Dear George Carlin,

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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.  

My Advice, Don’t Follow my Advice

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“Try to find someone nice!” is the advice I give young uns. They won’t listen, and we know they won’t, because we know we didn’t. We had to get over our attraction to the naughty first. The naughty are just more fun and fascinating, and they’re mean. No matter how hard “they” try to redefine funny, mean is just funny, when it’s not directed at us of course. Their violations of social protocols and etiquette, aren’t just funny they’re relatively informative, in the sense that their exaggerations of the opposite teach us a lot about ourselves. Nice comes in very low on our mate-o-meter when we’re young. Nice usually comes after all the bad boys and girls beat us down.

“I don’t want to play games,” we scream, they scream, and we all scream for ice cream. “I hate the games people play, and I try to avoid drama.” Then why did you date them? We dated them, because even though they were jackballs to everyone else, they were actually pretty nice to us, for a time and in small doses, and that made us feel special. We also enjoyed the vicarious attachments people made with us when we were around the mean and naughty. After dating those who made us laugh so hard that we cried, and cried so hard we laughed, we eventually decided to go out with someone who did nothing more than say something nice to us while we were watching TV with them, someone who appeared to enjoy cleaning the living room with us, and preparing a barbecue for a family reunion. We found ourselves opting for the stability and sanity of the nice. Some might call that boring, and that’s fine with us after everything we’ve been through. My advice is to date the tumultuous types for all of the excitement and fun they bring, but make sure to break things off before you start hearing substantial calls for commitment.

Save Your Money, Man, Save Your Money   

Those wild, good times cost money too, and the good times never last as long as we think. It’s Oh-So-Good right now, and we have no reason to believe it won’t last.

Someone pays us, and we don’t deserve it. We earn it! We earn it every day, and in every way. We work as hard as we play, but there will come a day when that will fade away, and things will happen. Things always happen, that’s the thing about things. They slap us from so many different directions that some of them aren’t even listed on Google Maps. What happened?

Save your money man. Save for that day. “Save 10% of every paycheck,” they say. Others suggest we save the equivalent of three-months of our salary. Both those figures are low, far too low for me, but I’m a saver. Most people can’t, or won’t, save, and living the spartan lifestyle in the present just seems like a waste of life. Carpe diem, seize the day, and save until the end of the year. When we do the latter, and it’s “all good”, we blow it all. 10% and three-months salary is a decent compromise for them. “It’s just money,” they say, “and I would rather live a life of fun and adventure than have a nest egg. Plus, isn’t money the root of all evil?” It is, if you have it. When we don’t, we see it as the necessity it is, and we learn the definition of penniless powerlessness. We’ll also learn what it feels like to depend on others for everything, and dependency can be humiliating. It almost makes us feel like a child all over again. My advice, do everything you can now, when times are good, to avoid slipping into that spiral.    

We should’ve and could’ve spotted the spiral before it started to swirl. We know that now, and we see the pivot points now that could’ve changed it? If we had the foresight, we never would’ve gone left instead of right or right instead of left, at that crossroad.

Think about where we would be right now if we had some foresight? If I only applied for that job/promotion that I didn’t think I was qualified for, but I probably was. I mean look who ended up getting it. If I had older siblings, better parents, and I made more friends, or dated more often just think what I could be now. And college, college! If I paid more attention in college, my life would be oh-so different. We can’t stop thinking about how that person, equally qualified, landed our dream job or promotion, because they threw a relatively worthless degree in basket weaving at the “theys”. The best explanation I’ve heard for why this happens is that attaining that sheepskin displays perseverance.

Experience teaches us two things, college degrees don’t mean as much as we thought they did, and it’s better to have one than not. But, and there’s always a butt, how many of us would probably be in almost-the-exact-same-space we’re in right now, if we attained the golden ticket? How different are the lives of the college graduates in our peer group? Generally speaking, they got a job, and we got a job. Even with all that, there’s a super-secret part of us that thinks if we just paid more attention in Mr. Crippen’s Astronomy class, we could all be astrophysicists by now. It’s possible, of course, but it’s more likely that if our academic accomplishments landed us a job on the Starship Enterprise, we’d probably end up a red shirt sent to investigate the spiky colorful plants that shoot out deadly spores.

The Bonkers

Avoid “The Bonkers” if you can. Our parents introduced us to the Bonkers multiple times. The Bonkers were our parents’ friends, which pretty much means our parents were bonkers too, as opposites don’t always attract. Some of the times, people make friends because they share a worldview, and some of the times it’s happenstance, but commonalities often weave their way into friendships. The Bonkers have ideas about how the world works, and their ideas are always nuanced approaches that are subjective to their worldview, fascinating, and wrong. If my parents were bonkers-free, they would’ve stepped up on The Bonkers at some point and said, “Hold on, that, right there, is just insane. I know you’re not willing to die on that hill, but if the Chinese are correct in saying that every adult leaves a mark on a child, I don’t want that influencing my child.”  

The primary characteristic The Bonkers share is resentment. They have an explanation for why they didn’t achieve in the shadow of their boogeymen. They were the child who didn’t get enough attention, who became an adult that was cheated out of the system for a reason so bizarre they feel compelled to repeat that reality-shattering explanation at every outing. In reality, they didn’t have the talent, ingenuity, wherewithal or perseverance to make the big bucks, and they spent their lives characterizing, and re-characterizing, those who do. I met their boogeymen more than once, and I knew some of them. When I unmasked them, I learned they weren’t the boogeymen of The Bonkers’ resentful narratives. They didn’t have near the money, power, or influence detailed in The Bonkers’ tales, and they didn’t make calculated moves to hold the little guy down. They were just as insecure, normal, and common as the people telling their tales. To move these findings from slightly funny to hilarious, I learned that most boogeymen have their own boogeymen. 

One of the best little tidbits I’ve ever heard came from a total wreck of a person. She said, “You raise a child to a certain point, and no one knows  where that ends, but at another point you learn to stop raising them and start guiding them.”

Another friend of mine dropped this nugget, “The number one rule to parenting is to spend time with your children and be there for them. The best element of my dad’s inept parenting was that he always made time for me. He made so many missteps and unforgettable mistakes, but he was always there for me. You’re going to make mistakes with your kid, we all do, but if you spend time with them, it will edit and delete some, if not all, of your mistakes.” Time, in other words, heals all wounds. 

How much time do we have for them? How much time do we have in general? Most narcissists are so into “me time” that they should’ve entered that data into their reproduction algorithm before going down that hole. Is it more narcissistic to require more “me time” or more time? We don’t even know the definition of narcissism, but we’re all narcissists and none of us are. “Yeah, you’re talking about that other guy.” 

I’m a storyteller, and I tell stories the way others play chess. I appreciate the fact that readers want a streamlined point of focus, but I cannot help considering the other side. When someone provides me a story from their day, I immediately think about the other side. (For those who want friends in life, don’t do this. People don’t like this. They want you to side with them in their story.) Learned, intellectual types suggest that it’s impossible for us to be objective, this is what learned, intellectual types call hyperbole. Of course total objectivity is difficult to difficult to achieve, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to achieve it. Some don’t, and when I hear their stories, I can’t help but think about this situation from the other person’s perspective.  

When we tell our story, it’s filled with faults and variables. We’ve all had primrose paths and well-marked minefields on the map of our crossroads, and most of us chose the well-marked, yet uncharted minefields. When we detail for our children the ramifications and consequences of our actions, we conclude with, “But I know you’re not going to listen to me, because I didn’t listen to my dad. Your best scenario is to experience everything yourself, then remember what I said here today. If you learn to couple your experiences with my advice, as I did with my dad’s, you might turn out halfway decent.” He listens to me now, at this age. That will change, of course, but our job is not to build the structure, it’s to create a foundation from which they build.

Censorship Often Proves Counterproductive

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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.