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September 20, 2007

I’ve never really had a problem sympathizing with Bill Hicks.

Maybe it’s the whole “frustrated Southerner sick of being lumped in with the mass amounts of idiots in the South” thing, the “frustrated human being sick of being lumped in with the mass amounts of idiots on the planet” thing, the “frustrated human being sick of seeing all of the consequences of society’s blind fealty to corrupt government officials who don’t give a fuck about us, and all we really have are each other” bit, or the “frustrated human being sick of the worst parts of the human race and fuck everything” schtick, but I can only count one time when I found him unfunny – I was young and still blind to the fact that humanity pretty much sucks, which is why we should encourage all moments of beauty that humanity can muster to flourish and be appropriately praised.

And while Hicks was often depicted as a hateful comedian, his hate seemed to be channeled in the right direction. He decried stupidity, racism, murder, the spoils of capitalism and the problems with advertising, blind faith in various institutions – government, military, religion - prohibition, refusal to change, and a lack of emphasis on education and compassion for our fellow man…and why not? These problems are certainly tantamount to any sort of social progress, and yet we still defer to and treat with respect those who fervently latch on to these antiquated ideals, treating such exclusionary and outmoded concepts with more than a shred of credibility….and why? Because we feel automatically beholden to such people thanks to a knee-jerk reaction inspired by the Revolutionary War?

Hicks frequently spoke of evolving ideas, and why not? Evolving ideas is automatically inclusive to acceptance, and humanity requires a measured degree of acceptance if we’re going to move anywhere. We can definitely disagree with certain things as individuals, but to treat them as anathema – as a culture – is regressive, to say the least. While Hicks was a comedian first and foremost, he was also an educator. He brought forth ideas, let them loose in his audience’s head, and the onus was on the audience whether or not they wanted to propagate these ideas by talking about them.

Which brings us to an entirely different part of cultural enlightenment – the discussion of ideas. I was talking with an ethnic friend about racism, and he matter-of-factly told me “This shit ends when you guys start talking about it.” Understandably, he was referring to white people given the circumstances of the conversation, but things truly only change when the antagonistic demographic starts discussing and challenging said issues. That sort of defines the level at which the American political debate landscape lies – a demographic unwilling to submit to change, to open itself to new ideas – compared to a demographic that’s sick of the bullshit perpetuated by such systematic beliefs, who wants change regardless of the source…which is frustrating and depressing and challenging all at the same time.

And it was within these similar parameters that Bill Hicks operated – an environment that decried intellectualism, that promoted blind faith in religion and government, and that worked best when nobody bothered to speak out against it. It was an environment where dissent was quashed, disregarded, from protest to being tasered at a public institution, and it was disgustingly overbearing, almost as if those in power were so fearful of the power of contrarian voices that their only method of combat was to violently stifle anything that remotely opposed their agenda.

I still feel somewhat elated over listening to various Hicks skits in context of recent events – most recently the Democratic defeat of the Republican system in the 2006 election in respect to the Hicks “Republican Beast is Dead” skit, as well as the various skits in respect to Saddam and the Iraq War – it seems as if Hicks was unwittingly ahead of his time. Regardless of how prescient his work may have been, we still have a very long way to go. Our Democratic leadership has yet to nut the fuck up and challenge the Republicans on a large scale, and while I understand their limitations due to the ration of R’s, D’s, and I’s within their institution, I still don’t understand the total lack of gumption and humanitarian outrage that they could rightfully brandish while still maintaining credibility – it’s come to realize that half of the things these people support are utterly inhuman, from the support of torture to the denial of basic legal rights to the rampant xenophobia and sheer hatred that they manage to tap for every single moment of their existence, and yet the people we elected still allow for some margin of this antithesis of cultural progress…and with looking at such an incident, I still realize how much further we have to travel as a nation before we openly accept and concede with various groups, while simultaneously marginalizing various groups based on their own hateful bullshit rhetoric and unwillingness to accept anything that’s contrary to their extremely limited worldview.

Thanks, Bill, for being there ahead of your time. We haven’t forgotten about you, and we'll never forget to harness the appropriate amount of outrage on your behalf. There's plenty of things to be pissed off about nowadays, and if we take it upon ourselves to be proper and respectful, we're absolutely missing the point in the face of many entities who wouldn't bother to reciprocate to us the same propriety and respectfulness.