George Carlin: Political Animal

"These days many politicians are demanding change. Just like homeless people."

George Carlin 1937 - 2008

Even die-hard Obamaholics have to appreciate the irony in that joke. George Carlin's biography has been plastered all over the airwaves and the newspapers the last few days. Most of it is concerned with a chronological ordering of his accomplishments - you can check out any of the major news networks if you want a blow by blow of his life story. From where I sit, his relentless questioning of the status quo - "taking it to 'The Man'" - gave him his counterculture persona, but it was the inventive way in which he examined our everyday lives that made him famous.

"Well, if crime fighters fight crime and fire fighters fight fire, what do freedom fighters fight? They never mention that part to us, do they?"

I saw him in the eighties, when he came to my college to do one of those shows the student union put with the student dues they collected. I'd never heard of him. One of my pals from Detroit was incredulous. "You've never seen Carlin? Man, you would REALLY like him! He's more intellectual than the average comedian, dude. I CAN'T BELIEVE you've never heard Carlin!"

We went to the show, and Carlin was as advertised - his riff on "the importance of stuff" is still funny. He was only just turning fifty one but he already looked old, with the graying ponytail, the gonzo beard, and his trademark black outfit.

"This country was founded by a group of slave owners who wanted to be. Am I right? A group of slave owners who wanted to be free! So they killed a lot of white English people in order to continue owning their black African people, so they could wipe out the rest of the red Indian people, in order to move west and steal the rest of the land from the brown Mexican people, giving them a place to take off and drop their nuclear weapons on the yellow Japanese people. You know what the motto for this country ought to be? 'You give us a color, we'll wipe it out.'"

Carlin was as much a political animal as he was a comedian. A self-avowed atheist, in later years his comedy seemed to be one long rant against religion and government.

"Now, there's one thing you might have noticed I don't complain about: politicians. Everybody complains about politicians. Everybody says they suck. Well, where do people think these politicians come from? They don't fall out of the sky. They don't pass through a membrane from another reality.

They come from American parents and American families, American homes, American schools, American churches, American businesses and American universities, and they are elected by American citizens. This is the best we can do folks. This is what we have to offer. It's what our system produces: Garbage in, garbage out.

If you have selfish, ignorant citizens, you're going to get selfish, ignorant leaders. Term limits ain't going to do any good; you're just going to end up with a brand new bunch of selfish, ignorant Americans. So, maybe, maybe, maybe, it's not the politicians who suck. Maybe something else sucks around here... like, the public. Yeah, the public sucks. There's a nice campaign slogan for somebody: 'The Public Sucks. F*ck Hope.'"

As sour as Carlin's joke sounds, though, in real life, in a March interview at Huffington Post, Carlin professed "Yes, I think the Obama story is an inspirational story, it's a wonderfully unique American story and it's exciting and fun to watch but even if he's elected and makes a lot of changes I still retain the right not to belong. I just like it out here."

Even though Carlin loved being anti-everything, I figured a guy like him would be on the O-Train.

Obama: Metaphorically Black or Literally Black?

Surfing through the political-oriented blogs Sunday, I tried to get a sense of the reactions to Hillary Clinton’s concession speech. Frankly, I was surprised by the number of comments from those who still didn’t think Barack Obama was "black" enough to lay claim to being the first African American presidential nominee of a major political party.

The fact that he was raised by his white mother, his Indonesian stepfather, and his two white grandparents has convinced these holdouts that Obama’s upbringing disqualifies him from the right to claim to be African American.

Of all the things we as black people have done to ourselves since we’ve been in America, none of them is more preposterous than this need to authenticate ourselves through this imaginary, ill-conceived litmus test, a measurement whose many permutations all contain the same common denominators – to have experienced at some time during your life a certain amount of shared suffering, poverty, or poverty-level subsistence.

But if the properties of "whiteness" are mostly mythical constructs, then the opposite must also be true – this thing we know as "blackness" is more circumstantial than factual, more anecdotal than fundamental.

If you are black today in America, you are:

More likely to be found on the internet than at a dogfight.

More likely to shop at Home Depot than at a swap meet.

More likely to wear a pair of Dockers than a pair of baggy jeans.

More likely to repair a crack in the driveway than sell crack on the corner.

More likely to contribute to a 401(k) than collect welfare.

More likely to live in a suburb than in a ghetto.

It is an "otherness" that a young, beige-skinned Obama experienced, growing up in mostly all-white environments, an"otherness" that all of us who look like minorities share. This is what qualifies his claim to be an authentic black American. The outsider perspective is a valid common characteristic of African Americans. It is the way an individual has been forced to see the world and how the world has decided to perceive him that binds us, not how much grape Kool-Aid we drank as a child.

Questioning any of the conventional wisdoms that underpin the belief systems of the mythical "authentic" African American prototype can still bring from some quarters an instant arching of incredulous eyebrows, or an immediate fluttering of fingertips across keyboards, both actions radiating a deep loathing towards anyone even daring to think about re-imagining the darker nation. To these holdouts, both black and white, the melanin in a Obama’s skin, a signifier that automatically awards him "outsider" status in the United States, is not sufficient enough to allow him to claim allegiance to his own community.

If we can agree that a culture can be shaped - that it can retain some characteristics and discard others over the passage of time - then I will be pushing mightily to throw away the dogfighting, the crack selling and the ghetto dwelling that we have been passing off as black american culture lately. These negative images we have raised to the level of cultural signifiers are a type of metaphorical posing, a commitment to "keeping it real" that ignores the literal truths we see before our very own eyes everyday.