REIMAGINING GEORGE CARLIN DURING LOCKDOWN - Of Productivity, Privilege, Proteins, Politics, People, Poop and more

Prelude:

1)    I surfed the internet and could not find any show by George Carlin, where he discussed this productivity mania and other things in detail (There is one on Motivation and Self-Help). If there are any videos, I request the reader to share in comments.

2)    There will be a lot of Carlin’s usual choice of words, which are intentional. The idea is to make it as close to how he would have fumed at the current scenario, with special emphasis on the Indian context.

3)    If you are not aware of George Carlin’s body of work and his methods, it is better you do not continue reading. I cannot handle the seismic attacks of your moral outrage on grounds of my political incorrectness.

“Folks, you know, I predicted the sort of a super virus that turns your vital organs into liquid shit long ago. Way back, in fact. People ask me how I could come up with these so-called prophecies. I say, “Bullshit. You, you, you and you, and every son of a motherfucker do not understand what to eat are bound to contact a virus. And, most of all, you deserve to die.” Anyways, the world is in a state of ‘lockdown’, and there are all sorts of these buffoons lamenting all over social media about the sad state of issues. These fucking idiots are lamenting over everything. EVERYTHING. The issues they keep harping about are so diverse, so unrelated, and so unimportant, and are nothing more than an additional act of assumed self-importance. In fact, I do have a list of ‘em. For the sake of time, let’s keep it to one alphabet now – P. People. Poor. Proteins. Productivity. Positivity. Privilege. Poop. Piss. Pollution. I’m tellin’ ya, I’m tired of this. Lemme do this, folks. Let’s add these people to my already existing listof people who ought to be killed.

Let’s start with people. Yeah, these Eccentric, Posh, Couch Potatoes. The IT workers. Ah, they have started complaining about getting stranded at their homes. Jesus Christ! What did y’all do when you went about minding your own business at the offices? You were flying kites with carefully-strung strings at the terrace of your office building? Travelling all around the orbits of this solar system during work hours? These motherfuckers were so inure to their work schedule that Sundays used to be self-imposed work days for them, and now these buy-all-consume-all-buy-more-consume-more wastrels have become stranded? Tell me this, you smug brats. When was the last time you DID NOT order an item on Amazon, Flipkart, Snapdeal, BigBasket, Swiggy, Zomato and many more of these apps that target just this shopping mania, and of course, with that, your personal data? When was the last time you went out of your home for anything – ANYTHING – apart from going to work? Nasty lunatics. Never stepped out of their homes. EVER. Cocooned themselves in their own lockdown every single day at work by comfortably perching their unshaped Flubber-like asses in a cubicle, and are now complaining of this goddamn lockdown.

These people are better. The least they can do is to lament, and the most they can do is to lament. Lamenting appears to be a sectoral 24*7 job of all the IT workers, who suddenly seem to hate Zoom meetings, Hangout chats, email deliverables, Trello boards, Slack tasks, Calendar appointments, conference calls, remote troubleshooting and what not. Were you, in your supposed days of glory at work before lockdown, telecommuting in a sort of Hyperloop that another of these self-righteous Silicon Valley entrepreneurs – one Elon Musk – designed for ya, to communicate in person with your far-off client existing in yet another time zone in yet another part of this big, fat world? Actually, forget designing or implementing Hyperloop. What the fuck is he talking about anyway? Fuck you, Lamenting Lampoons. Fuck Elon. And fuck everybody, coming to think of it.

Then, there are these Productivity Freaks. I don’t understand this. If you wanted to be productive, the first thing any sensible person would do is to turn the goddamn internet off. Or even better, break the smartphone, laptop, iPad, Kindle, desktop, modem, charger and headsets into a thousand pieces, and if possible, use another smartphone to make a TikTok video of it. I‘m telling you, these fanatics are capable of doing those kinda shit. You know what I mean? Breaking plates and banging god-knows-what vessel and using them as pieces of sonic instruments are things that my reasonably well-functioning brain does not seem to comprehend as activities of sanity or vanity. These people are worried about not spending their time useful enough. Calm down, you living-by-the-second-mindful-motherfuckers. Calm the fuck down. Let’s face it. Searching for productivity memes in a ton of Facebook pages surely does not qualify in any sense as a trait towards your wannabe sense of productivity. You know what productivity means? Lemme tell y’all what my definition of productivity is. Eat more. Shit more. If ‘more’ is the buzzword of productivity in this consumerist horizon, why not?

Speaking of food and poop, there are these calorie-conscious, protein-famished prickheads. These hypocritical assholes cannot seem to take a moment off to savour food. They need pitch-perfect, Excel-tabulated calculations for the number and percentage of the different micro- and macro-nutrients present in each and every morsel of meal they eat. Because, their lifestyles have suddenly become sedentary, and they do not want to gain weight. BULLSHIT. First of all, when was your work, life and everything in between in life not sedentary? Second of all, people, people. Stop. If we were conscious enough about food, what initiated this virus in the first place, huh?

Oh yeah, I know. I know. Those are only Chinese people. Let me introduce you to another bunch of these Clusterfuck Circlejerks, who are just vying for an opportunity to shift the burden on someone else - Africans in China, Expats, Immigrants, Muslims, Minorities. Carl Linnaeus would feel like his taxonomy is, after all, nothing more than a pile of sulphur-intoxicated garbage, if he saw the way these smug, greedy elites classify sub-groups. Branch after sub-branch after nodes after groups after classes after families of bullshit. Factually, FACTUALLY, there are only seven known types of Coronaviruses. Four mildly infective ones. SARS. MERS. nCOV. There is no Chinese virus. No African-expat virus. And the classification of these people to pass the buck just does not seem to stop only with the virus. It’s everywhere. Religion, caste, sub-caste, cluster, origin, family tree, forefathers’ origin, gender, creed, tribe, linguistics and more. Can’t seem to get rid of this habit of taxonomy. Fuck you, Linnaeus.

This taxonomic vassalage is what brings us to one of the other important categories of people. The Privilege-paranoid Party-poopers. Rich, well-fed, fair-skinned preachers of privilege make me want to spit and puke and cough and sneeze and burp and fart; fuck the masks and fuck droplet transmission. “You are privileged enough to stay home”, you say? Then, I dare say, “Fuck you. You are privileged enough to not only stay home but also stay home and post that goddamn tweet.” Oh, Jesus! You know what privileged asses should do? Stay home, eat more and shit more, like I said. Or better, go and try helping the health care workers. Pleasure-inducing for your privileged existence? Let’s then see what your omnipresent, validation-seeking souls on social media have to say about the privileged service of your privileged ass. Lemme tell you why these people harp, folks. I’ll tell y’all. It’s because they are safely placed in their comfortable cocoons, and can’t get out of it even after lockdown. These are “workarounds” towards portrayals of self-righteousness.

Staying true to the brand of taxonomy, there is a subset of these privileged preachers. I call ‘em Positivity Pukers. You’ve probably seen one of ‘em, haven’t ya? These high-on-optimism sub-humans possess some urine-induced belief from a cow that lighting various oil lamps would send out a message of positivity, solidarity and kill the virus. Kill the virus, seriously? Going by that argument, you know what’s more efficient? Lighting your balconies, corridors, bedrooms, dresses, cosmetics, and kitchens along with those liquefied gas cylinders on fire. If the heat kills the virus, why refrain from giving in the best possible effort to that extent? You the wanting-to-shed-privilege-but-nevertheless-privilege-practicing demigod will probably give some work to a group of privilege-forbidden hapless construction workers in effectively razing the building down to the ground.

But oh folks, that creates another set of problems. If there is so much heat, there’s pollution. Oh, dear! These Pollution-protecting Pigmies would then come up with some bar graphs, pie charts, tabulations, number crunching big data projections and all kinds of gibberish forecasts and extrapolations to guilt-trip your actions into one of privilege. “You were privileged enough to pollute the earth even during moments of arson”. What would the seemingly conscious act of absolving yourself of your privilege entail then? You know what it entails, irrespective of what you do or don't? That you’re nothing but a selfish asshole.

Thank you, that’s been my time. Thank you, folks. Thank you.”