Napalm & Silly Putty

by George Carlin

  ROCKETS AND PENISES IN THE PERSIAN GULF

  History Lesson

  I’d like to talk a little about that “war ”we had in the Persian Gulf. Remember that? The big war in the Persian Gulf? Lemme tell you what was goin’ on.

  Naturally, you can forget all that entertaining fiction about having to defend the model democracy those lucky Kuwaitis get to live under. And for the moment you can also put aside the very real, periodic need Americans have for testing their new weapons on human flesh. And also, just for the fun of it, let’s ignore George Bush’s obligation to protect the oil interests of his family and friends. There was another, much more important, consideration at work. Here’s what really happened.

  Dropping a Load for Uncle Sam

  The simple fact is that America was long overdue to drop high explosives on helpless civilians; people who have no argument with us whatsoever. After all, it had been awhile, and the hunger gnaws. Remember that’s our specialty: picking on countries that have marginally effective air forces. Yugoslavia is another, more recent, example.

  Surfing Unnecessary

  But all that aside, let me tell you what I liked about that Gulf War: it was the first war that appeared on every television channel, including cable. And even though the TV show consisted largely of Pentagon war criminals displaying maps and charts, it got very good ratings. And that makes sense, because we like war. We’re a war like people. We can’t stand not to be fucking with someone. We couldn’t wait for the Cold War to end so we could climb into the big Arab sandbox and play with our nice new toys. We enjoy war.

  And one reason we enjoy it is that we’re good at it. You know why we’re good at it? Because we get a lot of practice. This country is only 200 years old, and already we’ve had ten major wars. We average a major war every twenty years. So we’re good at it!

  And it’s just as well we are, because we’re not very good at anything else. Can’t build a decent car anymore. Can’t make a TV set, a cell phone, or a VCR. Got no steel industry left. No textiles. Can’t educate our young people. Can’t get health care to our old people. But we can bomb the shit outta your country, all right. We can bomb the shit outta your country!

  If You’re Brown, You’re Goin’ Down

  Especially if your country is full of brown people. Oh, we like that, don’t we? That’s our hobby now. But it’s also our new job in the world: bombing brown people. Iraq, Panama, Grenada, Libya. You got some brown people in your country? Tell ’em to watch the fuck out, or we’ll goddamn bomb them!

  Well, who were the last white people you can remember that we bombed? In fact, can you remember any white people we ever bombed? The Germans! That’s it! Those are the only ones. And that was only because they were tryin’ to cut in on our action. They wanted to dominate the world. Bullshit! That’s our job. That’s our fuckin’ job.

  But the Germans are ancient history. These days, we only bomb brown people. And not because they’re cutting in on our action; we do it because they’re brown. Even those Serbs we bombed in Yugoslavia aren’t really white, are they? Naaah! They’re sort of down near the swarthy end of the white spectrum. Just brown enough to bomb. I’m still waiting for the day we bomb the English. People who really deserve it.

  A Disobedient American

  Now, you folks might’ve noticed, I don’t feel about that Gulf War the way we were instructed to feel about it by the United States government. My mind doesn’t work that way. You see, I’ve got this real moron thing I do, it’s called “thinking.” And I guess I’m not a very good American, because I like to form my own opinions; I don’t just roll over when I’m told. Most Americans roll over on command. Not me. There are certain rules I observe.

  Believe You Me

  My first rule: Never believe anything anyone in authority says. None of them. Government, police, clergy, the corporate criminals. None of them. And neither do I believe anything I’m told by the media, who, in the case of the Gulf War, functioned as little more than unpaid employees of the Defense Department, and who, most of the time, operate as an unofficial public relations agency for government and industry.

  I don’t believe in any of them. And I have to tell you, folks, I don’t really believe very much in my country either. I don’t get all choked up about yellow ribbons and American flags. I see them as symbols, and I leave them to the symbol-minded.

  Show Us Your Dick

  I also look at war itself a little differently from most. I see it largely as an exercise in dick-waving. That’s really all it is: a lot of men standing around in a field waving their dicks at one another. Men, insecure about the size of their penises, choose to kill one another.

  That’s also what all that moron athlete bullshit is about, and what that macho, male posturing and strutting around in bars and locker rooms represents. It’s called “dick fear.” Men are terrified that their dicks are inadequate, and so they have to “compete” in order to feel better about themselves. And since war is the ultimate competition, essentially men are killing one another in order to improve their genital self-esteem.

  You needn’t be a historian or a political scientist to see the Bigger Dick Foreign Policy Theory at work. It goes like this: “What? They have bigger dicks? Bomb them!” And of course, the bombs, the rockets, and the bullets are all shaped like penises. Phallic weapons. There’s an unconscious need to project the national penis into the affairs of others. It’s called “fucking with people.”

  Show Us Your Bush

  So, as far as I’m concerned, that whole thing in the Persian Gulf was nothing more than one big dick-waving cockfight. In this particular case, Saddam Hussein questioned the size of George Bush’s dick. And George Bush had been called a wimp for so long, he apparently felt the need to act out his manhood fantasies by sending America’s white children to kill other people’s brown children. Clearly the worst kind of wimp.

  Even his name, “Bush, ” as slang, is related to the genitals without actually being the genitals. A bush is sort of a passive, secondary sex characteristic. It’s even used as a slang term for women: “Hey, pal, how’s the bush in this area?” I can’t help thinking, if this president’s name had been George Boner …well, he might have felt a little better about himself, and he wouldn’t have had to kill all those children. Too bad he couldn’t locate his manhood.

  Premature Extraction

  Actually, when you think about it, this country has had a man-hood problem for some time. You can tell by the language we use; language always gives us away. What did we do wrong in Vietnam? We “pulled out”! Not a very manly thing to do. No. When you’re fucking people, you’re supposed to stay with it and fuck them good; fuck them to death; hang in there and keep fucking them until they’re all fucking dead.

  But in Vietnam what happened was by accident we left a few women and children alive, and we haven’t felt good about ourselves since. That’s why in the Persian Gulf, George Bush had to say, “This will not be another Vietnam.” He actually said, “this time we’re going all the way.” Imagine. An American president using the sexual slang of a thirteen-year-old to describe his foreign policy.

  And, of course, when it got right down to it, he didn’t “go all the way.” Faced with going into Baghdad he punked out. No balls. Just Bush. Instead, he applied sanctions, so he’d be sure that an extra half a million brown children would die. And so his oil buddies could continue to fill their pockets.

  If you want to know what happened in the Persian Gulf, just remember the first names of the two men who ran that war: Dick Cheney and Colin Powell. Dick and colon. Someone got fucked in the ass. And those brown people better make sure they keep their pants on, because Dick and Colin have come back for an encore.

  OLD AND STINGY

  Here’s something that pisses me off: retired people who don’t want to pay local property taxes, because they say it’s not their grandchildren who go to the schools. Mean-spirited retirees usually from out of state. Cheap, selfish, old Bush voters.
The ones I read about were in Arizona. AARP members. They take a shit the size of a peanut and think it’s an accomplishment.

  And it’s not like these retirement people can’t afford the tax money. Not all old people are as dependent on Social Security checks as they’d like you to think. Some of them get all kinds of checks: Social Security, the VA, private pensions, government pensions. They also have stock dividends, bank interest, and whatever else they’ve managed to squeeze out of the system.

  And still they begrudge their local property taxes simply because their own fucked-up, cross-eyed grandchildren aren’t gonna use the schools. Fuck’em! I say pay your taxes and die like everybody else. I hope they choke on an early-bird dinner.

  SHORT TAKES

  What exactly is wrong with inmates running the asylum? It seems to me they’re in an ideal position to know just what’s needed.

  HOORAY FOR MOST THINGS!

  When it comes to my organs, I’ve decided to donate only my prostate and testicles, with the stipulation that they go to one of those lovely feminists.

  Here’s something no one ever wrote before: “Big bats down to one five, five over cross, up the thingo. Nose, baseball, hieroglyphics, hopscotch, pouch. Inevitably, two four eight, four eight, four eight, four eighth. I. I with a two, two, two. Three. Four. Five. Down here, Mother, we’re all home now. So long, Jill. Beep beep. Hungry, hungry. Are you? I couldn’t stand it. Not in my house. Up yours, too, Don. He’s packin’ them in! We’ll all try it. Fifty-fifty? Okay, but not me.” No one ever wrote that before. Not even Shakespeare. I’m proud of that.

  Civilization began its downhill path the day some guy first uttered the words, “A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do.”

  Have you ever been in the middle of a nice, pleasant dream, when you suddenly wake up and realize someone is trying to kill you? You know what I do? I go back to sleep.

  They say if you live to be 100 your lucky number goes up by one.

  Near as I can tell, “jack shit” and “diddly-squat” are roughly the same amount.

  What do you think about some guy who hears a voice in his head that tells him to kill his entire family, and he does it? Is that the only thing these voices ever tell paranoid guys to do? Kill people? Doesn’t a voice ever say, “Go take a shit on the salad bar at Wendy’s!” Doesn’t a voice tell a guy to take out his dick on the merry-go-round? Actually, some guys do take out their dicks on the merry-go-round. But usually it’s their own idea.

  In the old days white people used to put black greasepaint on their faces and perform menstrual shows. That must have been really interesting.

  When I first heard the song “Don’t Worry, Be Happy, ” I realized it was exactly the kind of mindless philosophy that Americans would respond to. It would make a great national motto. Right along with Me First.

  Little-Known Fact: When the stock exchange closes, the guy who comes out on the balcony with that big hammer slams it on the head of the person who lost the most money that day.

  America has too many fake Irish pubs. Giving your bar an Irish name doesn’t make it a pub. The word pub is earned the hard way: tons and tons of puke and thousands of shattered cheekbones.

  McDonald’s breakfast for under a dollar is actually more expensive than that. You have to factor in the cost of bypass surgery.

  May I make it clear that I don’t care what country the pope is in? I’m really not interested. All the pope ever does is go around to places where people make six dollars a year and tell them to have more children. Isn’t that bright? And responsible! And compassionate. Such a bright, responsible, compassionate man. If the pope wants to travel around, flaunting his wealth and encouraging poor people to have children, let him do it privately. And for God’s sake, keep it off television. The pope is not news.

  No one who has ever had “Taps” played for them has been able to hear it.

  Although it’s true blondes have more fun, it’s important to remember that they also have more venereal disease.

  If you watch a sitcom carefully, you can see that it’s really nothing more than a series of doors opening and closing with a series of jackoffs entering and exiting.

  Here’s a great idea: A roach spray that doesn’t kill the roach, but, instead, fills him with self-doubt as to whether or not he’s in the right house.

  I’m sure looters don’t call it looting. They probably think of it as extreme shopping.

  FUCK THE POLITICAL CENTER

  America got what it deserved in Elvis Presley: a big fat, drug-addict squealer. And don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing wrong with being a drug addict. But he wasn’t even addicted to a cool drug like heroin. It was medicine. Fuckin’ doctor drugs.

  One good reason for maintaining only a small circle of friends is that three out of four murders are committed by people who know the victim.

  If you live on the wrong side of the tracks but get up on the right side of the bed, do those things cancel each other out? Probably not.

  Professional soldiers are people who die for a living.

  Here’s Some Fun: Go into a photography shop and ask the man if you can buy the pictures of the other people in the window. Say, “How much for that heavy-set couple?” I guarantee they’ll stare at you a long time. In fact, they might even back up several feet.

  Whenever they say someone got hit by a “stray bullet ”I wonder about the choice of words. It seems to me the bullet isn’t stray at all. It’s doing exactly what physics predicts: travelling in a straight line. What’s so stray about that?

  AT LEAST EAT A FUCKIN’ LIMA BEAN, WILL YA?

  Beverly Hills has a new restaurant for bulimia victims. It’s called The Scarf and Barf. Originally, they were gonna call it The Fork and Bucket. Thank God, once again good taste prevailed in Beverly Hills.

  They’re also planning a restaurant for anorexics, but again, having trouble with the name. It’s a toss-up between The Empty Plate and Lonesome Chef. I suggested Start Without Me, Guys.

  Tell you the truth, I don’t feel sorry for an anorexic. Do you? Some rich cunt doesn’t wanna eat? Fuck her! Don’t eat. I give a shit. Like I’m supposed to be concerned.

  “I don’t wanna eat!”

  “Go fuck yourself! Why don’t you lie down in front of a railroad train after you don’t eat?”

  What kind of a goddamn disease is anorexia, anyway? “I don’t wanna eat!” How do we come up with this shit? Where do we get our values?

  Bulimia. There’s another all-American disease. This has gotta be the only country in the world where some people are digging in the dumpster for a peach pit while other people eat a nice meal and puke it up intentionally. Where do we get our values?

  FACE-TO-FACE WITH THE CLOCK

  I remember when they tried to teach me to tell time as a little boy. What they didn’t know, of course, was that you don’t tell time; time tells you. Still they tried.

  “Now, George, the big hand is on …”

  “I don’t have a big hand. Both my hands are little.”

  “Never mind. Just look at the clock.”

  And I did. It was wonderful. I love the face of a clock. To me, there is great emotion attached to the face of a clock. A conventional analog clock.

  Digital clocks are all right in their place, I suppose, but they lack the friendly spatial relationships that exist between the hands and the numerals on an analog clock.

  There’s a psychological component: to me, the first half of any hour, as the minute hand falls from 12 to 6, passes a lot more quickly than the second half, when it has to struggle upward, fighting gravity all the way.

  I’ll say this much: If I had only half an hour to live, I’d want it to be the second half. I just know it would last a little longer.