Justice for Working Class Americans

 By John A. Murphy 

“You called down the thunder—well now you've got it.
You tell them I'm coming . . . and Hell's coming with me!You hear?! Hell's coming with me!”- Kurt Russell as Wyatt Earp  

Immediately upon the death of George Carlin along with all of the articles and eulogies in the corporate media and on the Internet there was also a raft of editorial cartoons.  One of them really caught my attention.  It had a messy teenager sprawled out on a couch listening to television with his mother standing busily in the kitchen.  The television was "saying":

 "We're so self-important.  Everybody is going to save something.  Save the trees, save the bees, save the whales, save those snails.  And the greatest arrogance of all, save the planet.  WHAT?!! I'm tired of these self-righteous environmentalists, these white bourgeois liberals who think the only thing wrong with this country is there aren't enough bike paths.  The planet has been here four and a half billion years.  We've only been engaged in heavy industry for little more than 200 years. The planet has been here through a lot worse than us.  Earthquakes, volcanoes, plate tectonics, continental drift, solar flares, sunspots, magnetic storms, magnetic reversal of the polls, bombardment by comets, asteroids and meteors, worldwide floods, tidal waves, worldwide fires, erosion, cosmic rays, retiring ice ages, and we think some plastic bags and aluminum cans are going to make a difference? 

The planet isn't going anywhere.  We are!  People trying to make the world safe for their Volvos! Besides, environmentalists don't give a shit about the planet; they don't care about the planet. Not in the abstract they don't. You know what they're interested in? A clean place to live; their own habitat. They're worried some day in the future they might be personally inconvenienced." Upon hearing this coming from the television, the mother in the cartoon screams out to the kid, "who is that right wing nut you're watching?"  The kid replies "George Carlin". 

Is this the same George Carlin who railed against conservatives?

 "Pro life conservatives are obsessed with the fetus from conception to nine months. After that, they don't want to know about you. They don't want to hear from you. No nothing. No neonatal care, no day care, no Head-start, no school lunch, no food stamps, no welfare, no nothing. If you're pre-born -- you're fine. If you're pre-school, you're fucked.

Conservatives don't give a shit about you until ... you reach military age. Conservatives want live babies so they can raise them to be dead soldiers.  Pro-life! These people are killing doctors. What kind of pro-life is that? They'll do anything to save a fetus, but if it grows up to be a doctor they must just have to kill it? They're not pro-life. You know what they are? They're anti-woman." 

It almost seems impossible that the same person could have delivered these two apparently disparate monologues. 

The Okie from Muskogee In a way it kind of reminds me of some of the comments I've received on what happens when you open my congressional campaign website (www.johnmurphyforcongress.org ).  If your default player is QuickTime, when you open my website you will hear Merle Haggard singing "Rebuild America First".  In my anti-Vietnam war protest days I couldn't stand the thought of Merle Haggard.  He was the guy who sang "Okie from Muskogee".  Back then I thought Haggard was a complete reactionary.  He also wrote "Fightin' Side of Me".  How could I come to like a man who wrote lyrics like: 

And I'm proud to be an Okie from Muskogee

A place where even squares can have a ball

We still wave Old Glory, down at the courthouse,In Muskogee, Oklahoma,USA

.…If you're runnin' down my country, man,You're walkin' on the fightin' side of me.   

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