George Carlin: Philosopher, Mentor, Right

“Inside every cynical person, there is a disappointed idealist.”
- George Carlin

There is no blood, brains, or anima in any of the virtually identical George Carlin obituaries mindlessly replicated throughout the internet today more out of a sense of obligation than true sorrow or appreciation. Each in its own way minimalizes the life of George Carlin down to a sequence of events and a few passing references to his routines. George Carlin, when understood through these half-assed, trite, obligatory articles was merely a famous comic, a purveyor of counter-culture rhetoric and "That guy who did 'Seven Words You Can't Say on Television'."

But that is not George Carlin.

When Douglas Adams died, when Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. died, I knew that it was an end to a line of work, of writings. While I was saddened by their deaths I knew that their writings would linger on; I knew that I could continue to read Hitchhiker's, Slaughterhouse-Five. The men were dead, but it did not feel as if they were gone. When I learned that George Carlin had died...I felt alone.

George Carlin was more than just an author, an actor, an entertainer, a stand-up comic, a philosopher. George Carlin understood. And while I never met him, never saw him live, he was always a source of comfort for me. Because I knew that he was never only joking about religion, society, censorship, language, or stuff. Regardless of the particular subject George Carlin was always focused upon the fact that, in his own words:

"the longer you live, the more you look around, the more you realize...something is FUCKED-UP. Something is WRONG here."

That's who George Carlin was: George Carlin understood; George Carlin was right. And I took comfort in the fact that he was out there trying to get others to understand. Even if they dismissed him as an entertainer or merely humored him as he humored them...he was out there saying true things to people who needed to hear him. Yes, we still have his works. But we lost the man. And while we still have his message we lost the one most adept at communicating it.

In George Carlin we did not lose "the guy who said 'Seven Dirty Words'; we did not lose a comic. We lost a mentor, I lost a mentor, Sunday afternoon. We lost someone who was right.

And you can't replace that.