Napalm & Silly Putty

by George Carlin

  Then you put the whole thing on cable TV. The Violence Network. VNN. And for a corporate sponsor, you get one of those companies that loves to smear its logo-feces all over the landscape. Budweiser will jump at this in half a minute.

  Second group: Sex criminals. Completely incurable; you have to lock them up. Oh, I suppose you could outlaw religion and these sex crimes would disappear in a generation or two, but we don’t have time for rational solutions. It’s much easier to fence off another rectangular state. This time, Wyoming.

  But this is only for true sex offenders. We’re not going to harass consenting adults who dress up in leather Boy Scout uniforms and smash each other in the head with ball-peen hammers as they take turns blowing their cats. There’s nothing wrong with that; it’s a victimless hobby. And think of how happy the cat must be. No, we’re only going to lock up rapists and molesters; those hopeless romantics who are so full of love they can’t help gettin’ a little of it on you. Usually on your leg.

  You take all these heavy-breathing fun-seekers, and you stick them in Wyoming. And you let them suck, fuck, and fondle. You let them blow, chew, sniff, lick, whip, gobble, and cornhole one other …until their testicles are whistlin’ “O Come All Ye Faithful.” Then you turn. on the cameras, and you’ve got …the Semen Channel! And don’t forget our corporate sponsor. We’re going to let Budweiser put little logo patches on the rapists’ pants: “This pud’s for you!”

  Next group: Drug addicts and alcoholics. Not all of them, don’t get nervous. Just the ones who are making life difficult for at least one other person. And we’re not gonna bother first offenders; people deserve a chance to clean up. So, everyone will get twelve chances to clean up. Okay okay, fifteen! Fine! That’s fair, and that’s all you get. If you can’t make it in fifteen tries, off you go …to Colorado! The perfect place for staying loaded.

  Each week, all of the illegal drugs confiscated in the United States—at least those drugs the police and DEA don’t keep for their own personal use—will be air-dropped into Colorado. That way, everyone can stay stoned, bombed, wasted, smashed, hammered, and fucked up around the clock on another new cable channel: Shitface Central. This is the real Rocky Mountain high.

  Now, I’ve saved my favorite group for last. The Maniacs and Crazy People. The ones who live out where the buses don’t run. And I always take care to distinguish between maniacs and crazy people. A maniac will beat nine people to death with a steel dildo. A crazy person will beat nine people to death with a steel dildo, but he’ll be wearing a Bugs Bunny suit at the time.

  So you can’t put them all away. You have to keep some of them around just for the entertainment. Like the guy who tells you the King of Sweden is using his gallbladder as a radio transmitter to send anti Semitic, lesbian meat loaf recipes to Marvin Hamlisch. A guy like that, you want to give him his own radio show.

  No, the Maniac Farm will be used strictly for hopeless cases. Like a guy who gets a big tattoo on his chest of Madonna taking a shit. You know? Then he tells you that if he flexes certain muscles it looks like she’s wipin’ her ass. A guy like that, you wanna get him into custody as quickly as possible.

  Now, for the Maniac Farm I think there’s no question we have to go with Utah. Easy to fence, and right next to Wyoming and Colorado. And Colorado is right next to? Right, Kansas! And that means that all four groups of our most amusing citizens are now in one place. Except for the big electric fences. And, folks, I think I have another one of my really good ideas for cable TV. Gates! Small sliding gates in the fences.

  Think what you have here. Four groups: degenerates, predators, crackheads, and fruitcakes. All separated by 900 miles of fence. And here’s how you have some fun: every ten miles, you put a small, sliding gate in the fence. But—the gates are only ten inches wide, and they’re only opened once a month. For seven seconds.

  And you know something? Fuck cable, this stuff belongs on pay-per-view. Because if those gates are only open seven seconds a month, you are gonna have some mighty interesting people trying to be first on line. Deeply disturbed, armed, cranky lunatics on drugs! You know the ones: a lot of tattoos; a lot of teeth broken off at the gum line. The true face of America. And every time you open the gates a few of the more aggressive ones are gonna slip through. The crème de la crème. The alphas! They’re gonna slip through, they’re gonna find each other, and they’re gonna cross-breed.

  And pretty soon you’ll have the American melting pot: child-killers, corpse-fuckers, drug zombies, and full-blown twelve-cylinder wackaloons. All wandering the landscape in search of truth. And fun. Just like now. Everyone will have guns, everyone will have drugs, and no one will be in charge. Just like now. But Social Security will be fully funded.

  I’LL BE RIGHT BACK

  I’ve never been impressed with people who tell me what they plan to do when they go to the bathroom. Doesn’t that bother you? People who announce their intentions?

  “I’ll be right back, Trevor, I’m gonna take a shit.”

  “Never mind, Pietro! Do what you have to and leave me out of it. And please don’t describe it when you get back.”

  [Time, among other things, passes.]

  “Boy, you shoulda seen …”

  “Never mind!”

  “It set off the smoke alarm.”

  “Never mind!”

  “The rest room attendant passed out.”

  I’ve never understood people who describe their bowel achievements. Nor have I much cared for it. Especially at a fine restaurant.

  NOT EVERY EJACULATION DESERVES A NAME

  Have you noticed that most people who are against abortion are people you wouldn’t want to fuck in the first place? Conservatives are physically unattractive and morally inconsistent. They’re obsessed with fetuses from conception to nine months, but after that they have no interest in you. None. No day care, no Head Start, no school lunch, no food stamps, no welfare, no nothin’. If you’re preborn, you’re fine; if you’re preschool, you’re fucked.

  Once you leave the womb, conservatives don’t care about you until you reach military age. Then you’re just what they’re looking for. Conservatives want live babies so they can raise them to be dead soldiers.

  Pro-life. How can they be pro-life when they’re killing doctors? What sort of moral philosophy is that? “We’ll do anything to save a fetus, but we might have to kill it later on if it grows up to be a doctor”? They’re not pro-life; they’re antiwoman. Simple. They’re afraid of women, and they don’t like them. They believe a woman’s primary role is to function as a brood mare for the State. If they think a fetus is more important than a woman, they should try getting a fetus to wash the shit stains out of their underwear. For no pay.

  Pro-life. You don’t see many white, antiabortion women volunteering to have black fetuses transplanted into their uteruses, do you? No. You don’t see them adopting any crack babies, do you? No, that’s something Jesus would do.

  And you won’t see many pro-lifers dousing themselves with kerosene and lighting themselves on fire. Remember the Buddhist monks in Vietnam? Morally committed religious people in Southeast Asia knew how to stage a protest: light yourself on fire! C’mon, you Christian crusaders, let’s see a little smoke. Let’s see if you can match that fire in your bellies.

  Separate thought: Why is it when it’s a human being it’s called an abortion, and when it’s a chicken it’s called an omelet. Are we so much better than chickens? When did that happen? Name six ways we’re better than chickens. See? No one can do it. You know why? Because chickens are decent people.

  You don’t see chickens hanging around in drug gangs, do you? No. You don’t see chickens strappin’ someone to a chair and hookin’ up their nuts to a car battery. And when’s the last time you heard about a chicken who came home from work and beat the shit out of his hen? Huh? It doesn’t happen. You know why? Because chickens are decent people.

  Back to abortion: The central question seems to be “Are fetuses human beings?” Wel
l, if fetuses are human beings, why aren’t they counted by the census? If fetuses are human beings, why is it there’s no funeral following a miscarriage? If fetuses are human beings, why do people say, “We have two children and one on the way, ”instead of saying, “We have three children”?

  Some people say life begins at conception; I say life began a billion years ago, and it’s a continuous process. And actually, it goes back farther than that. What about the carbon atoms? Human life could not exist without carbon. So is it possible that maybe we shouldn’t be burning all this coal? I don’t mean to be picky, I’m just lookin’ for a little consistency.

  The hard-core pro-lifers tell us that life begins at fertilization, when the sperm fertilizes the egg. Which usually occurs a few minutes after the man says, “Sorry, honey, I was gonna pull out, but the phone startled me.”

  But even after fertilization it’s still six or seven days before the egg reaches the uterus and pregnancy begins. And not every egg makes it. Eighty percent of a woman’s fertilized eggs are rinsed out of her body once a month during those delightful few days she has. They end up on sanitary napkins, and yet they are fertilized eggs. So, what these antiabortion people are actually telling us is that any woman who’s had more than one period is a serial killer. I don’t mean to be picky, I’m just looking for a little consistency.

  And speaking of consistency, Catholics—which I was until I reached the age of reason—Catholics and other Christians are against abortions, and they’re against homosexuals. Well, who has less abortions than homosexuals? Here’s an entire class of citizens guaranteed never to have an abortion, and the Catholics and Christians are just tossin’ them aside. You’d think they’d be natural allies.

  And regarding the Catholics, when I hear that the Pope and some of his “holy” friends have experienced their first pregnancies and labor pains, and raised a couple of children on minimum wage, I’ll be glad to hear what they have to say about abortion. In the meantime, what they ought to do is tell these priests who took a vow of chastity to keep their hands off the altar boys. When Jesus said, “Suffer the little children come unto me, ”pedophilia is not what he was talking about. He had something else in mind.

  I’VE GOT YOUR SANCTITY OF LIFE

  One phrase that comes up quite a bit in abortion discussions is “sanctity of life.” What about that? Do you think there’s such a thing as sanctity of life? Personally, I think it’s a bunch of shit. Who says life is sacred? God? Great, but if you read your history you know that God is one of the leading causes of death and has been for thousands of years. Hindus, Moslems, Christians, Jews, all taking turns killing one another, because God told them it was a good idea. The sword of God, the blood of the lamb, vengeance is mine. Millions of dead people. All because they gave the wrong answer to the God Question:

  “Do you believe in God?”

  “No.”

  BAM! Dead.

  “How about you? Do you believe in God?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you believe in my God?”

  “No.”

  BAM! Dead!

  “My god has a bigger dick than your god.”

  For thousands of years all the bloodiest and most brutal wars have been based on religious hatred. Which, of course, is fine with me; any time “holy ”people are killing one another, I’m a happy guy. But please, don’t kill each other and then give me that shit about “sanctity of life.” Even if there were such an absurd thing, I don’t think you could blame it on God.

  You know where the sanctity of life comes from? We made it up. You know why? Because we’re alive. Self-interest! Living people have a strong incentive to promote the idea that somehow life is sacred. You don’t see Bing Crosby runnin’ around talking about this shit, do you? You don’t hear much from Mussolini on the subject. And what’s the latest from JFK? Not a goddamn thing! You know why? Because JFK, Mussolini, and Bing Crosby are all fuckin’ dead. They’re fuckin’ dead, and dead people give less than a shit about the sanctity of life.

  The only people who care about it are the living. So the whole thing grows out of a biased point of view. It’s a self-serving, man-made bullshit story; one of those things we tell ourselves in order to feel noble. “Life is sacred.” Makes us feel good. But let me ask you this: If everything that ever lived is dead, and everything alive is going to die, where does the sacred part come in? Can you help me on that?

  Because even with all we preach about the sanctity of life, we don’t practice it. Look at what we kill: Mosquitoes and flies, because they’re pests. Lions and tigers, because it’s fun. Chickens and pigs, because we’re hungry. And people. We kill people. Because they’re pests. And because it’s fun!

  And here’s something else I noticed. Apparently, the sanctity of life doesn’t apply to cancer cells, does it? You rarely see a bumper sticker that says Save the Tumors. Or I Brake for Advanced Melanoma. No. Viruses, molds, mildew, maggots, fungus, weeds, intestinal worms, E. coli bacteria, the crabs. Nothin’ sacred about those things. Just us.

  So, at best, the sanctity of life is a selective thing. We choose which forms of life we feel are sacred, and we get to kill the rest. Pretty neat deal. You know how we got it? We made the whole thing up! Same way we made up the death penalty. The sanctity of life, and the death penalty. We’re such a versatile species.

  READY OR NOT, HERE WE COME!

  The latest disaster for the solar system is that the United States has decided go to Mars. And, of course, later we intend to colonize deep space with our Salad Shooters and Snot Candy and microwave hot dogs. But let me ask you this: What are we going to tell the Intergalactic Council the first time one of our young women throws her newborn baby out of a seventh-story window? And how do we explain to the Near-Stellar Trade Confederation that our representative was late for the meeting because his breakfast was cold, and he had to spend thirty minutes beating the shit out of his wife?

  Do you think the elders of the Universal Board of Wisdom will understand that it’s simply because of quaint local customs that over 80 million of our women have had their clitorises and labia cut off and their vulvas sewn shut in order to make them more marriageable and unable to derive pleasure from sex and thus never be a threat to stray from their husbands’ beds?

  Can’t you just sense how eager the rest of the universe is for us to show up?

  NEVER HEARD OF HIM!

  You ever notice that suddenly overnight someone you never heard of becomes a big celebrity; and you never heard their name before? Ever? And you think, Who the fuck is this? How can this happen without me noticing? Usually it’s because the person is in some line of work you’re not interested in, like popular music or network television. They’re on some TV show you wouldn’t watch unless you were strapped in bed in a nuthouse, but suddenly there are big magazine articles about them, and they’re on Leno and Letterman. Don’t you feel really good two years later when they’ve completely disappeared; gone back to the supermarket? It’s very satisfying.

  SHORT TAKES

  Have you ever been on trial for murder? It’s weird. You don’t know what to do with yourself. Singing is out. Mostly I stare at the judge.

  Is a vegetarian permitted to eat animal crackers?

  I’ve figured out how to commit the perfect double murder. You pick one person up by the ankles and beat the other person to death with him. They both die, and there’s no murder weapon.

  Peg Leg Bates’s wife is one person who never had to wait for the other shoe to drop.

  Have you ever had a hatchet go right through your face? Not a glancing blow, but a full-on shot, deep into your forehead? Deep enough so you can shake your head and the hatchet doesn’t fall out? It’s the strangest feeling. Because just after the hatchet goes in, and before there’s any pain, you can feel a gentle puff of cool air on your brain. It feels good. But since it’s the only way to get that feeling, I try not to get too hung up on it.