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Video Description
In this piece from George Carlin’s HBO Special, “Life Is Worth Losing,” the stand-up comedian covers the downfall of America from our “inheritance” of this beautiful country to consumerism and today’s politicians, “It’s a big club and you ain’t in it.”
Life Is Worth Losing, stand-up comedian George Carlin’s 13th HBO comedy special, was recorded at New York’s Beacon Theatre in 2005. The special was simultaneously broadcast live. The special was nominated for Best Comedy Album at the 49th Annual Grammy Awards.
Full Video Transcript
But say what you want about America land of the free home the brave we got some dumb ass motherfuckers floating around this country
dumb ass motherfuckers
Now obviously that doesn’t include this audience I understand that
You seem intelligent and perceptive, but the rest of them. Holy jumping fucking shit balls
Dumber than a second coat of paint
And this ain’t just ranting and raving
This ain’t just blowing off steam
I got a little evidence to support my claim
It just seems to me
Seems to me
That only a really low IQ population
Could have taken this beautiful continent
This magnificent American landscape
That we inherited
Well actually we stole it from the Mexicans and the Indians
But hey it was nice when we stole it
It looked pretty good
It was pristine
Mmm, paradise.
Have you seen it lately?
Have you taken a good look at it lately?
It’s fucking embarrassing.
Only a nation of unenlightened half-wits
could have taken this beautiful place
and turned it into what it is today, a shopping mall.
A big fucking shopping mall.
You know that?
That’s all you got.
That’s all you’ve got here, folks.
Mile after mile of mall after mall.
Many, many malls. Major malls and mini malls.
They put the mini malls in between the major malls.
And in between the mini malls, they put the mini marts.
And in between the mini marts, you got the car lots, gas stations,
muffler shops, laundromats, cheap hotels, fast food joints,
strip clubs, and dirty bookstores.
America the Beautiful.
One big transcontinental commercial cesspool.
And how do the people feel about all this?
How do the people feel about living in a coast-to-coast shopping mall?
Well, they think it’s just fucking dandy.
They think it is cool as can be,
because Americans love the mall.
They love the mall.
That’s where they get to satisfy
their two most prominent addictions
at the same time, shopping and eating.
Millions of semi-conscious Americans,
day after day, shuffling through the malls,
shopping and eating, especially eating.
Americans love to eat.
They are fatally attracted to the slow death of fast food.
Hot dogs, corn dogs, triple bacon, cheeseburgers,
corn dogs, triple bacon, cheeseburgers,
deep-fried butter dipped in pork fat and cheese whiz,
mayonnaise-soaked barbecued mozzarella patty melts.
Americans will eat anything.
Anything. Anything.
If you were selling sautéed raccoon’s assholes on a stick,
Americans would buy them and eat them.
Especially if you dipped them in butter
and put a little salsa on them.
This country is big time, pig time.
Forget the bald eagle.
You know what the national emblem of this country ought to be?
a big bowl of macaroni and cheese.
A big bowl,
because everything in this country is king size.
King size, extra large, and super jumbo.
Especially the fucking people.
Have you seen some of the people in this country?
Have you taken a good look
at some of these big, fat motherfuckers
walking around?
Big, fat motherfuckers.
Oh, my God.
Huge piles of redundant protoplasm
lumbering through the malls
like a fleet of interstate buses.
The people in this country are immense.
Massive bellies, monstrous thighs,
and big, fat fucking asses.
And if you stand there for a minute
and you look at one of them,
you look at one of them,
you begin to wonder,
how does this woman take a shit?
How does she shit?
And even more frightening,
how does she wipe her ass?
Can she even locate her asshole?
She must require assistance.
Are paramedics trained in this field?
And standing right next to her, of course,
with a plate full of nachos and a mouthful of pie
is her clueless fucking husband, Joe Sixpack.
With his monstrous swollen beer belly
hanging dangerously out over his beer belt buckle,
this guy ain’t seen his dick since the Nixon administration.
And if you stand there and you look at the two of them,
you begin to wonder to yourself,
do these people fuck?
Is this man actually capable of fucking this woman?
It doesn’t seem structurally possible
That these two people could achieve penetration
Maybe they’re in that Cirque du Soleil or something
Telling you, the people in this country
Every half, every one of them is 50 pounds overweight
They are gargantuan
And in the summertime, God help us
In the summertime, they all want to wear short pants.
Jesus, Lord, protector of all that is good and holy,
deliver me from fat people in short pants.
They all got short pants, big bellies, fat thighs, and dumb kids.
Short pants, big bellies, fat thighs, and dumb kids.
Every one of them’s got two dumbass kids with them.
And the whole family is wearing T-shirts,
and every one of them’s got the same T-shirt.
I’m with stupid.
Apparently, in this country, the stupids are an extended family.
And besides wearing them t-shirts,
everyone in the family’s got on a backpack.
They got a backpack strapped to their back
so they can carry around lots of stupid shit.
And the reason they got to carry their stupid shit
strapped to their backs is because their hands
must remain free at all times to hold food.
And to get that food up to their mouth
where it gets shoveled in with all the rest
of the disgusting shit they ate that day.
And another reason for the backpacks
is these people are gonna buy even more stupid shit.
stupid shit. They ain’t got enough stupid shit at home. They just had a stupid shit sale. They ain’t
gonna buy more. They’re gonna go out in the parking lot and stuff this stuff into the big, fat, ugly,
oversized SUV that’s got plenty of room in it. Plenty of room in it for stupid shit and lots
of room left over for these big, fat, ugly motherfuckers to get them home. Stopping, of course,
for jelly roll and fried dough. These people, these people are efficient, professional, compulsive
It’s their civic duty, consumption.
It’s the new national pastime.
Fuck baseball. It’s consumption.
The only true lasting American value that’s left,
buying things. Buying things.
People spending money they don’t have
on things they don’t need.
Money they don’t have on things they don’t need
so they can max out their credit cards
and spend the rest of their lives
paying 18% interest on something that costs $12.50.
And they didn’t like it when they got it home anyway.
Not too bright, folks. Not too fucking bright.
fucking bright. But if you talk to one of them about this, if you isolate one of them, you sit
them down rationally, you talk to them about the low IQs and the dumb behavior and the bad decisions,
right away they start talking about education. That’s the big answer to everything. Education.
They say, we need more money for education. We need more books, more teachers, more classrooms,
more schools. We need more testing for the kids. You say to them, well, you know, we’ve tried all
of that and the kids still can’t pass the test. You say, oh, don’t you worry about that. We’re
going to lower the passing grades. And that’s what they do in a lot of these schools now. They lower
the passing grades so more kids can pass.
More kids pass, the school looks good, everybody’s happy, the IQ of the country slips another
two or three points, and pretty soon all you’ll need to get into college is a fucking pencil.
Got a pencil?
Get the fuck in there, it’s physics.
Then everyone wonders why 17 other countries graduate more scientists than we do.
Education.
Politicians know that word, they use it on you.
Politicians have traditionally hidden behind three things, the flag, the Bible, and children.
No child left behind. No child left behind.
Oh, really? Well, it wasn’t long ago
you were talking about giving kids a head start.
Head start, left behind.
Someone’s losing fucking ground here.
But there’s a reason. There’s a reason.
There’s a reason for this.
There’s a reason education sucks,
and it’s the same reason that it will never,
ever, ever be fixed.
It’s never gonna get any better.
Don’t look for it. Be happy with what you got.
Because the owners of this country don’t want that.
I’m talking about the real owners now.
The real owners, the big wealthy business interests
that control things and make all the important decisions.
Forget the politicians.
The politicians are put there to give you the idea
that you have freedom of choice.
You don’t.
You have no choice.
You have owners.
They own you.
They own everything.
They own all the important land.
They own and control the corporations.
They’ve long since bought and paid for the Senate,
the Congress, the state houses, the city halls.
They got the judges in their back pockets.
and they own all the big media companies,
so they control just about all of the news
and information you get to hear.
They got you by the balls.
They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying,
lobbying to get what they want.
Well, we know what they want.
They want more for themselves and less for everybody else,
but I’ll tell you what they don’t want.
They don’t want a population of citizens
capable of critical thinking.
They don’t want well-informed, well-educated people
capable of critical thinking.
They’re not interested in that.
That doesn’t help them.
That’s against their interest.
That’s right.
They don’t want people who are smart enough
to sit around a kitchen table
and figure out how badly they’re getting fucked
by a system that threw them overboard 30 fucking years ago.
They don’t want that.
You know what they want?
They want obedient workers.
Obedient workers.
People who are just smart enough to run the machines
and do the paperwork,
and just dumb enough to passively accept
all these increasingly shittier jobs
with the lower pay, the longer hours,
the reduced benefits, the end of overtime,
and the vanishing pension that disappears
the minute you go to collect it.
And now they’re coming for your social security money.
They want your fucking retirement money.
They want it back so they can give it
to their criminal friends on Wall Street.
And you know something?
They’ll get it.
They’ll get it all from you sooner or later
because they own this fucking place.
It’s a big club and you ain’t in it.
You and I are not in the big club.
By the way, it’s the same big club
they use to beat you over the head with all day long
when they tell you what to believe all day long,
beating you over the head in their media,
telling you what to believe, what to think, and what to buy.
The table is tilted, folks.
The game is rigged.
And nobody seems to notice.
Nobody seems to care.
Good, honest, hard-working people,
white collar, blue collar,
doesn’t matter what color shirt you have on.
Good, honest, hard-working people continue.
These are people of modest means.
Continue to elect these rich cocksuckers
who don’t give a fuck about them.
They don’t give a fuck about you.
They don’t give a fuck about you.
They don’t care about you at all, at all, at all.
Man. You know?
And nobody seems to notice, nobody seems to care.
That’s what the owners count on,
the fact that Americans will probably remain willfully ignorant
of the big red, white, and blue dick
that’s being jammed up their assholes every day.
Because the owners of this country know the truth.
It’s called the American dream
because you have to be asleep to believe it.
Thank you.
Source: Official George Carlin
Legend.
The malls and restaurants are dead because everybody’s broke, but other than that – it’s 20+ years later and Carlin’s sentiments are more relevant than ever.