All Hail The Prophets : George Orwell and George Carlin
America Has Been Officially Sold Into The New World Order, And Your Membership Isn't Optional
Update 5-25-2022
I highly recommend this doc on HBO Max about George Carlin.
I wasn’t aware at the time I wrote this that the doc was available to stream.
There are aspects of his career and personal life I had no knowledge about, despite being a lifetime fan, and I felt quite enlightened and inspired after watching.
The depth of George Carlin as an artistic and political voice will certainly be missed at a time when we need him NOW more than ever.
My ultimate takeaway: Don't back away from being yourself, expressing your artistic, and ESPECIALLY, political voice, by saying what you think.
Tailoring yourself to appeal to an audience is soul and career-destroying.
In the early 70’s, I had discovered FM Radio, which, if you were part of the times, was a gateway to awakening and awareness of a true artistic counterculture.
I had been hearing, through my cool friends, and the even cooler progressive radio station WOWI 103 FM in Norfolk, a comedian named George Carlin.
The seminal document of Carlin’s brilliant and hilarious takes on contemporary culture, politics, and being a lapsed Catholic, for me, was a 12-inch vinyl record called FM/AM.
George, as most people learned over his long, prolific career, was fascinated with language, meaning, and words. Just like brilliant musicians used instrumental Jazz and Rock soloing on various instruments to speak in a different language, George’s “solos” were done by hilarious contemplation of the diverse meaning of individual words and phrases, dissected with a fine-tooth comb in his comedic monologs. Ironic that, in a new era of revived censorship, propaganda, and disinformation, the YouTube audio documentation of FM/AM contains a parental warning for language. That was the legacy left by the PMRC hearings in the eighties.
Consider that when I bought the album in the early 1970s, these “warning stickers” were not only not required, they simply did not exist as a mandate of law. That trend would soon change with Carlin’s direct involvement in the “Seven Dirty Words” case, based on a legal complaint to the FCC. It went all the way to the Supreme Court.
It says something about the regression of freedom of speech that the recorded document of a standup comedian in 1971 would be flagged with a need for possible censorship in 2022. I can’t imagine, for example, my parents taking away a record that I spent hours listening to and laughing over. The loss of George Carlin as an intellectual and comedic influence would have been profound.
George may have laughed, or more likely, yelled out in anger at the irony, that after spending a lifetime preaching to people not to fear language, and opposing censorship, the government finally clamped down harder in 2022, and in a nod to George Orwell, created its own version of the Ministry Of Truth.
Perhaps the most well-known and famous monolog from Carlin that still circulates online is one loosely known as “The Big Club”. After decades of writing, exhaustive touring, performance, dealing with old age, and having kept serious drug addiction at bay, if not tamed, George had no time for yuks. Carlin had lost faith in the government, and human beings as a species. This wasn’t an entertainer’s warm regard for the audience, but more of an assault. Truth is always harsh medicine. Take a moment if you haven’t heard it to listen to what George had to say about the state of things in America. NOTHING has changed.
Longtime fans of George Carlin may have been excused for thinking that George was, frankly, getting old and cranky. What was he talking about, referring to the “real” owners of the country? This was more like a dire warning than comedic entertainment, and in fact, George likely knew, due to health issues and age, that he had limited time to get the message out. He predicted, within this high tension monolog, everything that is happening in May of 2022.
If it’s not apparent by now, it should be alarmingly clear: the government of the United States has officially enacted the will of “The Big Club” and sold us all down the river. The daily assault of outrage that pours forth from social media is unsettling and unending. How could it not be? Anecdotally speaking, things are bad. The owners and the stooge politicians that speak for them, want you to believe otherwise.
If you are like me, you are reeling and dizzy. There is no solid direction to head towards, because, at least for people who care about something besides their credit rating and the latest entertainment offerings, life is getting grim. Planning for the future seems, at best foolhardy, and definitively uncertain. Call us doomists if you will, but we see a rollercoaster careening off the tracks, and we’re just trying to make sense of it all for our individual and collective sanity.
As we have heard over the last few weeks, in unceasing, unending narratives propped up by the media owners with a lifetime membership in “The Big Club”, US involvement in provoking an existential global conflict in Ukraine is exclusively altruistic, good, and righteous.
Just weeks ago, the standard procedure was to hide conflicts of interest if any “expert” in “Defense”, War, or Geopolitical Strategy was interviewed on television. For example, just recently, former Secretary Of Defense Leon Panetta was seen on several prominent cable news outlets literally POUNDING the message of the necessity for the escalation of weapons into Ukraine like a religious evangelist with a high fever. Compliant anchors and media stenographers, unified in collective thought like The Borg on Star Trek, ask the same leading question: What more can “we” do? as if the average citizen had ANY say in tempering the headlong rush to war and possible extinction. There is only one definition of “more”, and that means more money for larger weapons stockpiles. This message was broadcast on other outlets with other-self-interested parties as well. What remained hidden was their personal investments in stocks, salaries, or literal careers in the Military-Industrial Complex.
That flimsy pretense is over. It should be cause for extreme alarm, and pushback, that, at a time when the US is economically strained, and inequality and uncertainty are at perhaps the highest level EVER, Biden has committed an obscene amount of the national wealth towards the manufacture of death and destruction. A compliant Democratic House, including “progressive” members of “The Squad”, voted for 40 Billion dollars to be spent with Raytheon and Lockheed Martin. Of course, the media, and government, are careful to frame it as “aid”, yet MOST of it is not humanitarian relief, just Javelins, and Stingers and launching platforms.
The owners have issued their orders, and the orders are to engage, destroy, and cripple Russia and Putin by fighting a proxy war using Ukraine as the battleground. The goal is the destruction of the Ruble and the final dominance of the American Petrodollar.
Consider this recent interview on “Face The Nation” one of the antiquated and ubiquitous Sunday talk shows, a relic of the times when the “Big Three” television networks ruled information distribution with radio and the printed newspaper. In the cool, elegant, sterile environment of a TV studio, where feathers are never ruffled, CBS News simply disposed of objectivity like so much trash and directly interviewed the CEO of Lockheed Martin. No hiding conflicts of interest, this was, to my knowledge, completely unprecedented. It was a literal advertisement for Lockheed Martin, and by default, the MIC, set up with obviously scripted, leading questions. “How quickly, the anchor asks, (without any sense of irony that she is as much an official spokesperson for Lockheed as the CEO is), can you scale up production? There is no context, pushback, no follow-up, it’s just a given that more weapons must, and need to be produced with speed and haste.
To add insult to common sense and morality, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi rose to the occasion by making a genuinely deceptive and cynical analogy of Ukrainian weapons procurement as being the equivalent of Biblical charity. Pelosi quoted the Gospel of Matthew “When I Was Hungry You Fed Me”. This isn’t Michael Jackson-style charity to feed Africa, despite Pelosi’s failed attempt to characterize it that way. It’s a giveaway to her corporate benefactors. It’s the failed morality of a legislative body that profits from insider stock trading in Defense and other stocks, a reward from the “owners”.
Of course, adding to the anxiety of day-to-day life in this disinformation hellscape is the repeal of women’s rights to bodily autonomy. This is something that has provoked justified outrage among women, and the backlash is fierce. Men, IMHO, shouldn’t have any say in determining what is clearly a woman’s right to choose. It’s wielding morality as a power play. It’s primitive and regressive. It seemed when the decision on Roe v. Wade was issued in 1973 (the same time George Carlin was fighting for free speech and against government censorship) that, as decades have long since passed, this would not be an issue in the 21st Century. As with many things, the government is becoming increasingly authoritative and regressive, serving powerful interests.
The Republicans while overtly controlling, fascist, and authoritarian, at the very least, don’t pretend to be advocates for women or the average citizen in word and enemies in deed. The performative political theater of a Senate vote to codify Roe and protect these rights, as Biden and the Democrats have promised for years, predictably failed. The Democrats, cynically, are using this failure to distract the public, and more importantly, to lobby and serve the interests of the powerful donor class. 2022 is not a lock electorally and the daily failures of the Biden administration are provoking increasing anger.
Speaking of feigned advocacy, being houseless, or home insecure, in an economy with increasing inflation and supply chain problems, is a topic that seems verboten. The only dialog allowed within the celebratory orgy of war spending and the addition of “jobs” is good news where very real problems are spun out of existence. The owners that George Carlin warned us about are adept at making bad things worse, and we now see the greediest of capitalists buying up entire communities. What struggling individual could possibly compete with that? We, who are economically struggling, are like Orwell’s character, Winston Smith, vainly trying to hold on to individualism against a collective, in the form of Wall Street hedge funds backed by Goldman Sachs, buying up housing and inflating rent. Homeownership in this climate is going to be, if not already, impossible. RENTING is impossible. The party in power, of course, has nothing to say about that or food insecurity. They are too busy spinning positive economic news that has no basis in reality.
Lately on social media, in a sort of ADD-addled hypnotic trance, I have been trying to sort out the truth. I have gravitated to YouTube where the algorithm takes me to the unpleasant realities espoused by economists and preppers. The prepping community deserves a better reputation. Now that the convergence of the Climate Crisis, drought, lack of trucking parts, inflation, food scarcity, and the annihilation of Western civilization as we know it are very real possibilities, they make sense. Preppers in 2022 are not wild-eyed survivalists with a penchant for stockpiling weapons but seem to be empathetic human beings reaching out with truth and tips for survival. One thing is for certain, you are not going to get the truth from any party or political class within the government. They are aligning for global war and only the members in the “Big Club” are going to make it out alive.
I can picture George Carlin nodding in agreement.
Late Edit: (05/13/2022) Check out this article by Dan Froomkin from Responsible Statecraft on the CBS News interview I mentioned above.
“After hearing from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi — who called for “more weapons, more sanctions” — and Ukrainian Ambassador to the U.S. Oksana Markarova — who asked for “more military support, more sanctions” — “Face the Nation” host Margaret Brennan warmly welcomed Jim Taiclet, the chairman and CEO of Lockheed Martin, tossing him questions that weren’t even softballs, they were bouquets.”