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Featured: George Carlin, Bob Moorehead
What’s in This Episode
- George Carlin’s relevance to modern America
- Misattributed Carlin quotes online
- Analysis of ‘Dumb Americans’ bit from Life is Worth Losing
- Carlin’s critique of American consumerism and corporate control
- The ‘American Dream’ monologue
Questions Answered in This Episode
Did George Carlin write the ‘Paradox of Our Time’ quote about taller buildings and shorter tempers?
No, that quote was written by Bob Moorehead, a pastor, in 1995. Carlin was reportedly furious about being credited for it and insisted nothing should be attributed to him unless it came from his albums, books, HBO specials, or his own website.
What is the ‘American Dream’ quote from George Carlin?
The full line is ‘It’s called the American dream because you have to be asleep to believe it.’ It comes from Carlin’s ‘Dumb Americans’ bit recorded in 2005 at the Beacon Theater in New York for his HBO special ‘Life is Worth Losing.’
What was the title of George Carlin’s bit about American ignorance and consumerism?
The bit is officially titled ‘Dumb Americans’ from his 13th HBO special ‘Life is Worth Losing,’ recorded November 5, 2005, though it’s often circulated online without this context.
What does George Carlin say about why American education doesn’t improve?
Carlin argues that education won’t get better because it’s by design—the wealthy business interests that control politicians, media, and government don’t want an educated, critically thinking population; they want obedient workers.
How many major wars has the U.S. had according to George Carlin?
Carlin stated that America, at only 200 years old, has had ten major wars, averaging a major war every 20 years, making the country very practiced at warfare.
Full Transcript
This transcript was automatically generated and may contain spelling and/or transcription errors.
Caloroga Shark Media. How did July fourthom Johnny Mac with your Daily Comedy News Today, I thought I would talk about America’s great prophet, George Carlin. If you’re a regular listening there to this program, you’ve heard me say before. The stuff Carlin put out at the beginning of this century, it feels like it was recorded yesterday. At the time, I thought Carlan sounded angry and had lost his fastball, And I am so, so so wrong to have had that opinion.
He is America’s great profit. I just want to talk a little bit about that war in the Persian golf, big doings in the Persian golf. You know my. Favorite part of that war. It’s the first war.
We ever had that was on every channel plus cable. And the war got good ratings too, didn’t it got good ratings? Well, we like war. We like war. We’re war like people.
We like war because we’re good at it. And you know why we’re good at it because we get a lot of practice. Those country is only two hundred years old and already we’ve had ten major wars. We average a major war in this country every twenty years, So we’re good at it, and it’s a good thing we are. We’re not very good at anything else anymore.
Can’t build a decent car, got no steel industry left, can’t get healthcare to our old people, can’t educate our young people. But we can bomb the shit out of your country, all right. We can bomb the shit out of your country, all right. Now, Before we get into this, some housekeeping. If you go looking for George Carlin quotes online, a huge percentage of what you’ll find is fig They’re not exaggerated or paraphrased.
They’re just attributed to him by people who never bother to check. One example is something called the Paradox of Our Time. That’s the one about taller buildings and shorter tempers, wider freeways and arrow of viewpoints that gets reposted with his name on it constantly. He didn’t write that. That’s from Bob Moorehead, a pastor who wrote it in nineteen ninety five.
Carlan was reportedly furious that he would be credited for it, and said nothing should be attributed to him unless it actually came from one of his album’s books, HBO Specials, or his own site. Let’s start with the bit that’s the actual backbone of this whole conversation. It gets quoted, the most it’s understood, the least it’s from. Life is worth losing. His thirteenth HBO special, recorded November fifth, two thousand and five, at the Beacon Theater in New York.
The bit is officially titled Dumb Americans. And that title alone tells you something because the version of the bit that circulates online almost never gets attached to that title or that context. It gets cut down to the punchest twenty seconds. It passed around like a standalone thought. So here’s my challenge here.
I want to play a little in context here, but I can’t go playing the whole bit. I’m just as bad as the people of critiquing. But here’s George Carland. Only a really low IQ population could have taken this beautiful content, this magnificent American landscape that we inherited. Well, actually we stole it from the Mexicans and the Indians, but hey, it was a nice one.
We stole it. It looked pretty good. It was pristine paradise. Have you seen it lately? Have you taken a good look at it lately?
It’s 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. 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 walls they put the mini marts.
And in between the mini march you got the car lots, gas stations, muffler shops, launder match, cheap hotels, fast food joints, strip clubs, and dirty bookstores. America the beautiful, one big trans continental commercial cesspool. And how did the people feel about all this? How did the people feel about living in a coast to coast shopping mall. Well, it’s just dandy.
They think it is cool as can be because Americans love them all. They love them all. That’s where they get to satisfy their two most prominent addictions at the same time, shopping and eating. What was actually happening in that room that night? Carlon spent several minutes building a case about American voters, calling out what he saw as wilful ignorance, mocking people for not paying attention, and then he pivots hard into something much more structural.
He says, there’s a reason education in this country doesn’t get better, and it’s not in competence. It’s designed Forget the politicians, he says, they’re relevant. They’re there to give you the idea you have freedom of choice. The real owners, he says, are the big wealthy business interests. They control the Senate, the Congress, the state houses, the city halls, the judges, the media.
They got you, in his words, by the balls two thousand and five.
And then he lands the whole thing on the line everyone knows when they don’t …
It’s called the American dream because you have to be asleep to believe it. That’s the big answer to everything. Education. They said, 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 well, you know we’ve tried all of that and the kids still can’t pass the tests. So don’t you worry about that. We’re going to lower the passing grades. And I said, they’re doing a lot of these schools.
Now they lower the passing grades, the more kids can pass, more kids passed, 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 pencil. Then everyone wonders why seventeen 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 ground here. But there’s a reason.
There’s a reason. There’s a reason for this. There’s a reason education sucks. 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 big, the wealthy that the real owners, the big wealthy business interests that control things and make all the important decisions. Forget the politicians. They’re they’re they’re irrelevant.
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 and city halls. They got the judges in their back buckets. And they own all the big media media news, 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. 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 to reduce 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 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 related because they own this place.
It’s a big club, and you ain’t in it. What’s important is the shape of the argument underneath that all. He’s not telling a joke with a setup and a Twisty’s making an accusation point by point, like a closing argument. And the laughs on the rum are happening because the audience recognizes something true in real time, not because he’s surprised him with a punch line. That’s why this bit has invaded the way topical material usually does.
He wasn’t joking about a specific two thousand and five scandal. He was describing a mechanism, and mechanisms don’t expire on a news cycle. The second piece of that conversation, the fascism line, has a different and more interesting origin than most people assume, because it didn’t come up from a stand up special at all. It came from a TV appearance September ninth, two thousand and five, on Real Time with Bill Maher, days after Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast. Harlan was on the panel and the conversation turned to President Bush calling for zero tolerance on looters and price gougers in the storm’s aftermath.
Carlin used the moment to say something he clearly believed. When fascism comes to America, it won’t be in brown and black shirts. It won’t be with Jack boots. It’ll be Nike sneakers and Smiley shirts.
And then he throws out in a side Germany lost the Second World War, fascism d…
The real looting in this country takes place in the transfer of the wealth from the poor to the rich. I’m sorry that you don’t like class and the truth, my friend, but you’re just stuck with it. And the poor have been systematically looted in this country. The rich have been made richer under this criminal, fascist president and his government. Book.
That line has had a second life, completely disconnected from Katrina, completely disconnected from two thousand and five, completely disconnected from Bush. It gets pulled out now by people across a wide range of political positions attached to whatever they’re worried about in their own moment. And that’s not a misuse of the quote. That’s actually what the quote was built to do. Carlan wasn’t describing a specific political party.
He was describing the mechanism, the idea that authoritarianism doesn’t need to look authoritarian if it can dress itself in comfort and branding and a friendly logo instead. Hmm, that’s a structural observation. Hm. The great profit of our time. Then there’s the bid that almost never gets the credit it needs next to the political stuff, because it’s not really about the government, it’s about the planet.
This one from Jammin in New York, April nineteen ninety two, Paramount Theater inside Madison Square Garden. Carland reportedly said that one was his personal favorite of everything he ever did for HBO. George starts by going after the language of environmentalism itself. Everybody’s saying something now, save the tree, save the bees, save the whales, save the snails, and then, in his own words, the supreme arrogance, save the planet. He says, we don’t even know how to take care of ourselves.
We haven’t learned how to take care of each other, and we think we’re going to save the entire planet, and then the turn the planet’s fine. The people are the one who are finished. The planet’s four billion years old, he said, it isn’t going anywhere. We are pack your stuff, we’re going away. We won’t even leave much of a trace.
The bit isn’t really making a claim about climate change one way or the other. It’s making a claim about human arrogance, the assumption that we are significant enough to destroy something that’s outlasted ice ages and asteroid impacts. It’s aged in a strange way because every time there’s a wave or wildfire season dominating headlines, someone resurfaces the clip and it lands like he’s narrating this week’s news from thirty years in the past. He wasn’t predicting anything specific. He was describing a posture, and the posture is still recognizable.
See, I’m not one of these people who’s worried about everything. You got people like this around you, Countries full of them now, people walking around all day long, every minute of the day, worried about everything, Worried about the air, worried about the water, worried about the soil, worried about insecticides, pesticides, food additives, carcinogens, worried about graydon gas, worried about asbestos, worried about saving endangered species. Let me tell you about endangered species, all right. Saving endangered species is just one more arrogant attempt by humans to control nature. It’s arrogant meddling.
It’s what got us in trouble in the first place. Doesn’t anybody understand that interfering with nature? Over ninety percent, over way over ninety. Percent of all the species that have ever lived on this line, that ever lived are gone. They’re extinct.
We didn’t kill them all. What ties all those pieces together, the owner bit, the fascism line, the planet bit, is that none of them are about a specific event. That’s the difference between material that ages and material that doesn’t. Jokes built around a particular scandal, particular politician, a particular headline, those need a footnote a few years later to even make sense. Carlin, especially in his last decade, was mostly building arguments about systems and habits of thought that don’t get retired just because the news cycle moves on now.
Some people would say Carlin himself would have mocked this framing. Not every bit in his catalog is aged the same way. Some of the broader targets from early in his career land differently now than they did in the room at the time, the way almost any comedian’s full body of work as a material that was much of the time. He was a comedian who, over five decades got progressively sharper and angrier and more precise about one specific question, Who actually holds power and what does it cost regular people that they mostly don’t notice. He spent his final specials narrowing in on that question with more focus than almost anyone else working in the format, and he answered it carefully enough and meant it specifically enough that the answer has not needed an update.
That is the case for calling him a profit. There has nothing to do with the seven words, nothing to do with hippie, dippy weatherman George Carlin, America’s prophet. Enjoy your Independence Day. Hope you have an awesome weekend. See you tomorrow.