That's pretty dark. Also not entirely inaccurate. i'VE THOUGHT carlin was very dark throughout his career and sadly he makes up so much of the often kind of dark attitude that I sadly associate with so many of the comedians of that era - not just the Carlin's but the Bill Mahers and John Olivers and everybody.

There is a problem with America but no one ever wants to blame all of America. The right wants to blame the elitist snobs who live on the coast and who live in the urban blight The left wants to blame middle America the South and everyone in flyover country. So put together everybody in the country is in agreement that everybody is at fault.

We do suck. And the thing is the people who highlight Carlin today for his cynicism tend to highlight the parts of his comedy that speak to them. In their mind, he was speaking about all the things that were wrong with the institutions of America and that made him a prophet because he gave them confirmation of what they think. But he was talking about selfish, ignorant Americans - and he could just have easily been speaking about everyone else in his audience and his fellow comics. His audience may have laughed hysterically because they were all thinking: "He's not talking about me!" But he probably was - and maybe he was even talking about himself.

Now of course that's dark material - and I have to tell you given that Carlin was very much and atheist and was nearing the end, he might have had more reason to despair. I can't imagine what its like to think that the world is a shithole - and that all that's waiting for you is a void. And I can't help but state that for all his disparaging of the American dream, there is nothing more American then capitalism and up until the end he was willing to take money saying how shitty America was.

That's the thing I can never truly accept about all of those prophets in entertainment who are basically hailed for telling us how horrible we, as Americans, all are. If they truly believed America was a corrrupt and rotten institutions, why did they spend so much time and energy taking money belittling it? If there's one thing I've learned about both social media and certain aspects of our society, it's that no one ever lost money by underestimating how much Americans want to know how badly everything in America is. They;ll all revile the evils of capitalism but they love the benefits of it.

Carlin calls us selfish and ignorant. So was he in that sense. So is everyone else who spends all their time and energy telling us how things are broken - and doesn't do anything in his life to try and fix it. That is part of the American tradition to: it's easier to get something new when it breaks than try to repair something when its broken. Carlin spent forty years telling AMERICA how broken things were and getting rich and enjoying the fruits of his labor. And now we call him a prophet. Prophets don't solve anything either.

Maybe that's why I'm very cyncial in my own way about those of us who look at anyone from the entertainment industry who tells us something that we agree with and now think its gospel. I'm always reminded of that remark from Sam Rayburn: any jackass can kick a barn down, but it takes a carpenter to build one. Carlin was many things, manh of them good, but if you try to convince me he was a carpenter, well, that kind of makes you a jackass.