George Carlin, Sex Crimes, Terrifying Questions

 Why does this small tidbit from George Carlin live rent-free in my head, after so many years?

This is from a bit, State Prison Farms, from his Back In Town (1996)

“Alright, next group: sex criminals. Completely incurable, you got to lock them up. You could outlaw religion and in most cities sex crimes would disappear in a couple of generations. But we don’t have time for rational solutions!”

Outlaw religion? For sex crimes? 

And here are two headlines from the NYT’s of 1/29/24:

So…depressing. 

And here is a sentence of transcript from the Podcast, Terrifying Questions, Episode 12: Are We Our Bodies? (January 29, 2024): “It may be that the christian despising of the body because it’s animal and sinful and so on is part of this illicit separation of the mind or the spirit from the body, because it’s by drawing a sharp contrast that you can then kinda condemn all the bodily stuff as lower and base and not worthy of respect.”

Condemn the body.

I think George Carlin saw the connection from christian hatred of the body (as the source of original sin [an illogical concept but here we are]), to the condemnation of the body, to the prevalence of sex crimes. 

What if we didn’t despise the body? 

What if we accepted that we are our bodies? And that our bodies aren’t intermediaries of sensation/perception?
What if we respected our bodies as the source of our being-in-the-world?
What if we didn’t treat our bodies as base vehicles, depreciated to valueless the moment we leave them at death (again, an illogical concept but here we are)?

What if sex weren’t the source of sin?
If we ditched this (illogical) concept, would our public be healthier?

Look Me Over And Think What You Will

I just finished Kurt Vonnegut’s Hocus Pocus and the book is little more than a deft depiction of a humanity fraught with violence, greed, racism, sexism, classism, materialism, prison industrial complexes, and bell towers.

Vonnegut is wonderful at providing perspective on our species. Having read a bit of him before I wasn’t surprised but at the end of the book…in so few words, merely a few sentences, he redeems, yes redeems (I know it is a strong word) humanity.

Upon meeting his 23 year old illegitimate son for the first time, his main character delivers this:

I felt wonderful, very happy to have him look me over and think what he would. I had seldom been happy to have my legitimate children look me over and think what they would…

And then:

How embarrassing to be human.

And lastly:

It could be, I suppose, because somewhere in the back of my mind I believed that there might really be a big book in which all things were written, and that I wanted some impressive proof that I could be compassionate recorded there.

I was crying at the dining room table thinking about my two young sons looking me over and thinking what they would. 

The world is nothing but a mirror.

Ok, maybe "redeem" is too strong a word. But close.