If you haven’t been paying attention to what’s been happening around you, perhaps you should start paying closer attention, because it’s happening.  It happening, your country is being overthrown and it isn’t going to stop happening until you’ve been completely overrun by a brutal and unaccountable corporatocracy without a face and a regenerative head.  As I stated before in a couple other posts, I grew up enjoying standup comedy with my father ever since I was a kid.  Rare were such moments when I would feel emotional about a famous person passing away, but I actually wept when George Carlin died.  I grew up listening to him, since the days when he was more of a wordsmith who would do wonderful routines about the English language, some of them were even moderately clean comedy routines.  Hit such as “Icebox Man” and “Fussy Eater”, from his album, A Place For My Stuff, were personal childhood favorites of mine.  But as he got older, he held back less and opened up more in ways that truly spoke the truth about American culture, our government, politics, and the true owners and controllers of our country.  Rather than getting into a big opine of him and trying to convince you how awesome he was, I’ll let him speak for himself and you can decide for yourself.

For more great George Carlin materials…

Copyright Disclaimer Under Section 107 of the Copyright Act 1976, allowance is made for “fair use” for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research. Fair use is a use permitted by copyright statute that might otherwise be infringing. Non-profit, educational or personal use tips the balance in favor of fair use.

One of my favorite things as a kid was watching standup comedy laser discs with my father when laser disc preceded the Betamax. I’m sure plenty of you are aware of the laser disc players that came out after VHS some years before DVD, Blu-Ray and streaming came along and put Laser Blazer in West L.A. out of business (before Jay and Silent Bob relocated their Secret Stash), but I’m not talking about that laser disc. My love for the religion of standup comedy started back when you shoved a big thick plastic laser disc into the machine like an 8-track. How in the Hell that the true comic genius had escaped my radar for so many years, being that he’s been doing it for well over 20 years, is beyond me. I don’t know, maybe it was because I grew up on Richard Pryor and Redd Fox. But as I’ve stated before, I’m a Pandora fanatic, and I discovered him a bit too late in my life on the Political Comedy channel.  I won’t go into a huge long diatribe on him nor his material, because his comedy speaks for itself and though I’ve not been booed off a stage at an open mic, I still haven’t done enough reps to criticize or critique or say who’s good and who isn’t.  I was just so shocked to find someone whom I could almost call my spirit animal.

But for fuck’s sake, you cheap fucker, buy his material and support independent standup comedians who are out there grinding and making people laugh.  This was only a small excerpt of a fantastic show, No Refunds, which I saw on Netflix.  But you can find lots of great stuff here.

Copyright Disclaimer Under Section 107 of the Copyright Act 1976, allowance is made for “fair use” for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research. Fair use is a use permitted by copyright statute that might otherwise be infringing. Non-profit, educational or personal use tips the balance in favor of fair use.

I grew up loving stand-up comedy ever since I was a kid.  Unlike most other kids I knew, my parents were more open minded and permissive than other parents with what my brother and I were allowed to watch on TV or at the movies.  My Dad took us to see Ridley Scott’s ALIEN when I was in the second grade and took us to An American Werewolf in London in fourth grade, cool like that.  My house was the cool house for kids to spend the night on weekends back in the day.  Growing up in the 1970s and 80s, the moment Betamax hit the market was the beginning of my stand-up comedy education.  Redd Foxx, George Carlin, and Richard Pryor got plenty of airtime at Casa de Sandoval.  I was buying stand-up comedy cassettes and would record the Dr Demento Show on my portable tape recorder each and every Sunday night.  It was practically a religion to me.

When I got to Los Angeles after getting out the Navy, Bill Hicks was my favorite comedian because he truly seemed to fit with my worldview at the time.  I’m still in touch with plenty of my old shipmates after all these years.  Men that I consider my brothers, just like real family, and we argue and bicker just as much today as we did back in the early 90s.  One of the things we bickered and argued about was about the whole “love it or leave it” attitude that plenty of Americans tend to exhibit.  Thinking about it more, now it’s worse than ever because of this whole Trump phenomenon.

But I’m a believer in liberty and freedom, and contrary to popular belief, they’re not necessarily the same thing.  It’s been my observation and experience that the people who overuse the word “freedom” are not to be trusted.  Because more often than not, they seem to be obsessed with taking yours away all because they don’t understand the difference between symbol & substance.  Well let me clear it up for you, “freedom” is a concept that involves a whole country and all of the people within it.  As where “liberty” is more about the rights of the individual.  Fundamentally, the United States is considered a “free country”, and in a free society it is the right of individual liberty and personal sovereignty that reigns supreme.  Which brings me to symbol and substance.  In our free society, it is our Constitution that is supposed to be what guarantees our national freedom and individual liberty.  That’s what makes the Constitution of the United States of America the substance that binds us as a nation.  The flag, on the other hand, is a symbol of the promise of equality as a constitutional republic for which it stands, one nation indivisible.  It’s the symbol, not to be confused with the substance.

If I had a dollar for every time I witnessed a bunch of faketriots on social media telling other Americans to “love it or leave it,” and subsequently pontificating that the flag is what our military fought for, I could buy the New England Patriots and still have enough left over to sign Colin Kaepernick and punt Tom Brady to the bench out of sheer spite.  By the way, he wasn’t kneeling, but doing a genuflect (learn the difference), during the national anthem over police violence and somehow it was all turned into an act of defiance against the military, the flag, and what our military personnel fought for.  Well let me tell you this, when I took my solemn oath upon enlistment into the military, the oath that I swore was to uphold, support, and defend the Constitution of the United States of America from all enemies, foreign and domestic.  Nowhere in that oath was either the flag nor the national anthem ever mentioned.  The flag is a symbol of a promise and the Constitution (notice the capital “C”) is the substance of a guarantee.

We’re all free in this country to express ourselves individually, and this includes the right of an individual to burn the flag if they feel that neither their government nor their nation is living up to the promise that the symbol is supposed to represent.  That right was fought for in the court system, all the way up through the Supreme Court of the United States of America. Before anyone goes keyboard commando about their right to beat up people who burn the flag that they think U.S. Military personnel fought for, no you don’t have that right.  That would be called assault and battery and though the penalties vary from state to state, it can range from fines to imprisonment depending upon the severity of the offense and your criminal history.  It’s not something that’s worth landing yourself in the pokey over.  But since this blog post started in how I love stand-up comedy, particularly Bill Hicks, I’m just going to leave this right here.

MORE TO COME…

Copyright Disclaimer Under Section 107 of the Copyright Act 1976, allowance is made for “fair use” for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research. Fair use is a use permitted by copyright statute that might otherwise be infringing. Non-profit, educational or personal use tips the balance in favor of fair use.