Blogs

     Joseph Heller, Ken Kesey, George Harrison, Arthur Miller, Hunter S. Thompson, Rodney Dangerfield, Ray Charles, Kurt Vonnegut, Molly Ivins, Richard Pryor, Johnny Cash, and Utah Phillips are among the great artists and visionaries who died over the last decade that I never had the chace to meet.  Now another one of my heroes has given up the ghost before I had the opportunity to meet him and say thanks for all the entertainment and his valuable contribution to humanity.

     As a child from a Republican background, George Carlin was one of the influences that helped me to see through all the bullshit of modern society (along with Mad Magazine and some of my more radical teachers) and helped shape me into the healthy skeptic that I am today.  Whether he was exposing church hypocrisy, attacking government doublespeak and incompetence, lampooning shallow consumer culture, ridiculing war mongers, or tirading against all doomed enterprises based upon greed, ignorance, and stupidity, George Carlin did it with a sharp wit and blunt language that to me was mesmerizing, enlightening, appealing to my love of the language, and inspiring to my sense of creativity.

     Now that he's dead (not gone, expired, or with the angels; Carlin hated euphemisms), I've been reading articles about him online, watching reminiscences about him on Larry King from some of his disciples (Bill Maher, Jerry Seinfeld, Lewis Black and Roseanne), hearing tributes from other comedians as well as his family, and I've finally had a chance to ponder his career in its entirety and appreciate its magnitude.  Carlin produced an immense amount of work that is not only funny and entertaining, but is also a record and critical analysis of the U.S., its inhabitants, and the world at large for the past 50 years.

     George Carlin has died and left us...the seven dirtiest words of all.