George Carlin, nihilist supreme

carlin was indeed funny. i died laughing at him on Yutube yesterday. it was my first time as i was lost to america's tv personalities during the sixties and much of the seventies. but i feel that a careful examination of carlin's ideas indicate a rather empty tin can with the marble (it was hardly a mere stone). he mouthed the nihiltic culture that destroyed many in the sixties and early seventies,and that drove the following generation into a radicalism that represents the most cravish accomodation to the status quo, while wallowing in mindless consumerism. There was nothing new about his attacks on religion and tradition, favorites of the enlightenment self-legitimation tactics for quite some time, except that he threw in the F-word, the nihilistic attitude that is ironically the outcome of the enlightenment, with its state and individual human reason as lawgivers. He attacked religion for it's inclination to go to war, but forgot modernist universalisms: communism, fascism and liberal democracy. Yes, that icon too. Just look at george and the neo cons headed for the oil fields to bring democracy to the middle east. Look at US policy during the Cold War. Democracy at the barrel of a gun, really no different from the Russian or Chinese gun except that some businessmen made a fortune. These three killed, and killed lots more than any wars of religion. About a hundren million actually, and that does not include the dead in Iraq, and the four million refugees that are close to the living dead. Carlin attacked consumerism, which is nothing other than rampant egoism, in fact an anomic egoism in a materialist market determined world that can produce anything and everything that can be imagined by anybody. The human imagination for entertainment gadgets is indeed limitless. But did any of these attacks give Carlin a lead on what an alternative world might look like. i don't know whether or not Carlin took the hippie in the woods route, but i doubt it. Did he have a woodshed for the toilet activities he seemed to know so intimately? or did he too have a jacuzzi? does it matter? No. whether he took a dump into an Asian style hole in the ground or had a golden throne, it had not one whit of an influence over our world. His greatest impact was to legitimate the naysayers, those who stand for nothing except their freedom to do whatever they please no matter what the consequences. Yes, Carlin was entertaining or so i found him, but that does not blind me to the lack of content.