“But there is a difference between holding complexity and refusing to hold anything at all. Jefferson was a slaveholder who wrote the words that made abolition possible.” Not just complexity, but paradox. When you simplify something complex, you get a caricature, a crude cartoon. When you ignore or are blind to the paradox, you eviscerate the inner dynamic that powers movement and hence the possibility of creative change—in other words, evolution. The process that Hegel called the dialectic.
In my simplistic mind, I liken this to eggs. I worked on a campaign to ban cage eggs and all the cruelty it entails. But I still bought them. As student, my excuse, was that I couldn't afford the 10x premium for free-range. But I still fought for the law change. Because I believed, as a society, we shouldn't have that choice. Eventually the law changed, prices stabilized because there was nobody cutting corners or undercuting the others, and now free range is the new normal. Democracy at work. Kinda like Mr. Jefferson, who had slaves, as was the norm of the time, but knew it wasn't right and worked to change it - it's not really a contradiction, just working with what you got. There ARE always good people. Just sometimes circumstances transpire to create a monster like Trump. Or Hitler. And we need to figure out how to prevent that.
Like sharing on FB. While I never buy anything directly from its ads, I do still find it a valuable tool to reach a lot of people. Working with what we've got, getting the word out to facilitate changing the system 🤷♀️
Yes, but you were taking action. As far as I know—and I’m no Jefferson scholar, mind you—while he planted the seeds by writing those words in the Declaration, he took no significant action to end slavery, before, during or after his presidency. He did not cultivate that plant. And while he expressed his view that the Indians were born moral equals, he regarded them as technological and cultural inferiors whose lands should be appropriated. What happened to their unalienable rights to liberty and the pursuit of happiness? Don’t get me wrong: what Jefferson did by planting those seeds was unprecedented and ultimately world-shattering. What he set in motion was too powerful to be contained by the social and cultural forms of his time; it had to break them.
"The left’s moral unseriousness—its performance of critique without commitment to repair—systematically dismantled the memory structures that would have inoculated the republic against exactly this kind of assault." The "left"? Come on. Which left? The left according to Fox News?
There is a part of the left, which you will encounter depending on which corners of the internet you trawl, that holds that the entire Western democratic project (not just the United States, but often with a special ire for that polity) is inherently illegitimate because it was founded largely by white men, who often owned slaves, with a highly restricted franchise, largely for the purposes of protecting property rights (and thus ensuring that the poor remain poor), and the reforms since are just window dressing on a fundamentally unjust foundation (and when they're peeled back even slightly all you see is naked fascism, because the system has always only ever been fascism with makeup) and everyone who fought and sacrificed to preserve that system was a dupe, a fool, or an enemy.
It has, as you say, some truth to it, but it often just boils down justification for a form of left-wing accelerationism, one in which, in contrast to the neo-reactionary right's accelerationism, the desired end result is some sort of Kropotkin-esque anarcho-communism.
EDIT: To the original point, it's not as widespread as outlets like FOX might have one believe, but it's also not the case that there's nobody who holds those sorts of views and it's just a strawman.
Blaming whites is a means to solidify separation of identity by apparent race, thus preserving the illusion of race and stalling the emergence of (post-racial) class consciousness. It makes the right very happy when anyone on the left helps them this way. We on the left have many useful idiots among us -- not a knock on their native intelligence; it's easy to get duped on this one.
Crikey. That's bleak. I prefer to think (hope) that the bulk of the people engaged in all that were still fundamentally good, just operating within the rules/norms of the time.
It's essentially the view that "anyone who disagrees with me is ontologically bad, evil and wrong". Owned slaves? Bad, evil, wrong, end of discussion. Excluded women or non-whites from full political participation? Bad, evil, wrong. Support private property rights (there is a distinction made here between private property and personal property, keep in mind) or any sort of social hierarchy? Bad, evil, wrong. So essentially everyone involved in forming those systems in the first place was bad, evil, and wrong in this view, and thus the systems are irredeemably tainted (and the rules/norms of the time were bad, evil, and wrong, and they might cite Nuremberg to say that "I was just following the norms" is not an excuse), and as I said above, this is just left-wing populist accelerationism.
Populists have great difficulty respecting the rule of law. If one listens to the explanations that they offer for their actions, a great deal of this reflects a bias toward concreteness in their thinking. They think the purpose of the rules is to stop bad people from doing bad things, but since they themselves are good people trying to do good things, they cannot see why they should be constrained by the rules. They have enormous difficulty treating themselves and the other political parties symmetrically. (Americans are currently being subjected to a non-stop display of this.) Unfortunately, as those of us who teach liberal political philosophy know, there is an essential feat of abstraction at the foundation of all liberal principles. John Stuart Mill described it as a rejection of the the “logic of persecutors”: “that we may persecute others because we are right... but they must not persecute us because they are wrong.”
Thank you for this insightful essay. I love George Carlin, too, but I never considered that his observations were a call to action. I am a leftist. There is an old folk song called “Love Me, I’m a Liberal” by Phil Ochs that also criticizes the left (particularly the comfortable, middle class left) for its criticisms without action. Your insight is really rich and I’ll read this again for deeper understanding. Yes, we owe a debt to our brothers and sisters who sacrificed. I came of age in the sixties and seventies and it was a transformative time when action got results particularly in civil rights, anti war, and environmental awareness. I believe that this regime will not last for long but it will not go down easy. My concern is that there is no vision of what comes next. A return to the “normal” republican/democrat, us or them system will only perpetuate the system Carlin criticized. We have to grow from here. We have to renovate the system. Our voting system sucks. Gerrymandering is corrupt. Citizens United is corrupt. The two party duopoly is corrupt. Much renovation could be achieved without constitutional amendments, but amendments may be required. We are a million miles from the civil cooperation necessary for deep system change. George Carlin showed us the problems. The question remains, is it even possible for Americans to see them and respond effectively?
I think a lot of things conspired to bring us to this point. Trump just filled the spot we all created for him. Yes it's screwed. And it'll take a long time to fix. But we have to start somewhere. Personally, I think it starts with responsibility. Mike said something a while back that I cling to. Democracy relies on participation. Those of us brought up in the selfish 80's didn't participate. We stopped teaching our kids the importance of politics and being involved. We prized individualism, rampant capitalism and thought market forces if left to themselves would be the arbiter - like some weird 'survival of the fittest' mantra. We though belonging and community and responsibility was old fashioned nonsense not fit for the computer age. Now we find ourselves in a world of selfishness, individualism, nihilism, hate, and general chaos. We need to go back to the start, back to our kids, and teach them the importance of society, and democracy, and paying attention, and journalism and not getting your news from TicTock and apps controlled by power-hungry oligarchs.
I read this slow and deeply. Each insight was profound and I let it drop inside me so I would not forget its wisdom. I want to read it ten more times so it sinks in.
I could absolutely understand what you meant about us on the left and how we paved the way to where we are now. That was hard to hear but rings very true.
And really the whole article was this way.
Now I will go find everything George Carlin ever said!
Agree. There's so much wisdom here I want to absorb it all. It makes me want to be a better person. I'm not rushing out to listen to Carlin, but I really strive to hear Mike's words - despite them stretching my humble mental abilities. The world would be a better place if more people were exposed to Mike's writing and made the effort to understand it and act on it.
"It is the refusal to let what you see change what you do. It is the deployment of sophistication in the service of paralysis." I think this is the current hallmark of modern life. We have traded comfort and inertia for less freedom.
Good article. As an adopted kid in a super religious and conservative family, I grew up fearful and scared. God and religion didn’t make sense to me. I wanted to dare to question God or not believe in him (if I didn’t believe in him), but I was also, believe it or not, scared of a lightening bolt coming out of the heavens and being punished for all my eternal sins. I survived religion! What I appreciated about Carlin is the way that he exposed all of the absurdities of God and religion in a simple, but intellectual and humorous way that helped me get past religious conditioning and my fears, to be the terrific human secularist I am today. One of his lines that has stayed in my head, can God create a rock so heavy that even he can’t lift it? I think he was raised a Catholic and said that he would try to come up with questions to stump the priests.
David, that question, "Can God create a rock so heavy that even he can’t lift it?" has an equivalent formulation without any reference to supernatural, deities etc, but is nevertheless important to ponder. There is a whole rigorious branch of mathematics which develops tools and proper framework to understand, among other things, "what is going on with this question". It does have practical applications, for example echoes of this question are in the foundations of contemporary cryptography (digital signatures etc) and, consequently but separately, the whole "crypto" business. Childlish questions designed to stump priests are sometmes profound and profitable.
Well, I guess we were not handed a finished product along with the Declaration and Constitution. That the country was actually divided even then, the "more perfect union" was not an accomplishment but a challenge. That history is not static; that morality is an ever-elusive call.
In my view, our head trips are our impediments, that we need to discover - or rediscover - that humans are so much more than thinking animals, ever capable of travesty and self-delusion so long as we hang out in that space between the ears. That our full-bodied evolutionary composition is actually for magnificent effect, should we dare to grown up. Inhabit the whole body and learn what it is to be human -- wise and informed far beyond mere belief.
When you criticize “the Left” you have to specify what and who you are talking about lest you slip into Bothsidesism.
Marxism is easy to criticize because its governing track record is abysmal. The Communist Manifesto is an embodiment of failure to acknowledge the Is/Ought problem as Marx goes on the whole tract about naming the problems in capitalism, inserting his version of socialism, communism as somehow inevitable and natural then ends with the sudden command to make the “inevitable” happen with the famous “WORKERS OF THE WORLD, UNITE!”
Marxism is notorious for identifying problems correctly but offering terrible solutions.
Postmodernism dissects thought itself, then invokes because of biases, you cannot impose any meta narrative as objective. This is not a terrible suggestion because of the chaos that ensues, but the question raised: “Why the hell not???”
It is a mirror image of the Is/Ought problem. Because we cannot determine what Is, we cannot construct Oughts.
That is a problem easy to defeat. It is at the very HEART of the Alt Right.
If there is no objective truth there is no justification of imposing your point of view on others. On the other hand, there is also no justification of NOT imposing your point of view on others! Might makes Right. We arrive at the Dark Enlightenment. The Natural Law is the Law of the Jungle.
The Truth is to be WON. Fought for every day. Impose your Truths so they flourish and all others perish. Objective truth is whatever is your Objective to MAKE true.
Carlin (you pegged him here) was the goat, and to think of what comedy has become since him (he would never have gone to Saudi Arabia like so many of our allegedly leading comic lights just did).
Like you I always thought of him not just as a comedian but as the stand-up philosopher, the first of a kind, beyond Richard Pryor and Lenny Bruce, that Mel Brooks named in History of the World.
I get what you’re saying here, just a few thoughts to add. I do not think Carlin is at all responsible for the shortcomings (perhaps) of the medium in which he operated and conveyed his truths. On the other hand, while comedy has gotten a bad rap for allowing people to laugh and return to their lives, I think it also has at least a potentially subversive quality for this reason.
You might not be giving the audience, including yourself, and Carlin enough credit for the importance of what he did, and the audience’s reception, even if there is no immediately traceable connection between his performances, the audience, and their relationship, and any “action” that any part of his audience took or has yet to take. We don’t know, for example, how many people in the streets of Minneapolis carry Carlin in their souls which propelled them to take the risks we are seeing them take.
The fact that you listened to Carlin’s albums when you were young (as, in 6th grade, I memorized and could recite his expanded list of words you can never say on TV from his Carnegie Hall show - my father, perhaps unwisely, let me watch it) is not inert. It helped form you and, I’d wager, did not have an insignificant impact on your decision to leave the tech and crypto scene and follow Thomas Paine toward the restoration of the republic. Carlin, as Lewis Lapham noted in his eulogy for him, worked in the tradition of Thomas Paine, which is to say, dissent.
Carlin’s cultivation of the “dissent” sensibility, and his audience’s receptivity to it, is important, and has a huge part to play in resurrecting the republic. Planting those seeds accordingly is, as you noted, especially early, a vital bequest.
The categories that most people define everything by make little sense to me. At 80 I’m a lifelong Republican who is only conservative in the sense that I believe in planning, being open minded and practical and not expecting so much of others that I fall into judgmental bitterness. I vote democratic and give to Democratic candidates to the extent that I am solicited by the Democratic Party for every conceivable level of candidacy from almost every state in the Union. The values of the 🫏s are congenitally appealing to me, but I I’ve never understood why those values are not sold on the basis of “we are all better off if we build a community that is healthy and well educated”. It amazes me that both parties are so vehemently critical of each other and also of themselves. I just don’t understand why people have to define themselves in terms of a group. It seems so unfree. Being a member of a party only seems useful to me in the sense that being an independent prohibits you, in many states, from voting in a primary. Identifying strongly with a group makes your ego rise and fall with their success in winning and messes up your mind.
I've felt for a while now that Jon Stewart is heavily implicated in everything you're talking about here. I consider him to be morally serious, with the exception of his understanding of his responsibility to the country. He always says he's just the guy that follows after puppets making crank calls. My guess is he can't see the responsibility he's brought upon himself by being a voice of moral clarity while also enabling inaction. People would follow him if he decided to get into politics. But he'd have to sacrifice whatever privacy he enjoys.
“But there is a difference between holding complexity and refusing to hold anything at all. Jefferson was a slaveholder who wrote the words that made abolition possible.” Not just complexity, but paradox. When you simplify something complex, you get a caricature, a crude cartoon. When you ignore or are blind to the paradox, you eviscerate the inner dynamic that powers movement and hence the possibility of creative change—in other words, evolution. The process that Hegel called the dialectic.
In my simplistic mind, I liken this to eggs. I worked on a campaign to ban cage eggs and all the cruelty it entails. But I still bought them. As student, my excuse, was that I couldn't afford the 10x premium for free-range. But I still fought for the law change. Because I believed, as a society, we shouldn't have that choice. Eventually the law changed, prices stabilized because there was nobody cutting corners or undercuting the others, and now free range is the new normal. Democracy at work. Kinda like Mr. Jefferson, who had slaves, as was the norm of the time, but knew it wasn't right and worked to change it - it's not really a contradiction, just working with what you got. There ARE always good people. Just sometimes circumstances transpire to create a monster like Trump. Or Hitler. And we need to figure out how to prevent that.
Like sharing on FB. While I never buy anything directly from its ads, I do still find it a valuable tool to reach a lot of people. Working with what we've got, getting the word out to facilitate changing the system 🤷♀️
Yes, but you were taking action. As far as I know—and I’m no Jefferson scholar, mind you—while he planted the seeds by writing those words in the Declaration, he took no significant action to end slavery, before, during or after his presidency. He did not cultivate that plant. And while he expressed his view that the Indians were born moral equals, he regarded them as technological and cultural inferiors whose lands should be appropriated. What happened to their unalienable rights to liberty and the pursuit of happiness? Don’t get me wrong: what Jefferson did by planting those seeds was unprecedented and ultimately world-shattering. What he set in motion was too powerful to be contained by the social and cultural forms of his time; it had to break them.
"The left’s moral unseriousness—its performance of critique without commitment to repair—systematically dismantled the memory structures that would have inoculated the republic against exactly this kind of assault." The "left"? Come on. Which left? The left according to Fox News?
There is a part of the left, which you will encounter depending on which corners of the internet you trawl, that holds that the entire Western democratic project (not just the United States, but often with a special ire for that polity) is inherently illegitimate because it was founded largely by white men, who often owned slaves, with a highly restricted franchise, largely for the purposes of protecting property rights (and thus ensuring that the poor remain poor), and the reforms since are just window dressing on a fundamentally unjust foundation (and when they're peeled back even slightly all you see is naked fascism, because the system has always only ever been fascism with makeup) and everyone who fought and sacrificed to preserve that system was a dupe, a fool, or an enemy.
A very naive view, to be sure.
It has, as you say, some truth to it, but it often just boils down justification for a form of left-wing accelerationism, one in which, in contrast to the neo-reactionary right's accelerationism, the desired end result is some sort of Kropotkin-esque anarcho-communism.
EDIT: To the original point, it's not as widespread as outlets like FOX might have one believe, but it's also not the case that there's nobody who holds those sorts of views and it's just a strawman.
Blaming whites is a means to solidify separation of identity by apparent race, thus preserving the illusion of race and stalling the emergence of (post-racial) class consciousness. It makes the right very happy when anyone on the left helps them this way. We on the left have many useful idiots among us -- not a knock on their native intelligence; it's easy to get duped on this one.
Crikey. That's bleak. I prefer to think (hope) that the bulk of the people engaged in all that were still fundamentally good, just operating within the rules/norms of the time.
It's essentially the view that "anyone who disagrees with me is ontologically bad, evil and wrong". Owned slaves? Bad, evil, wrong, end of discussion. Excluded women or non-whites from full political participation? Bad, evil, wrong. Support private property rights (there is a distinction made here between private property and personal property, keep in mind) or any sort of social hierarchy? Bad, evil, wrong. So essentially everyone involved in forming those systems in the first place was bad, evil, and wrong in this view, and thus the systems are irredeemably tainted (and the rules/norms of the time were bad, evil, and wrong, and they might cite Nuremberg to say that "I was just following the norms" is not an excuse), and as I said above, this is just left-wing populist accelerationism.
https://josephheath.substack.com/p/populism-fast-and-slow
Populists have great difficulty respecting the rule of law. If one listens to the explanations that they offer for their actions, a great deal of this reflects a bias toward concreteness in their thinking. They think the purpose of the rules is to stop bad people from doing bad things, but since they themselves are good people trying to do good things, they cannot see why they should be constrained by the rules. They have enormous difficulty treating themselves and the other political parties symmetrically. (Americans are currently being subjected to a non-stop display of this.) Unfortunately, as those of us who teach liberal political philosophy know, there is an essential feat of abstraction at the foundation of all liberal principles. John Stuart Mill described it as a rejection of the the “logic of persecutors”: “that we may persecute others because we are right... but they must not persecute us because they are wrong.”
Thank you for this insightful essay. I love George Carlin, too, but I never considered that his observations were a call to action. I am a leftist. There is an old folk song called “Love Me, I’m a Liberal” by Phil Ochs that also criticizes the left (particularly the comfortable, middle class left) for its criticisms without action. Your insight is really rich and I’ll read this again for deeper understanding. Yes, we owe a debt to our brothers and sisters who sacrificed. I came of age in the sixties and seventies and it was a transformative time when action got results particularly in civil rights, anti war, and environmental awareness. I believe that this regime will not last for long but it will not go down easy. My concern is that there is no vision of what comes next. A return to the “normal” republican/democrat, us or them system will only perpetuate the system Carlin criticized. We have to grow from here. We have to renovate the system. Our voting system sucks. Gerrymandering is corrupt. Citizens United is corrupt. The two party duopoly is corrupt. Much renovation could be achieved without constitutional amendments, but amendments may be required. We are a million miles from the civil cooperation necessary for deep system change. George Carlin showed us the problems. The question remains, is it even possible for Americans to see them and respond effectively?
I think a lot of things conspired to bring us to this point. Trump just filled the spot we all created for him. Yes it's screwed. And it'll take a long time to fix. But we have to start somewhere. Personally, I think it starts with responsibility. Mike said something a while back that I cling to. Democracy relies on participation. Those of us brought up in the selfish 80's didn't participate. We stopped teaching our kids the importance of politics and being involved. We prized individualism, rampant capitalism and thought market forces if left to themselves would be the arbiter - like some weird 'survival of the fittest' mantra. We though belonging and community and responsibility was old fashioned nonsense not fit for the computer age. Now we find ourselves in a world of selfishness, individualism, nihilism, hate, and general chaos. We need to go back to the start, back to our kids, and teach them the importance of society, and democracy, and paying attention, and journalism and not getting your news from TicTock and apps controlled by power-hungry oligarchs.
I read this slow and deeply. Each insight was profound and I let it drop inside me so I would not forget its wisdom. I want to read it ten more times so it sinks in.
I could absolutely understand what you meant about us on the left and how we paved the way to where we are now. That was hard to hear but rings very true.
And really the whole article was this way.
Now I will go find everything George Carlin ever said!
Agree. There's so much wisdom here I want to absorb it all. It makes me want to be a better person. I'm not rushing out to listen to Carlin, but I really strive to hear Mike's words - despite them stretching my humble mental abilities. The world would be a better place if more people were exposed to Mike's writing and made the effort to understand it and act on it.
Agree, can’t just read it we have to change.
"It is the refusal to let what you see change what you do. It is the deployment of sophistication in the service of paralysis." I think this is the current hallmark of modern life. We have traded comfort and inertia for less freedom.
Good article. As an adopted kid in a super religious and conservative family, I grew up fearful and scared. God and religion didn’t make sense to me. I wanted to dare to question God or not believe in him (if I didn’t believe in him), but I was also, believe it or not, scared of a lightening bolt coming out of the heavens and being punished for all my eternal sins. I survived religion! What I appreciated about Carlin is the way that he exposed all of the absurdities of God and religion in a simple, but intellectual and humorous way that helped me get past religious conditioning and my fears, to be the terrific human secularist I am today. One of his lines that has stayed in my head, can God create a rock so heavy that even he can’t lift it? I think he was raised a Catholic and said that he would try to come up with questions to stump the priests.
David, that question, "Can God create a rock so heavy that even he can’t lift it?" has an equivalent formulation without any reference to supernatural, deities etc, but is nevertheless important to ponder. There is a whole rigorious branch of mathematics which develops tools and proper framework to understand, among other things, "what is going on with this question". It does have practical applications, for example echoes of this question are in the foundations of contemporary cryptography (digital signatures etc) and, consequently but separately, the whole "crypto" business. Childlish questions designed to stump priests are sometmes profound and profitable.
Thx Mike.
Well, I guess we were not handed a finished product along with the Declaration and Constitution. That the country was actually divided even then, the "more perfect union" was not an accomplishment but a challenge. That history is not static; that morality is an ever-elusive call.
In my view, our head trips are our impediments, that we need to discover - or rediscover - that humans are so much more than thinking animals, ever capable of travesty and self-delusion so long as we hang out in that space between the ears. That our full-bodied evolutionary composition is actually for magnificent effect, should we dare to grown up. Inhabit the whole body and learn what it is to be human -- wise and informed far beyond mere belief.
When you criticize “the Left” you have to specify what and who you are talking about lest you slip into Bothsidesism.
Marxism is easy to criticize because its governing track record is abysmal. The Communist Manifesto is an embodiment of failure to acknowledge the Is/Ought problem as Marx goes on the whole tract about naming the problems in capitalism, inserting his version of socialism, communism as somehow inevitable and natural then ends with the sudden command to make the “inevitable” happen with the famous “WORKERS OF THE WORLD, UNITE!”
Marxism is notorious for identifying problems correctly but offering terrible solutions.
Postmodernism dissects thought itself, then invokes because of biases, you cannot impose any meta narrative as objective. This is not a terrible suggestion because of the chaos that ensues, but the question raised: “Why the hell not???”
It is a mirror image of the Is/Ought problem. Because we cannot determine what Is, we cannot construct Oughts.
That is a problem easy to defeat. It is at the very HEART of the Alt Right.
If there is no objective truth there is no justification of imposing your point of view on others. On the other hand, there is also no justification of NOT imposing your point of view on others! Might makes Right. We arrive at the Dark Enlightenment. The Natural Law is the Law of the Jungle.
The Truth is to be WON. Fought for every day. Impose your Truths so they flourish and all others perish. Objective truth is whatever is your Objective to MAKE true.
Thank you for this, it’s very helpful. It tells me in simple terms what is needed from me now and why.
Carlin (you pegged him here) was the goat, and to think of what comedy has become since him (he would never have gone to Saudi Arabia like so many of our allegedly leading comic lights just did).
Like you I always thought of him not just as a comedian but as the stand-up philosopher, the first of a kind, beyond Richard Pryor and Lenny Bruce, that Mel Brooks named in History of the World.
I get what you’re saying here, just a few thoughts to add. I do not think Carlin is at all responsible for the shortcomings (perhaps) of the medium in which he operated and conveyed his truths. On the other hand, while comedy has gotten a bad rap for allowing people to laugh and return to their lives, I think it also has at least a potentially subversive quality for this reason.
You might not be giving the audience, including yourself, and Carlin enough credit for the importance of what he did, and the audience’s reception, even if there is no immediately traceable connection between his performances, the audience, and their relationship, and any “action” that any part of his audience took or has yet to take. We don’t know, for example, how many people in the streets of Minneapolis carry Carlin in their souls which propelled them to take the risks we are seeing them take.
The fact that you listened to Carlin’s albums when you were young (as, in 6th grade, I memorized and could recite his expanded list of words you can never say on TV from his Carnegie Hall show - my father, perhaps unwisely, let me watch it) is not inert. It helped form you and, I’d wager, did not have an insignificant impact on your decision to leave the tech and crypto scene and follow Thomas Paine toward the restoration of the republic. Carlin, as Lewis Lapham noted in his eulogy for him, worked in the tradition of Thomas Paine, which is to say, dissent.
Carlin’s cultivation of the “dissent” sensibility, and his audience’s receptivity to it, is important, and has a huge part to play in resurrecting the republic. Planting those seeds accordingly is, as you noted, especially early, a vital bequest.
I never said Carlin was responsible for the shortcomings of his medium. I assure you that such implication was not meant.
I know, I think I got that, just musing by way of addition
This is the best I have read in a long time.
The categories that most people define everything by make little sense to me. At 80 I’m a lifelong Republican who is only conservative in the sense that I believe in planning, being open minded and practical and not expecting so much of others that I fall into judgmental bitterness. I vote democratic and give to Democratic candidates to the extent that I am solicited by the Democratic Party for every conceivable level of candidacy from almost every state in the Union. The values of the 🫏s are congenitally appealing to me, but I I’ve never understood why those values are not sold on the basis of “we are all better off if we build a community that is healthy and well educated”. It amazes me that both parties are so vehemently critical of each other and also of themselves. I just don’t understand why people have to define themselves in terms of a group. It seems so unfree. Being a member of a party only seems useful to me in the sense that being an independent prohibits you, in many states, from voting in a primary. Identifying strongly with a group makes your ego rise and fall with their success in winning and messes up your mind.
I've felt for a while now that Jon Stewart is heavily implicated in everything you're talking about here. I consider him to be morally serious, with the exception of his understanding of his responsibility to the country. He always says he's just the guy that follows after puppets making crank calls. My guess is he can't see the responsibility he's brought upon himself by being a voice of moral clarity while also enabling inaction. People would follow him if he decided to get into politics. But he'd have to sacrifice whatever privacy he enjoys.
"It's a big club, and you ain’t in it. You and I are not in the big club."
And a good thing, too, now that we know what they were doing in their big club over on Epstein Island.
A am