Who's to Say What's Obscene?

by Paul Krassner

  I once quoted Timothy Leary’s premise that demonstrations against the Vietnam War “played right onto the game-boards of the administration and the police alike, and that students could shake up the establishment much more if they would just stay in their rooms and change their nervous systems.” But, I wrote, “It wasn’t really a case of either-or. You could protest and explore your 13-billion-celled mind simultaneously. During the mass imprisonment of Free Speech Movement demonstrators, a Bible that had been soaked in acid solution easily made its way into the jail cells, with students just eating those pages up, getting high on Deuteronomy, tripping out on Exodus.”

  The last time I saw Michael Rossman was in 2004 at the fortieth anniversary of the Free Speech Movement. He had asked several participants whether that was a true story about an LSD-soaked Bible being smuggled into jail, verifying that it was only a false rumor. I promised him that I would find a way to retract it. And now I’ve kept that promise.

  GEORGE CARLIN HAS LEFT THE GREEN ROOM

  In December 1962, when Lenny Bruce was arrested for obscenity at the Gate of Horn in Chicago, the police broke open his candy bars, looking for dope. They checked the IDs of audience members, including George Carlin, who told the cops, “I don’t believe in IDs.” Then they arrested him for disorderly conduct, dragged him along by the seat of his pants and hoisted him into the police wagon.

  “What are you doing here?” Lenny asked.

  “I didn’t want to show them my ID.”

  “You schmuck,” said Lenny.

  Lenny and Carlin had similar points of view—for example, they were both outspoken about the decriminalization of drugs—and they were both self-educated, but their working styles were different. Lenny didn’t write his material, it evolved on stage, whereas Carlin did write all his routines and then memorized ’em. Although both were unbelievers as far as religion was concerned, Lenny came from a Jewish background, and Carlin came from an Irish Catholic background.

  Susie Bright, who first heard Carlin when she was in seventh grade, recalls playing his Class Clown album for her mother, “a woman whose first twenty years were entirely dominated by the Irish Catholic Church—and it was a comic exorcism for her. She peed in her pants! She was cured in one LP [long-playing vinyl record]!”

  Socrates said, “Know thyself”; Norman Mailer said, “Be thyself”; and the 1960s counterculture said, “Change thyself.” Carlin—who had entered show business in the late 1950s, wearing a suit and tie, performing traditional stand-up schtick—started surfing on that wave. He reinvented himself visually—jeans, T-shirt, beard, ponytail—and later acknowledged that smoking pot had really helped him to fine-tune his material.

  “My comedy changed because my life changed,” he said. “The act followed what was going on in me. Humor is very subjective, and what I was doing on stage didn’t match up with what was going on in my life or the country—1967 was the Summer of Love, it was the height of the cultural revolution—love, peace, free sex, all crested that summer. Everything was changing. I was playing big shows like Jack Paar and Ed Sullivan, but inside I was anti-authority and I hated that shit. Parents might not have been able to relate, so I went to the kids. I was using my act to further my ideas about the times.”

  Carlin was a generous friend, and such a sweet man. When I performed in Los Angeles, he sent a limousine to pick me up at the airport, and I stayed at his home. Several years later, I opened for him at the Warner-Grand Theater in San Pedro, California. We were hanging around in his dressing room, where he was nibbling from a vegetable plate. I watched as he continued to be genuinely gracious with every fan who stopped by. If they wanted his autograph, he would gladly sign his name. If they wanted to be photographed with him, he would assume the pose. If they wanted to have a little chat, he indulged them with congeniality.

  “You really show respect for everybody,” I observed.

  “Well,” he responded, “that’s just the way I would want to be treated.”

  As a performer, Carlin was uncompromising, knowing that his audience trusted him not to be afraid of offending them. In fact, he was excited by that possibility. The day before one of his live HBO specials, he called and told me to be sure and watch, because he would devote the first ten minutes of his performance to the subject of abortion.

  Carlin had long been vocal in support of the right to smoke and ingest various drugs, and posed this rhetorical question: “Why are there no recreational drugs in suppository form?” I was pleased to inform him that teenage girls have been experimenting with tampons soaked in vodka, inserting them vaginally or rectally as a way of getting intoxicated without their parents detecting booze on their breath.

  No matter what else Richard Nixon accomplished in his lifetime, his obituaries always mentioned him as the first American president to resign, and no matter what else George Carlin accomplished in his lifetime, his obits will always connect him with the Supreme Court ruling on “The Seven Words You Can’t Say on Television.”

  When asked in the Green Room at the Warner Grand Theater by producer Dan Pasley why he didn’t include the word “nigger” in that list, Carlin replied, “There’s nothing funny about it—that really is a dirty word—but repressed words about sexual functions and bodily parts were truly funny. I had only been thinking about the ‘dirty’ words in terms of sex and bodily functions, and how uptight these religious freaks have made us. That’s fun, that’s some funny shit.”

  Carlin provided an introduction to one of my books, Murder at the Conspiracy Convention. Referring to the 1960s, he wrote: “As America entered the Magic Decade, I was leading a double life. I had been a rule-bender and law-breaker since first grade. A highly developed disregard for authority got me kicked out of three schools, the altar boys, the choir, summer camp, the Boy Scouts and the Air Force. I didn’t trust the police or the government, and I didn’t like bosses of any kind. I had become a pot smoker at 13 (1950), an unheard-of act in an old-fashioned Irish neighborhood. It managed to get me through my teens. . . .

  “My affection for pot continued and my disregard for standard values increased, but they lagged behind my need to succeed. The Playboy Club, Merv Griffin, Ed Sullivan and the Copacabana were all part of a path I found uncomfortable but necessary during the early 1960s. But as the decade churned along and the country changed, I did too. Despite working in ‘establishment’ settings, as a veteran malcontent I found myself hanging out in coffee houses and folk clubs with others who were out-of-step people who fell somewhere between beatnik and hippie. Hair got longer, clothes got stranger, music got better. It became more of a strain for me to work for straight audiences. I took acid and mescaline. My sense of being on the outside intensified. I changed.

  “All through this period I was sustained and motivated by The Realist, Paul Krassner’s incredible magazine of satire, revolution and just plain disrespect. It arrived every month, and with it, a fresh supply of inspiration. I can’t overstate how important it was to me at the time. It allowed me to see that others who disagreed with the American consensus were busy expressing those feelings and using risky humor to do so. Paul’s own writing, in particular, seemed daring and adventurous to me; it took big chances and made important arguments in relentlessly funny ways. I felt, down deep, that maybe I had some of that in me, too; that maybe I could be using my skills to better express my beliefs. The Realist was the inspiration that kept pushing me to the next level; there was no way I could continue reading it and remain the same.”

  You can imagine how incredibly honored I felt.

  At a private memorial for family and friends, Carlin’s daughter Kelly read from his burial instructions, written on May 1, 1990:

  “Upon my death, I wish to be cremated. The disposition of my ashes (dispersal at sea, on land or in the air) shall be determined by my surviving family (wife and daughter) in accordance with their knowledge of my prejudices and philosophies regarding geography and spirituality. Under no circumstances are my ashes to b
e retained by anyone or buried in a particular location. The eventual dispersal can be delayed for any reasonable length of time required to reach a decision, but not to exceed one month following my death.

  “I wish no public service of any kind. I wish no religious service of any kind. I prefer a private gathering at my home, attended by friends and family members who shall be determined by my surviving family (wife and daughter). It should be extremely informal, they should play rhythm and blues music, and they should laugh a lot. Vague references to spirituality (secular) will be permitted.”

  Kelly added, “There will be no mention of God allowed” and “No one will be allowed to say that ‘George is now smiling down at us from Heaven above.’ ”

  Carlin once told an audience of children how to be a class clown as a way of attracting attention. “I didn’t start out with fake heart attacks in the aisle,” he explained. Ah, if only that’s what he was doing this time.

  But a reporter did once ask him how he wanted to die.

  “I’d like to explode spontaneously in someone’s living room,” he replied. “That, to me, is the way to go out.”

  And, through his CDs, DVDs and books, George Carlin does indeed continue to explode spontaneously in living rooms across the country.

  5. FREEDOM’S JUST ANOTHER WORD

  EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW WITH MICHAEL PHELPS

  Q: What’ve you learned from this whole nuclear bong explosion?

  A: I learned how fast you can go from being an international hero to being a reference in a joke on a late-night talk show. I heard Jay Leno say, “You know what really did Tom Daschle in? It turns out there are now pictures of him partying with Michael Phelps.” And David Letterman: “I don’t want to just ruin everybody’s day, but there is discouraging news everywhere. Unemployment is high. Foreclosure rate is high. Michael Phelps is high.”

  Q: Well, that’s what happens when your profile is so high. But your coach said that you would learn from the experience.

  A: I learned that it was my own fault. I was so busy getting treated like a horny Jesus that I forgot that there could possibly be a Judas in the room. A greedy Judas with a cell phone camera. That was my mistake. That’s what I regret. That’s what will never happen again. I mean what happens in South Carolina doesn’t stay in South Carolina. It ends up in Tabloid Hell And Judas got a friggin’ hundred thousand dollars to play with.

  Q: In England, yet. And then it comes back here to the States and drops in the lap of the Kellogg Empire. I called their headquarters, and there was an automatic message: “Press one to leave a comment about Michael Phelps—”

  A: They were afraid that my image would pollute their image. That my brand would damage their brand. But the truth is, I actually felt relieved. I had been like a whore. Selling my soul instead of renting my body. And Tony the Tiger was my pimp. A nutritionist told me that the absolutely worst thing to have in your diet is sugar-coated cereal. And there I was, pushing Frosted Flakes—and it’s friggin’ addictive, man—I was peddling a dangerous breakfast cereal to innocent little kids. And those Kellogg PR people were worried about what message was my behavior sending? What message does dealing junk food send?

  Q: But this whole thing also served to open up dialogue. I saw Whoopi Goldberg on The View—she said, “I smoked weed,” and most of the audience applauded. And don’t forget, that’s Middle America.

  A: Y’know what I’d really like to do? When I was like 12 years old, there was this issue of Time magazine with Ellen DeGeneres on the cover, and she’s saying, “Yep, I’m Gay.” So now I wanna be on the cover of Newsweek, smoking a joint and saying, “Yep, I’m Stoned.” I wanna be the poster boy for the decriminalization of marijuana. If I’m supposed to be a role model, it would be great to inspire tokers to come out of their closets. Listen, did you know that almost one out of every three Americans have smoked marijuana? There’s strength in numbers, although everybody’s afraid of losing their jobs, but they know that the real harm comes from the ridiculous, insane laws, not from the weed.

  Q: And don’t forget the vicious propaganda. Did you happen to see a commercial by the Office of National Drug Control Policy? It features a woman saying, “Hey, not trying to be your mom, but there aren’t many jobs out there for pot-heads.” Your mother is the principal of a middle school, right? What do you think her reaction would be to your pro-pot crusade?

  A: Oh, I’m sure she wouldn’t be very supportive. In fact, she’d be very upset. She would grit her teeth and she’d say, “Michael, you are grounded for three weeks!”

  THERE ARE NO ATHEISTS IN THE WHITE HOUSE

  Whenever anybody claims that God talks directly to them, I think they’re totally delusional. George Bush is no exception. Not only was he told by his senior adviser, Karen Hughes, not to refer to terrorists as “folks,” but Bush was also being prompted by God Him-Her-or-Itself: “God would tell me, ‘George, go and end the tyranny in Iraq.’ And I did.” As if he was only following divine orders.

  In The Fall of the House of Bush: The Untold Story of How a Band of True Believers Seized the Executive Branch, Started the Iraq War, and Still Imperils America’s Future, Craig Unger writes: “Conventional wisdom has it that George W. Bush became a ‘born-again’ Christian in the summer of 1985, after extended private talks with Reverend Billy Graham. As recounted by Bush himself in A Charge to Keep: My Journey to the White House, a ghostwritten autobiography prepared for the 2000 presidential campaign, Bush and Graham went for a walk along the rugged Maine shore, past the Boony Wild Pool where Bush had skinny-dipped as a child. ‘I knew I was in the presence of a great man,’ Bush wrote. ‘He was like a magnet; I felt drawn to seek something different. He didn’t lecture or admonish; he shared warmth and concern. Billy Graham didn’t make you feel guilty; he made you feel loved. Over the course of that weekend, Rev. Graham planted a mustard seed in my soul, a seed that grew over the next year. He led me to the path, and I began walking.’

  “There’s just one problem with Bush’s account of his conversion experience: It’s not true. For one thing, when Billy Graham was asked abut the episode by NBC’s Brian Williams, he declined to corroborate Bush’s account. ‘I’ve heard others say that [I converted Bush], and people have written it, but I cannot say that,’ Graham said. ‘I was with him and I used to teach the Bible at Kennebunkport to the Bush family when he was a younger man, but I never feel that I in any way turned his life around.’

  “Even if one doesn’t accept Graham’s candid response, there’s another good reason to believe that the account in Bush’s book is fiction. Mickey Herskowitz, a sportswriter for the Houston Chronicle who became close friends with the Bush family and was originally contracted to ghostwrite A Charge to Keep, recalled interviewing Bush about it when he was doing research for the book. ‘I remember asking him about the famous meeting at Kennebunkport with the Reverend Billy Graham,’ Herskowitz said. ‘And you know what? He couldn’t remember a single word that passed between them.’ Herskowitz was so stunned by Bush’s memory lapse that he began prompting him. ‘It was so unlikely he wouldn’t remember anything Billy Graham said, especially because that was a defining moment in his life. So I asked, ‘Well, Governor, would he have said something like, “Have you gotten right with God?” ’ According to Herskowitz, Bush was visibly taken aback and bristled at the suggestion. ‘No,’ Bush replied. ‘Billy Graham isn’t going to ask you a question like that.’

  “Herskowitz met with Bush about twenty times for the project and submitted about ten chapters before Bush’s staff, working under director of communications Karen Hughes, who took control of it. But when Herskowitz finally read A Charge to Keep, he was stunned by its contents. ‘Anyone who is writing a memoir of George Bush for campaign purposes knew you had to have some glimpse of what passed between Bush and Billy Graham,’ he said. But Hughes and her team had changed a key part. ‘It had Graham asking Bush, ‘George, are right with God?’ In other words, Herskowitz’s question to Bush was now coming out
of Billy Graham’s mouth. ‘Karen Hughes picked it off the tape,’ said Herskowitz.”

  ◆ ◆ ◆

  In July 2003, during a meeting with Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas, Bush told the newly elected leader, “God told me to strike at Al-Qaeda and I struck them, and then He instructed me to strike at Saddam, which I did. And now I am determined to solve the problem in the Middle East. If you help me, I will act, and if not, the elections will come and I will have to focus on them.”

  Abu Bakar Bashir, an Islamic cleric and accused terrorist leader, has said that “America’s aim in attacking Iraq is to attack Islam, so it is justified for Muslims to target America to defend themselves.” That’s exactly interchangeable with this description of Bush by an unidentified family member, quoted in the Los Angeles Times: “George sees [the war on terror] as a religious war. His view is that they are trying to kill the Christians. And the Christians will strike back with more force and more ferocity than they will ever know.”

  Apparently, religious bigotry runs in the family. Bush’s father, the former president: “I don’t know that atheists should be considered citizens, nor should they be considered patriots. This is one nation under God.” And before him, there was Ronald Reagan: “For the first time ever, everything is in place for the Battle of Armageddon and the Second Coming of Christ.” Not to mention Reagan’s Secretary of the Interior, James Watt, responsible for national policy on the environment: “We don’t have to protect the environment—the Second Coming is at hand.”

  In 1966, Lyndon Johnson told the Austrian ambassador that the deity “comes and speaks to me about two o’clock in the morning when I have to give the word to the boys, and I get the word from God whether to bomb or not.” So maybe there’s some kind of theological tradition going on in the White House.