27 June 2008

A Useful Comparison

Professional asshole Vox Day considers it "no loss" that George Carlin is dead:

I never thought George Carlin was funny. Not even a little bit. It wasn't due to his language or anything, whether it was Carlin's lame routine about seven words or his cameos in movies like Dogma, I just thought he was lame, boring, and obvious from the start and never saw any reason to change my opinion. His uttered wisdom, such as it was, seemed design to impress those with average IQs; they were chock full of the illusion of intelligence rather than anything approaching the real thing.
Oh, you rascally varmint Vox! Tell it like it is, man!

Then again, Vox is just begging for a comparison between his own putrid rumblings and Carlin's work, so I think it bears a moment of reflection. On the one hand, we have an entertainer with a five-decade resume, more than a dozen hourlong HBO specials dating back to the earliest days of HBO, three bestselling books, a legendary reputation among the most brilliant comedy minds currently working, and oh yeah, a Supreme Court win. On the other, you've got a guy who's done work on a few videogames, a free blog, and a handful of self-published science fiction books available for free download.

Now, I'm aware that history sometimes can be a bitch, but if we're looking to see which one of these men will have the most lasting effect on history, I'm betting on the rotting corpse.

I do, however, disagree with the commenter whom Vox responds to asking Vox to lay off the insults to Carlin. Vox describes Carlin thusly:
An individual who devoted his entire career to tearing down tradition and encouraging disrespect and believed that humans are nothing more than meaningless collections of atoms
His central misunderstanding of reality is to believe that this is in any way an insult. We are all meaningless collections of atoms; it is those who believe in magical fairies granting eternal paradise who deserve our scorn, not those who accept the world the way it is like an adult should.

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