Seven words, two versions

From 1977 and 1974. (Other stuff there's fun, too.) The War on Fatuousness has lost its foremost soldier.

[Update]

A deeply grateful hat tip to the Crooks and Liars commenter "knuckledragger" who supplied this eerily current blast from the past. I repost it in the spirit of honoring Carlin's prescience, rather than plagiarizing his work:

I really haven’t seen this many people in one place since they took the group photographs of all the criminals and law-breakers in the Ronald Reagan administration. [laughter] Yeah! Yeah! 225 of ‘em so far! 225 different people in the Ronald Reagan administration have either quit, been fired, been arrested, indicted, or convicted of either breaking the law or violating the Ethics Code! 225 of ‘em! And Edwin Meese alone… [laughter] Edwin Meese alone has been investigated by three separate Special Prosecutors and there’s a fourth one waiting for him in Washington right now. Three separate Special Prosecutors have had to look into the activities of the Attorney General, and the Attorney General is the nation’s leading law enforcement officer! [laughter]

See that’s what you’ve got to remember, this is the Ronald Reagan administration we’re talking about. These are the Law and Order people! These are the people who are against street crime! They want to put street criminals in jail to make life safer for the business criminals! [laughter, cheers] Yeah! They’re against street crime, provided that street isn’t Wall Street. [laughter]

And the Supreme Court decided about a year ago that it’s all right to put people in jail now if we just think they’re going to commit a crime. It’s called preventive detention. All you’ve got to do now is just think they’re going to commit a crime. Well if we’d known this seven or eight years ago we could have put a bunch of these Republican motherfuckers directly into prison [laughter, cheers] Yeah! put ‘em in the joint where they belong and we could have saved the expense of putting these pin-headed assholes on trial. [laughter] Another thing you gotta remember is these are the people elected with the help of the Moral Majority. Elected with the help of the Moral Majority and — the Teamster’s Union. That’s a good combination. Organized Religion and Organized Crime working together to help build a better America. [laughter, cheers]

They were going to get government off our backs. Yeah, but when it comes to abortion they don’t mind government being in a woman’s uterus, do they? [laughter] Yeah, backs are no good, but uterus is ok by them. These people call themselves Right to Lifers. Don’t you love that phrase, and don’t you love the way these kind of people pervert the English language? Right to Lifers? Don’t you realize that most of the Right to Lifers are in favor of the death penalty, and they support the South American death squads, and they’re against gun control, and they’re against nuclear weapons control. When they say Right to Life they’re talking about their right to decide which people should live or die. [cheers]

So these right-wingers, you know, so these Reagan people, these right-wingers in general, these crypto-Fascists, they’re against homosexuality, they’re against pornography, they’re against sex education, they’re against abortion, yeah they’re going to get government off your back but they’re going to tell you how to live your sex life. And let me ask you this, how would they know anything about it? [laughter] Have you ever taken a look at those people? [laughter] No wonder they’re afraid of their bodies, take a look at ‘em! [laughter] Doesn’t it strike as mildly ironic that most of the people who are against abortion are people you wouldn’t want to fuck in the first place? [laughter, cheers]

Hey, I’m the first one to say it’s a great country, but it’s a stra-a-ange culture. We got a strange culture. … This is a country where tobacco kills 400,000 people a year — so they ban artifical sweeteners! [laughter] Because a rat died! [laughter, cheers] Know what I mean? This is a place where gun store owners are given a list of stolen credit cards, but not a list of criminals and maniacs! [laughter] And now they’re thinking about banning toys guns, and they’re going to keep the fucking real ones!! [laughter, cheers] This is a place where alcohol ruins more lives than cancer, and everybody gets upset when some athlete gets hooked on cocaine. You know Time Magazine and Newsweek put cocaine on the cover, but they put the liquor advertisements inside the magazine.

It’s the old American double standard, you know say one thing and do something different. And of course the country is founded on the double standard, that’s our history, we were founded on a very basic double standard. This country was founded by slave owners who wanted to be free. [laughter, applause] Am I right? A group of slave owners who wanted to be free. So they killed a lot of white English people, in order to continue owning their black African people, so they could wipe out the rest of the red Indian people, and move west and steal the rest of the land from the brown Mexican people, giving them a place to take off and drop their nuclear weapons on the yellow Japanese people. [laughter] You know what the motto of this country ought to be? You give us a color, we’ll wipe it out! [laughter]

Thanks to several others in the crew who posted shorter blurbs. I had to stifle so much laughter from the pod-mates that I still have tears in my eyes. Thanks, guyzos!

Voluntary segregation is still segregation

I noticed a piece in the Toronto Star last week that covered the popular hesitation to publicly fund religious schools for Jewish and Islamic students. Supporters of such funding point to state funding of Catholic Schools. Turns out that this just re-opens an old debate.

Which in turns reopens, for me, an old speculation of why anyone needs religious-based instruction six days a week in the first place. Is it so difficult to drill ten little commandments into someone? Don't steal, don't kill, don't lie, etc. How hard is that, really? Are parents really so insecure about their ability to provide the proper example to the next generations that they must outsource it to so-called professionals? Or are they afraid that they may (by genetic fluke or whatever) have unwittingly spawned a demon-seed sociopath that must be tamed with the threat of hellfire? (If so, teaching a fledgling sociopath to revere a genocidal, child-murdering, human-sacrifice-demanding Great Sociopath in the Sky is not particularly bright.)

Or is the insecurity purely cultural? Growing up surrounded by those from similar backgrounds is somehow a bulwark against becoming just another drone in a homogeneous capitalist wasteland? Granted, I'm watching it happen to my nephews, and it's not a pretty sight. But I can't see that imposing additional conformity by segregating them into an artificially-defined subset of their peers is the key to helping them develop their own identity.

And so I hope that the Canadians will have the good sense and political will to cut off the tap for the outdated tradition of funding Catholic schools. It's a revenant from a more bigoted era, and makes as much sense as paying reparations to the American descendants of African slaves. The evil men do lives after them, to be sure. Yet when the redress outlives the evil, it's time to give the whole thing a decent burial and channel those resources into righting present wrongs.

Success vs. failure

As I age, I'm not certain that the line is so distinct as many think it is. Or, at least not as distinct as I once thought it was. It is not, after all, in the best interests of The Establishment to raise successes, not in the fullest sense of the word. Keeping the proletariat in mortal terror of lagging behind The Joneses is, in the end, the aim of many of our so-called institutions. Organized religion sometimes serves to reinforce compliance with the established order, but other times seems to go widdershins. I suppose much depends on the collusion between the brahmins and the fatuousness of the masses at that juncture of history.

So--to make my longwinded point even longer--few, if any, are formally trained for "success" when it is defined as wielding our aptitudes and passions for our own direct and greatest benefit. It wasn't until just now that I realized that entrepreneurship is, in a sense, an act of guerilla warfare against the status quo. Far more so than any rock band that ever railed against The Man in burma-shave refrains.

For awhile now, I have also been mulling over the question of whether we, at the most subconcious level, don't actually fear success more than we fear failure. And I mean real success, not the gumball machine knockoffs that society tries to pawn off on us.

But I am short on time, so those ruminations will have to wait until later.