Da Dominion: Home of DOMINIONCAST!

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Our first book review is on When will Jesus bring the Pork Chops? This article’s title supplies the answer to this esoteric question; one of the many thoughts George Carlin had and recorded for posterity in this volume using himself as narrator. As he’s made a living doing live perfomances, his voice is perfectly matched with the writing, but would be a magnitutde funnier if read by Abigail Breslin.

Years back, my father explained to me that old people were venomous sacks of bitchy because it was a natural psychological disconnect from life in preparation for eminent death. The preceding sentence encapsulates the theme of this book. If you … FUCKING … ADORE … Carlin’s “comedy” get this book, which can be found at your local Borders under scathing social commentary interspersed with obscenely bizarre ideas - but will likely be misplaced in the comedy section. However, this is dark - like a well diggers taint - observational comedy and commentary.

Reading a chapter at a time, once per day, will make you chuckle in fascination at what you just read. Four chapters a day will depress you into laconic distance from your loved ones. Reading the whole thing through will make you withdraw your life savings, fly to Vegas, commission three prostitutes for an indeterminate time, and four-way them on a McDonald’s play-scape while taking a shot of heroine for every fake moan of delight or terrified scream of a child until you die.

I’m listening to it right now and struggling not to choke myself with the mouse cord, as you can tell from the article thus far. Carlin is making a point on how dumb Americans are based on that fact that one is killed by a train every 90 mins. Trains, being on tracks, can’t come get you. They’re huge. They’re heralded by literal bells and whistles. Tracks are often on hard to scale raised embankments. Wooden planks lower to block your passage in front of them. This is one of the funny parts that aren’t focused on preachy cynicism - like the chapter Sex Facts from Thailand, which are admittedly dated because everyone there is occupied getting undressed.

The work’s title should be part of a series named for his older work Brain Droppings because that’s what fills these pages. Only some chapters are tied to an underlying theme and many are collections of anecdotes, sketches and comically weird questions: like why do they have people sign the Star Spangled Banner for the deaf? Don’t they know the words already? Wouldn’t you break an arm trying to capture the vocal gymnastics black singers put into it.

It has helped me though. Carlin focuses a great deal on the use of language in our culture, specifically euphemisms and how they dull meaning to the point of antiseptic incoherency. For example, PTSD is Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, which has evolved from the World War I term Shell Shock, a descriptor that actually triggers empathy as opposed to the clinical jargon but discourages youth from going to war sadly. If we are to worship Truth in da Dominion, this lesson is to be observed. Nonsense is prevalent in our contemporary speech: “caregiver” and “caretaker” are synonyms, where they should be opposites, right?

In this book, a favorite in my catalog, in one chapter, was where old George, clever as a fox, gave the skinny on how we shoot the shit with prepositional phrases around the clock, and wouldn’t you know it, he did so using these phrases, the old son of a bitch. I’m still a relatively new writer … I need to lie down after that. I think I’ll be turning to more … less honest comedy for the next book, but this one is ironically refreshingly straight.

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