendship could develop. The idea that he doesn’t display his own values doesn’t seem to faze him in the least. If you called him a hypocrite, he’d have an answer. He always has an answer. The most important thing to him in life is finding happiness, and he doesn’t care what he has to do to get it. He’s just a bad guy.”