I've been thinking about George Carlin lately. Not about his comedy itself, but about how people choose to interpret him. There was this dumbass image macro (that's what ancient geezers like me call memes that are just a picture with text, and no other discernible format) floating around on facebook, and the text said something to the effect of "The reason everything sucks is because the damn kids these days don't pray enough."
Imagine how poor your understanding of George's work would have to be for you to think he could ever say or believe that. He made it known, in no uncertain terms, that he considered you an utter imbecile if you thought praying made a difference in anything. He had a rock solid point on prayer's effect on society. You're either praying for something in the plan, which is needless, or you're praying for something not in the plan, which is pointless. Now, I'm not as hardcore as George, and I figure prayer is more or less a crude form of meditation, so go nuts if it makes you happy. Just try not to be shitty about it.
As a person who had lost all semblance of religious faith by the time I was ten years old, George was a beacon for me, for better and worse. For better, because we all need someone to open our eyes to the fact that we're in a constant state of being lied to about more or less everything. For worse, because without an in-person mentor to guide you through these revelations (heh revelations, do you get it), you run the real risk of becoming something odious; an edgy internet contrarian.
If you're at all familiar with the evolution of internet culture over the last twenty-five years, you know what I'm talking about. The modern version of this phenomenon is the guy on social media that butts into conversations with "ACTUALLY," or "heh are you triggered, I bet you're triggered". Well, now we're seeing people show up who both radically misinterpret works they claim to enjoy, while retaining the edgy contrarian persona.
An example of this is rapidly aging guys who might have been considered cool in the 70s. When Dave Gilmour of Pink Floyd says things in the neighbourhood of "Trump is bad, actually", twitter goes ablaze with the same message, over and over; I M FAN BUT BOO HOW CAN YOU NOT MAGA OOK OOK OOK". Imagine, if you will, listening to The Wall, or Animals, and come away thinking "The message here is that right wing politics and capitalism are good things."
By the way I absolutely do not fucking care what you think of these things, don't @ me. I'm just saying, if you're too thick-brained to understand some of the clearest imagery in the history of pop music, I don't have a lot of time for your thoughts.
When this is just on the internet, it's easy enough to deal with. The mute button on twitter, *kisses fingers* mwah, primo. The problem is when it bleeds into real life, with people you at least trusted to tie their shoes in the morning. A guy I work with who, for lack of a more poetic way of putting it, has just been turning directly into a Seth Macfarlane Dad character, worships Carlin's work. Then, recently, he mentioned being a big fan of Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro. I'm not going to waste our time talking about them, if you recognize those names you have an opinion on them (again I don't want to fucking hear it). I smirked and made what was, admittedly, a sliiiiiightly rude gesture. He referenced Carlin in comparison to them, and suggested that maybe I was a snowflake that couldn't tolerate opposing views. It was then proposed that I hate free speech, since rolling my eyes and making the jack-off motion for eternity definitely counts as depriving someone of their voice. More to the point, I must be one of these starry-eyed socialists who want a free ride, while he has to pay for it. After I finished giving him trophies and ribbons for these breakthrough arguments, I disengaged by suggesting a podcast that would please everyone; Cumtown (it's really good I'm sorry about the name).
The idea of Carlin supporting religious conservatives who adamantly believe you must be a religious conservative in order to be a good person is laughable. It's an argument so stupid that it stuns you, and when you're thrown off balance like that, an idiot considers that winning. Yeah, George would also tell you about the importance of free speech, and he would use his freedom of speech to shit on them, and openly disrespect their fans.
This isn't where I say he actually, in fact, if you think about it, supports MY particular sociopolitical views! He was a complicated guy on a ludicrous amount of blow. That's what a lot of the ones trying to follow in his footsteps and don't reach the real heights are lacking. Stanhope pretty much seems to get it, but he's more of a drunk than a fiend, and that makes for a different kind of act. Burr can go on about how a stupid thing is stupid, but he doesn't have that 'truly fucked up' brain thing going on.
If you want to feel a little sad, watch how George's material changes through the nineties and into the two thousands. He became increasingly direct about how he felt, and also more bitter as he saw the writing on the wall; the things he had feared had come to pass. The W. Bush era was too much for George, it was a sign that no true progress on anything he had cared about had happened. And here we stand in 2019, still in acquiesce to the same poisonous power structures, on the eve of more "military intervention" in South America, with corporate brand engagement yielding skyrocketing results.
One more thing relating to George. There's this idea floating around, spewed ad nauseum by unoriginal dipshits; "They couldn't get away with doing that THESE days."
For fuck's sake, whenever this is said, it's about something that happened 30+ years ago. If a comedian got up on stage and started spewing material from that long ago, you'd be OBLIGATED to boo them off for being so lazy. My oldest and best friend, Jerry Seinfeld, is a great example of this. "I can't play colleges anymore!" he cries, "They're too PC!" as if we're obligated to throw money at an unfunny hack who thinks he's too good to update his act after decades. "They couldn't make Blazing Saddles today!" screams a mouth-breathing dullard. Yes, a movie about how horrible and stupid racists are would just absolutely get shouted down, congrats on the brain, friend. These things were made, and they pushed us forward. Now we have to do new things, because otherwise we're spinning our wheels, stagnating. And stagnation is death.
Now let me finish this off with a statement of belief; many of these contrarians, at least on the internet, are essentially just grifters. There's a lot of money to be made in saying things raging morons want to hear, or in angering people they hate, and some people have weak enough morals that they're A-OK with exploiting it. Whether or not they believe what they say is beside the point, however. They're playing with fire, and the rest of us have to deal with the consequences. It's easy enough to say "Just ignore them", and as I said, heck yeah mute button. The problem with this, though, is it tosses aside certain basic things about human nature. It's the rhetorical equivalent of insisting on abstinence-only sex education; yeah, if everyone was just abstinent there wouldn't be any STI's or unwanted pregnancies, but as we can see from literally every society that pushes it, it doesn't fucking work. So sit in your ivory tower of smugness screaming ACTUALLY, all day, I guess. Just don't pretend to be surprised when I exercise my right to free speech by spamming your feed with goatse.
Well now that I got that out of my system, I "finished" the first chunk of this comic. There was a big delay between these updates because I thought I had a broken tablet. This turned out to only be half-true, though. Apparently a very common problem with this model is the usb port warping beyond the point of use. I thought I needed to replace the whole thing, but in fact there is a wireless adapter. It took a few weeks to come in, but once I got it, everything became so much easier to deal with. I was able to get things done faster, and with less headache. Overall there's so much I want to improve. For instance, the design of the main three characters. By that I mean, there isn't really one. I didn't do very well with the linework either, most of the lines are just too fat to look good. Well anyway blah blah blah woe is me, here it is.
I intend to keep going, but I don't really know what to do with it otherwise. See, here's where I'm torn; I don't feel like it's at a point where it's good enough to actually host somewhere with the intention of trying to get people to read it. On the other hand, I've seen some truly abysmal webcomics, even more incompetent than this, proudly up and with a following.
