| Carlin's routine is meant to draw attention to the ways that authorities and systems fuck around with words and how, even with the best intentions, these changes gradually benefit the institutions instead of the downtrodden. Most of Carlin's routines involve ironic hyperbole. He had a bit about how everybody on the road driving faster than you is a maniac and everybody driving slower than you is an idiot. It's an extremely important bit for understanding his work. Carlin believed that everybody should express their opinion loudly from their own point of view, be aware that a lot of the time those opinions will be wrong, but know that when we do not express those opinions the fuckers always win. When he shouts that the transition from "shellshock" to "PTSD" has been a tool used for government control he's absolutely right. It was. By making a disease name for it and creating PTSD treatment programs the military could look like it was addressing the problem, where the actual problem was the military using human suffering as a tool to reinforce American political power for economic reasons. If you told George Carlin "yeah, but rape victims have the same experience, don't we need to include them" he'd probably have told you to call that cock-shock. You'd say "that's gross" and he'd say "rape is gross, the name for what happens after it should be horrible, not clinical". By saying things like this, Carlin highlights hypocrisies and illusions in our lives and thought processes. Carlin wants to make sure you see what you've forgotten by moving to the new words. I'm reminded of when Vonnegut pointed out how dangerous it was to move from Armistice Day to Veteran's Day. "It was during that minute in nineteen hundred and eighteen, that millions upon millions of human beings stopped butchering one another. I have talked to old men who were on battlefields during that minute. They have told me in one way or another that the sudden silence was the Voice of God. So we still have among us some men who can remember when God spoke clearly to mankind. Armistice Day has become Veterans’ Day. Armistice Day was sacred. Veterans’ Day is not." Vonnegut doesn't mean that later veterans didn't suffer, that their service is worthless or that their pain shouldn't be noted. He's saying that by including new individuals, the message of the day - that it is horrific to murder millions of people for any reason - has been erased for the good of the military system. People like Vonnegut and Carlin aren't trying to say things that are correct. They're trying to say things that expose truth. It's very different. |