Old Modern Man

I miss George Carlin terribly.  I think of him often.  I wonder what he would have said about our sick, wacky times.  Carlin was never a political comedian in the sense that he commented on politics and politicians; he thought it was all bullshit and that voting was pointless.  But he certainly spoke knowingly and critically of our age, always being funny and usually wise and eloquent, as well.  I miss him because his honesty and intelligence, as well as his humor, comforted me, acknowledged me, justified me.  George made me feel proud to be an outsider because he was King of the Outsiders and he made that pretty cool.

I got to interview George Carlin twice, both times by phone.  The first time was when I worked for HBO and one of his specials was coming up.  The second time was when I did some freelance work for the producers/ creators of Shining Time Station / Thomas the Tank Engine and Friends and George was the lovable Mr. Conductor.

Carlin, especially in his post-heart attack years, was reputed to be difficult to deal with (for producers, suits and such, which was probably true) and no easier to interview.  But on both occasions, which were about five years apart, he was pleasant and easy-going; willing to answer any question I put to him; and generous with his time.  Maybe it was because I wasn’t a journalist but instead just a p.r. hack trying to do her job; Carlin always respected ordinary working folks.  I think it was because he was just a decent guy who sometimes gave greedy or bossy or nervy people a hard time.  After all, he was George Carlin.

If George were here now, he’d probably be quietly, maybe anonymously, sending food and blankets to assorted Occupy Wall Street sites.  He would be talking about the legitimacy of gay marriage, tax and income inequality and the danger wrought by the Religious Right’s slow, steady, disciplined 30-year-climb from minor local politics to the less-than-hallowed-halls of Congress, the Court and the White House.  He would be angry, brainy and funny as ever.  And he would be a sane voice in crazy times.

A couple of hours ago, I saw a re-run of the Mark Twain Prize ceremony that honored George Carlin a few months after his death at the age of 71 in June, 2008.  It ended with Carlin’s complete performance of his magnificent routine, “A Modern Man.”  Whether you recall it fondly or never heard it, I present it here for your enjoyment and edification:

“I’m a modern man, digital and smoke-free; a man for the millennium.  A diversified, multi-cultural, post-modern deconstructionist; politically, anatomically and ecologically incorrect.  I’ve been uplinked and downloaded, I’ve been inputted and outsourced.  I know the upside of downsizing, I know the downside of upgrading.  I’m a high-tech low-life.  A cutting-edge, state-of-the-art, bi-coastal multi-tasker, and I can give you a gigabyte in a nanosecond.  I’m new-wave, but I’m old-school; and my inner child is outward-bound.  I’m a hot-wired, heat-seeking, warm-hearted cool customer; voice-activated and bio-degradable.  I interface with my database; my database is in cyberspace; so I’m interactive, I’m hyperactive, and from time to time I’m radioactive.

“Behind the eight ball, ahead of the curve, ridin’ the wave, dodgin’ the bullet, pushin’ the envelope.  I’m on point, on task, on message, and off drugs.  I’ve got no need for coke and speed; I’ve got no urge to binge and purge.  I’m in the moment, on the edge, over the top, but under the radar.  A high-concept, low-profile, medium-range ballistic missionary.  A street-wise smart bomb.  A top-gun bottom-feeder.  I wear power ties, I tell power lies, I take power naps, I run victory laps.  I’m a totally ongoing, big-foot, slam-dunk rainmaker with a pro-active outreach.  A raging workaholic, a working rageaholic; out of rehab and in denial.  I’ve got a personal trainer, a personal shopper, a personal assistant, and a personal agenda.

“You can't shut me up; you can't dumb me down.  ‘Cause I’m tireless, and I’m wireless.  I’m an alpha-male on beta-blockers.  I’m a non-believer, I’m an over-achiever;  laid-back and fashion-forward.  Up-front, down-home; low-rent, high-maintenance.  I’m super-sized, long-lasting, high-definition, fast-acting, oven-ready and built to last.  A hands-on, footloose, knee-jerk head case; prematurely post-traumatic, and I have a love child who sends me hate-mail.

“But I’m feeling, I’m caring, I’m healing, I’m sharing.  A supportive, bonding, nurturing primary-care giver.  My output is down, but my income is up.  I take a short position on the long bond, and my revenue stream has its own cash flow.  I read junk mail, I eat junk food, I buy junk bonds, I watch trash sports.  I’m gender-specific, capital-intensive, user-friendly and lactose-intolerant.

“I like rough sex; I like tough love.  I use the f-word in my e-mail.  And the software on my hard drive is hard-core—no soft porn.  I bought a microwave at a mini-mall.  I bought a mini-van at a mega-store.  I eat fast food in the slow lane. I’m toll-free, bite-size, ready-to-wear, and I come in all sizes.  A fully equipped, factory-authorized, hospital-tested, clinically proven, scientifically formulated medical miracle.

“I’ve been pre-washed, pre-cooked, pre-heated, pre-screened, pre-approved, pre-packaged, post-dated, freeze-dried, double-wrapped and vacuum-packed.  And I have unlimited broadband capacity.  I’m a rude dude, but I’m the real deal.  Lean and mean.  Cocked, locked and ready to rock; rough, tough and hard to bluff.  I take it slow, I go with the flow; I ride with the tide, I’ve got glide in my stride.  Drivin’ and movin’, sailin’ and spinnin’; jivin’ and groovin, wailin’ and winnin’.  I don’t snooze, so I don’t lose.  I keep the pedal to the metal and the rubber on the road.  I party hearty, and lunchtime is crunch time.  I’m hangin’ in, there ain’t no doubt; and I’m hangin tough.  Over and out.”

There’s Somethin’ Happenin’ Here – And What It Is Is Exactly Clear!

Today marked the two month anniversary of the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement.  Since it began, OWS events have sprung up in cities and towns across America – 1,000 locations in all.  OWS has struck a chord among an increasing number, and an increasing diversity, of Americans in the “99%.”  And how was this anniversary celebrated?  With police…shall we say, “over-zealousness.”

It would appear that mayors from coast-to-coast have been on conference calls together (so says the grapevine) trying to figure out how to “handle” OWS – and have concluded that a paramilitary use of their police forces is the way to go.  Sharp, progressive, creative thinking, eh?

OWS – despite its lack of a “specific” agenda, blah blah blah – has been remarkably disciplined in its commitment to non-violence, all the more remarkable because, unlike during the Civil Rights movement of the ‘60s, they have not been formally trained in non-violent tactics.  Nonetheless, the original group in New York has been dispossessed from Zuccotti Park, their personal belongings confiscated, and their persons subjected to outright violence by heavily armed and shielded police.  (I guess it was too cold for fire hoses and all the dogs were busy elsewhere trying to sniff out marijuana.)

Has the OWS been messy?  Yes.  Have they inconvenienced and interfered with the normal comings and goings of others?  Yes.  Have there been legitimate concerns about public health and safety?  Yes.  Have municipal governments done anything to positively, non-violently and economically address these issues (allowing port-o-potties, for example)?  No.  And what has been the result?  Greater determination plus increased and more focused action by OWS.  Today was a National Day of Action for OWS; from sea to shining sea they left their campsites and marched, and occupied other locations, like banks and subways. 

The far-right has declared that OWS is dead, but they’ve already demonstrated considerable confusion about what constitutes life and death.  Indeed, OWS is very much alive, growing, maturing, and attracting increasing participation and media attention.  More than 30,000 people (including a lot of organized labor) marched in Manhattan tonight and nearly 300 were willingly arrested.  I know it’s been a while since we’ve seen one, so we may not immediately recognize it – but this is the beginning of a New American Revolution.

Something else happened yesterday that is also revolutionary.  Six representatives from a group of 200 very rich people known as The Patriotic Millionaires met with tax phobic troublemaker, Grover Norquist, begging him to release Republicans from their “no new taxes ever” pledge and finally increase taxes on those earning $1 million (or more) annually – acknowledging the disparity between their contributions and those of the 99%.  Norquist dismissed them as “Democratic Party hacks.”  They suggested that Norquist move to Somalia.   

The photo above is the iconic picture that has come to define the infamous Kent State Massacre, an Anti Vietnam War protest held at Kent State University in Ohio in May, 1970.  During that event, National Guardsmen responding to the “uprising” killed 4 students and wounded 9 more – and America was up in arms.

“Kent State” inspired Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young’s song Ohio, and, Buffalo Springfield’s For What It’s Worth, which was actually written in 1967 in response to the LAPD’s assault on  hippies, over time has also become associated with Kent State.  Currently, the song’s lyrics* have been used as a denotation for OWS.  The message is simple: don’t respond to legitimate protest with military force; don’t dismiss earnest Americans as socialists/communists; don’t accuse sincere political activists of being dirty, drug-sodden, sex-crazed loonies; don’t demonize Americans demanding reasonable economic, political and social change.  In short, don’t allow Fox News to shape your views about what’s happening.

* There’s somethin’ happenin’ here
What it is ain’t exactly clear
There’s a man with a gun over there
Telling me I got to beware

I think it’s time we stop, children, what’s that sound
Everybody look what’s going down…

…Paranoia strikes deep
Into your life it will creep
It starts when you’re always afraid
You step out of line, the man come and take you away

We better stop, hey, what’s that sound
Everybody look what’s going down…

A Noble Occupation

I’ve been paying close attention to the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement since Week 2 and I have to say, as a counter-balancing relief from the babble of the current herd of Republican hopefuls, OWS is refreshing and encouraging.

What has surprised me is the number of people – mostly on the Right, but the Left and Center, too – who keep trying to dismiss (or smear) this socio-political phenomenon, because they haven’t stated clear goals, or provided a manifesto or list of demands.  It’s like listening to someone blurt guttural screams for HELP! and standing aside, asking, “Yes, I understand you want assistance, but can you please clarify exactly what it is you want help for; and if you don’t mind, could you put your request in writing so that it can be studied by the proper committees?”

Talk about you-don’t-get-it!

Remember the 1976 film Network (written by Paddy Chayefsky, directed by Sidney Lumet) starring the late, great Peter Finch, Faye Dunaway and William Holden?  It’s set in the 1970s, when the three major networks still ruled television, and tells the story of a grand old broadcast newsman left over from the salad days of grand old broadcast newsmen, a la Edward R. Murrow.  One day, Howard Beale (played by Finch) comes to the studio to do his nightly newscast and instead he gives a sermon of desperation that is eerily pertinent to our times, even though it’s 36 years later.  The following is taken directly from the script:

            “I don’t have to tell you things are bad.  Everybody knows things are bad.  It’s a depression.  Everybody’s out of work or scared of losing their job, the dollar buys a nickel’s worth, banks are going bust, shopkeepers keep a gun under the counter, punks are running wild in the streets, and there’s nobody anywhere who seems to know what to do, and there’s no end to it.  We know the air’s unfit to breathe and our food is unfit to eat, and we sit and watch our tee-vees while some local newscaster tells us today we had fifteen homicides and sixty-three violent crimes, as if that’s the way it’s supposed to be.  We all know things are bad.  Worse than bad.  They’re crazy.  It’s like everything’s going crazy.  So we don’t go out any more.  We sit in the house, and slowly the world we live in gets smaller, and all we ask is please, at least leave us alone in our own living rooms.  Let me have my toaster and my tee-vee and my hair-dryer and my steel-belted radials, and I won’t say anything, just leave us alone.

            “Well, I’m not going to leave you alone.  I want you to get mad – I don’t want you to riot.  I don’t want you to protest.  I don’t want you to write your Congressmen.  Because I wouldn’t know what to tell you to write.  I don’t know what to do about the depression and the inflation and the defense budget and the Russians and crime in the street.  All I know is first you got to get mad.  You’ve got to say:  “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take this any more.  I’m a human being, goddammit.  My life has value.”  So I want you to get up now.  I want you to get out of your chairs and go to the window.  Right now.  I want you to go to the window, open it, and stick your head out and yell.  I want you to yell: “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take this any more!”  Things have got to change.  But you can’t change them unless you’re mad.  You have to get mad!”

That, ladies and gentlemen, is what the OWS is about.  Beale’s rage against the machine and call-to-expression is one of the greatest in modern cinema, and I wanted to reprint it for those of you who have never seen the film (or haven’t seen it in a long time).  OWS is about everyday people being mad as hell with the economic and political system, with being ripped off, pissed on, treated like children, and being completely excluded from the bounty of the 1%.  What’s the mystery?

Network remains pertinent, timely, throughout.  At first, the network powers-that-be are furious.  But when they discover that millions of people from coast to coast are in fact yelling out their windows, they realize that Beale has hit a nerve – and they can capitalize on it!  They take Beale off the nightly news and give him a show of his own.  They call him “The Mad Prophet of the Airwaves.”  And the old man comes out each week, gives a powerful rant, then swoons into a dead faint as the audience cheers.  Reality TV 36 years before its time!

But in art as in life, one day Beale goes too far.  Voicing the rage of the common man (which can always be ignored…) is one thing – but challenging the machinations of BIG big business is quite another.  Here’s what Beale says that gets him into trouble:

            “All right, listen to me!  Listen carefully!  This is your goddam life I’m talking about today!  In this country, when one company takes over another company, they simply buy up a controlling share of the stock.  But first they have to file notice with the government.  That’s how C.C. and A. – the Communications Corporation of America – bought up the company that owns this network.  And now somebody’s buying up C.C. and A! Some company named Western World Funding Corporation is buying up C.C. and A!  They filed their notice this morning!  Well, just who the hell is Western World Funding Corporation?  It’s a consortium of banks and insurance companies who are not buying C.C. and A. for themselves but as agents for somebody else!  Well, who’s this somebody else?   They won’t tell you!  They won’t tell you, they won’t tell the Senate, they won’t tell the SEC, the FCC, the Justice Department, they wont tell anybody!  They say it’s none of our business!  The hell it ain’t!”

This is the daily business reality that affects all of us.  This is the chicanery that OWS is mad about.  What’s the mystery?

Beale can’t be allowed to go on telling that kind of truth.  So Arthur Jensen himself (beautifully played by Ned Beatty), the corporate honcho of C.C. and A., takes Beale into an imposing conference room and reads him the corporate riot act.  Doesn’t this, too, sound very much like the global economic present – the era that OWS is mad about?  Just substitute China for Russia and the corporations of today for those of yesteryear and it’s enough to make you shiver.

Jensen says:

            “You have meddled with the primal forces of nature, Mr. Beale, and I won’t have it, is that clear?!...You are an old man who thinks in terms of nations and peoples.  There are no nations!  There are no peoples!  There are no Russians!  There are no Arabs!  There are no third worlds!  There is no West!  There is only one holistic system of systems, one vast and… interwoven, interacting, multi-variate, multi-national dominion of dollars! petro-dollars, electro-dollars, multi-dollars!, Reich marks, rubles, rin, pounds and shekels!  It is the international system of currency that determines the totality of life on this planet!

            “That is the natural order of things today!  That is the atomic, subatomic and galactic structure of things today!  And you have meddled with the primal forces of nature, and you will atone!  Am I getting through to you, Mr. Beale?

            “You get up on your little twenty-one inch screen, and howl about America and democracy.  There is no America.  There is no democracy.  There is only IBM and ITT and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide and Exxon.  Those are the nations of the world today.  What do you think the Russians talk about in their councils of state – Karl Marx?  They pull out their linear programming charts, statistical decision theories and minimax solutions and compute the price-cost probabilities of their transactions and investments just like we do.  We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies, Mr. Beale.  The world is a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable by-laws of business.  The world is a business, Mr. Beale!  It has been since man crawled out of the slime…”

This post has gone on long enough I think.  I hope you’ve enjoyed these golden snippets of Network and suffice it to say that you should think twice about the invectives being hurled at the OWS: they’re radicals, they’re killers, they’re anti-Semites, they’re a bunch of dirty hippies taking up space.

No.  They’re you and me and everyone in the country, who, for one (or more) countless reasons is mad as hell and won’t take it any more.  I hope New York has a mild winter.