George Carlin: A Philosopher for Our Times

The first political button I ever owned said QUESTION AUTHORITY. I was sixteen when I got it back in 1969 and it's been my mantra ever since, so naturally, when the irreverent, authority challenging Mr. Carlin came on the comedy scene in the early 70's he became one my counter culture icons.

He not only questioned authority, he beat the hell out of it. There were no sacred cows; politics, religion, race, sex, drugs, mainstream culture, the media, nothing was safe from his satirical sarcasm. Not since the untimely, but totally predictable demise of Lenny Bruce has a comedian been so up in the face of America.

But what I admired most about George was his use of words, at first to shock us, then to get us to look closer at their meanings and manipulations. He showed us how we were being controlled by consumerism, celebrity worship, the media, the government and and the growing corporatization of the world. Ironically, for a comedian, he was the voice of sanity crying out in the wilderness.

Last night my husband and I were watching Carlin's 2005 video, paradoxically entitled Life Is Worth Losing, and raising a few glasses to mourn his passing. As the credits rolled I commented that his death was unfortunate since we needed his kind of insight even more now than ever. "Yep," my husband said, "he was the Socrates of our time."

Since my husband is quite the Greek and Roman scholar, and my only memory of Socrates was the hemlock incident, I Googled Socrates and found that he and George did indeed have a lot in common. Socrates was renown for his contibutions to the field of ethics and lends his name to the concepts of Socratic irony in which a series of questions are asked not only to draw individual answers, but to encourage fundamental insight into the issue at hand. His pupil, Plato, refered to him as "the gadfly of the state" because of his questioning of the Athenian government, which ultimately led to his death sentence via the hemlock.

As rude and crude as Carlin was in the 70's and 80's he did indeed seem to mellow over time, becoming more thoughtful and yes, philisophical. His humor and insight will be sorely missed in these trying times we are going through.