George Carlin has died at age 71.

Fuck.

And I use that term very deliberately given that Carlin's "Seven words you can't say on TV" ultimately became the focus of a Supreme Court case about obscenity and censorship.

Personally I hate it when a celebrity dies and people pretend they knew what a great human being they were and how much their families will miss them. That's all BS. I don't have the slightest clue whether or not Carlin was an utter douchebag in real life. He might have placed just below Goebbles in terms of personal integrity. Don't know, and really I don't care. That's not how we knew him.

We knew him as a humorist.

A humorist is a comedian, certainly, but more than that. They are the people who embody T.S. Elliot's quote, "Humor is also a way of saying something serious." Humorists are very very serious. They bludgeon us with our own stupidity and they make us laugh while doing it. Carlin did this. He was a funhouse mirror magnifying our every blemish so that we couldn't just ignore them anymore. We had to confront them, if only a little bit. That's perhaps the best service anyone can do for their fellows- to help them, even force them, to be better people. Humorists are the vulgar conscience of society.

The most appropriate tribute to the man would seem to be to stand one more time in Carlin's funhouse, and to laugh at the grotesqueries he helped us see in ourselves.

But all that aside, let me tell you what I liked about that Gulf War: it was the first war that appeared on every television channel, including cable.

And even though the TV show consisted largely of Pentagon war criminals displaying maps and charts, it got very good ratings. And that makes sense, because we like war. We're a warlike people. We can't stand not to be fucking with someone. We couldn't wait for the Cold War to end so we could climb into the big Arab sandbox and play with our nice new toys. We enjoy war.

And one reason we enjoy it is that we're good at it. You know why we're good at it? Because we get alot of practice. This country is only 200 years old, and already we've had ten major wars. We average a major war every twenty years, So we're good at it!

And it's just as well we are, because we're not very good at anything else. Can't build a decent car anymore. Can't make a TV set, a cell phone, or a VCR. Got no steel industry left. No textiles. Can't educate our young people. Can't get health care to our old people. But we can bomb the shit outta your country, all right. We can bomb the shit outta your country!

Especially if your country is full of brown people. Oh, we like that, don't we? That's our hobby now. But it's also our new job in the world: bombing brown people. Iraq, Panama, Grenada, Libya. You got some brown people in your country? Tell 'em to watch the fuck out, or we'll goddamn bomb them!

Well, who were the last white people you can remember that we bombed? In fact, can you remember any white people we ever bombed? The Germans! That's it! Those are the only ones. And that was only because they were tryin' to cut in on our action. They wanted to dominate the world.

Bullshit! That's our job. That's our fuckin' job.

George Carlin: So I say live and let live. That's my motto: Live and let live. Anyone who can't go along with that, take 'em outside and shoot the motherfucker. It's a simple philosophy, but it's always worked in our family.

George Carlin: Think for a moment about the concept of the flamethrower. Okay? The flamethrower. Because we have them. Well, *we* don't have them, the army has them....And what this indicates to me, it means that at some point, some person said to himself, "Gee, I sure would like to set those people on fire over there. But I'm way to far away to get the job done.