George Carlin - Napalm and Silly Putty

Here’s a good one. Something really nice. You take a high-speed catapult, and you shoot a guy straight into a brick wall. Trouble is, it would be over too quickly. No good for TV. You’d have to do a whole bunch of guys right in a row. Rapid-fire capital punishment. Fifteen catapults! While you’re shootin’ off one, you’re loadin’ up the others. Of course, every now and then you’d have to stop everything to clean off the wall. Cleanliness! Right next to godliness.

Finally, high-tech! I sense you’re waitin’ for some high-tech. Here you go. You take a highly miniaturized tactical nuclear weapon, and you stick it straight up a guy’s ass and set it off. A thermonuclear suppository. Preparation H-Bomb. Boy, you talk about fallout! Or, a variation: You put a bomb inside that little hole on the end of a guy’s dick. A bomb in a dick! And when it goes off, the guy wouldn’t know whether he was comin’ or goin’! I got a lotta good ideas. Save Social Security.

Here’s another one of my really good ideas. I’m going to save us a whole lot of money on prisons, but at the same time I’m going to remove from society many of our more annoying citizens. Four groups are goin’ away—permanently!

First group: Violent criminals. Here’s what you do: You take the entire state of Kansas and you move everybody out. You give the people a couple of hundred dollars apiece for their inconvenience, but you get them out. Next you put a 100-foot-high electric fence around the entire state, and Kansas becomes a permanent prison farm for violent criminals. No police, no parole, no supplies; the only thing you give them is lethal weapons and live ammunition. So they can communicate in a meaningful manner.

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’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.

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.