Brain Droppings (14 page)

You know, you’d think it would be a fairly simple thing to come over to this continent, commit genocide, eliminate the forests, dam up the rivers, build our malls and massage parlors, sell our blenders and whoopee cushions, poison ourselves with chemicals, and let it go at that. But no. We have to compound the insult. Native Americans! I’m glad the Indians have gambling casinos now. It makes me happy that dimwitted white people are losing their rent money to the Indians. Maybe the Indians will get lucky and win their country back. Probably they wouldn’t want it. Look what we did to it.

C A R L I N
GEORGE

People like to say that no matter how bad off your life is, there is always someone worse off than you. I guess it’s a source of comfort. It’s nice to know that while they’re removing a bone from your throat, the man in the next room has a four hundred-pound tumor in his groin.

But the idea that there is always someone worse off leads to the logical conclusion that somewhere in the world there is a person who is in worse shape than everybody else. Some guy who has almost six billion people doing better than he is.

But, in reality, as you get down to the bottom of the bad-shape pile, it becomes harder and harder to know who’s doing worse. Is a blind, paralyzed, maniac really better off than a three-foot, paraplegic imbecile? Tough call.

Then there’s always my “Plus-a-Headache” formula. No matter how horrible and painful a person’s condition may be, it can always be made worse by simply adding a headache: “He was poor, ignorant, diseased, lonely, depressed, and abandoned—plus he had a headache.”
Look on the bright side: The headache will very likely go away.

Everyone complains about this being a “victim society.” Well, I don’t know about the victim society, but I would like to talk about the “Grief, Tragedy, and Sympathy Industry.”

The news media are playing a game with you. You’re being fed a large ration of other people’s troubles designed to keep your mind off the things that should really be bothering you. I guess the media figure if you’re sitting around feeling
?68

brain droppings
sorry for every sick, injured, or dead person they can scrounge up, you’ll have less time to dwell on how fucked up your own life is, and what bad shape this culture is really in.

I’m not so much opposed to grief per se, as I am to public media grief. My attitude is fuck sick people and fuck a dead person. Unless I knew them. And, if so, I’ll handle it on my own, thank you. I don’t need media guidance to experience sorrow.

Above all, I object to the abuse of the word tragedy. Every time some asshole stops breathing these days it’s called a tragedy. The word has been devalued. You can’t call every death a tragedy and expect the word to mean anything. For instance, multiple deaths do not automatically qualify as tragedies. Just because a man kills his wife and three kids, her lover, his lover, the baby-sitter, the mailman, the Amway lady, and the guy from Publishers’ Clearing House and then blows his own brains out doesn’t mean a tragedy has occurred. It’s interesting. It’s entertaining to read about. But it’s not a tragedy.

The death of a child is also not automatically a tragedy. Some guy backing over his kid in the driveway is not a tragedy, it’s a bad, bad mistake. A tragedy is a literary work in which the main character comes to ruin as a consequence of a moral weakness or a fatal flaw. Shakespeare wrote tragedies. A family of nine being wiped out when a train hits their camper is not a tragedy. It’s called a traffic accident.

You wanna know what a tragedy is? A tragedy is when you see some fat bastard in the airport with pockmarks on his face and his belly hanging out, and he’s with a woman

6
GEORGE C A R L I N
who has bad teeth and multiple bruises, and that night he’
i| gonna make her suck his dick. That’s a tragedy. They don’t mention that a lot on TV.

The media often refer to the killing of a white policeman as a tragedy. Why is that more tragic than the same white
0 policeman killing an unarmed black kid? Why is it never a tragedy on TV when a white cop kills a black kid? It’s never
\ presented in that way. The whites save tragedy for themselves. Why is that?

The media have elevated the marketing of bathos and sympathy to a fine art. But I gotta tell ya, I really don’t care about a paraplegic who climbs a mountain and then skis cross-country for 50 miles; I’m not interested in a one-legged
Q veteran who ice skates across Canada to raise money for children’s prosthetics. I have no room for some guy without a nervous system who becomes the state wrestling champion; or a man who loses his torso in Vietnam and later holds his breath for six months to promote spina bifida research; or
. someone born with no heart who lives to be ninety-five and helps everyone in his neighborhood neaten up their lawns.

Is this all we can find in America that passes for personal drama? People overcoming long odds? God, it’s so boring and predictable.
^ And does this mean we are supposed to admire people sim-
ply because of the order of their luck? Because their bad luck j came first? What about the reverse? What about people who start well and then fail spectacularly in life? People who were born with every privilege and given every possible gift and tal– ;??-??? ent, who had all the money they needed, were surrounded by

brain droppings
good people, and then went out and fucked their lives up anyway? Isn’t that drama too? Isn’t that equally ineresting? In fact, I find it more interesting. More like true tragedy.
6
I’d prefer to hear something like that once in a while, rather than this pseudo-inspirational bullshit that the media feel they have to feed us in order to keep our minds off America’s decline. If they’re going to insist that we really need to know about sick babies and cripples who tap dance and quadraplegic softball players, why don’t they simply have a special television program called “Inspirational Stories”? That way I can turn the fuckin’ thing off. I’m tired of people battling the odds. Fuck the odds. And fuck the people who battle them. After a while don’t you just get weary of being told that some kid in Minnesota needs a new liver? Kids didn’t need new livers when I was growing up. We had good livers. What are they feeding these kids that suddenly they all need new livers? I think it’s the gene pool. Nature used to eliminate the weak, imperfect kids before they were old enough to repro-. duce their flaws. Now we have a medical industry dedicated T§ to keeping people alive just long enough to pass along their bad genes to another generation. It’s medical arrogance, and it works against nature’s plan. I’m sick of hearing about a baby being kept alive on a resuscitator while doctors wait for (j a kidney to be flown in on a private jet contributed by some corporation seeking good publicity because they just killed six thousand people in Pakistan with a chemical spill. I’m tired of this shit being presented in the context of real news. Prurient gossip about sick people is not real news. It’s emotional pandering.

170

GEORGE C A R L I N
The real news is that there are millions upon millions of
6 sick babies and cripples and addicts and criminals and mis
fits and diseased and mentally ill and hungry people who
need help. Not to mention all the middle-class normals who
???:.’, swear things are just fine but spend three hours a day com-
4 muting, and whose dull, meaningless lives are being stolen from them by soulless corporations. But the media don’t *, bother with all that. They like to simply cover their designated Victims of the Week, so they can see themselves as somehow noble. They highlight certain cases, making them appear exceptional. And when they do, they admit they are simply unable and unwilling to report the totality of the Great American Social Nightmare.
DEATH IS AinQST TUH THESE DAYS

Seems to me it wasn’t long ago that when an OLD PERSON DIED the UNDERTAKER put him in a COFFIN, and you sent FLOWERS to the FUNERAL HOME where the MORTICIAN held the WAKE. Then, after the FUNERAL, they put him in a HEARSE and DROVE him to the CEMETERY, where they BURIED his BODY in a GRAVE.

Now when a SENIOR CITIZEN PASSES AWAY, he is placed in a BURIAL CONTAINER, and you send FLORAL TRIBUTES to the SLUMBER ROOM where the GRIEF THERAPIST supervises the VIEWING. After the MEMORIAL SERVICE, the FUNERAL
COACH TRANSPORTS THE DEPARTED to the GARDEN OF REMEMBRANCE, where his EARTHLY REMAINS are INTERRED in their FINAL RESTING PLACE.

brain droppings
R IF: on THE VCR

You know where you never see a camcorder? At a funeral. Wouldn’t that be fun? Especially if you didn’t know any of the people there. Why not go to a stranger’s funeral, and bring your camcorder? Have a little fun! Zoom in on the corpse’s nose hairs. Then pull back, and pan over to the widow’s tears. Get a tight shot of that. Do a montage of people wracked with grief. Then go home and put a laugh track on it! Smoke a joint and show it to your friends. That would be a lot of fun.

You can talk about capital punishment all you want, but I don’t think you can leave everything up to the government. Citizens should be willing to take personal responsibility. Every now and then you’ve got to do the right thing, and go out and kill someone on your own. I believe the killing of human beings is just one more function of government that needs to be privatized.

I say this because I believe most people know at least one other person they wish were dead. One other person whose death would make their life a little easier. A sexual rival; an abuser; a tormentor at school; a parent who’s been draining the family nest egg by lingering too long on life support. It’s a natural, human instinct. In fact, in the psychological literature it’s technically referred to as, “Jesus, I wish that son of a bitch was dead!” Don’t run from it. Society must find a way to accommodate this very understandable human instinct.

172

C A R L I N
GEORGE
And so, I offer a plan: Legal Murder Once a Month
6 Under this plan, every thirty days each person in Ameri will be allowed to kill one other person without incurrin punishment. One murder per person, per month. But you can’t kill just anybody. It’s not random. Each month there
4″ will be a different type of person it’s OK to kill. For instance one month it would be all right to kill a business associate
k (For you blue-collar guys, that means someone at work.) That month, kill anybody at work—no punishment. But you must have a good reason; none of this weak shit, “I caught him fucking my wife.” It has to be a good reason. Like, “The guy is just a real asshole.”
Another month we would have a day when it’s OK to kill
.
0 a relative. Actually, you might want two days for this, one for in-laws, and one for blood relatives. In fact, you might even need a week. Seven days, seven dead relatives. A festival! The Seven Dead Relatives Festival. Christmas week! There’s a good time for family resentment. Lots of old, festering patho- logical flotsam bobbing to the surface like buoyant turds. Christmas! Peace on Earth and a nice stack of dead relatives under the tree. And forgive what may seem a tacky note, but this plan might also help simplify your Xmas shopping.

All right, what about spouses? You gotta have a day for killing spouses, although I don’t think you’d want to do this one too often. You know how some guys are, they’d be goin’ through ten or twelve old ladies a year. No, this one should be an annual event with a one-spouse limit. In fact, why not just have an annual spouse-hunting season? You must get a license, you must wear bright orange, and you

brain droppings
must be accompanied by three drunken friends. And please (y take note, those of you who aren’t married and are merely living together will not be allowed to kill each other until you have taken your sacred vows.
All right, we’ve covered relatives and spouses. Now, how ^ about that certain someone else? Someone who really deserves to die? The ex-spouse! The exes of both sexes. The i ex-husband, usually referred to in court documents as “the ,. * asshole.” And, of course, that other towering archetypal figure in divorce law, “the cunt”!
i.; In fact, I think we ought to just combine spouses and ex-
spouses and stretch this one into a full week as well. Do I smell another holiday festival here? Is this possibly Easter 4f week we’re talkin’ about? I think so! And I’m gonna give you a special deal. Not only will you be allowed to kill your ex-spouse, but you’ll also get to kill their lawyer. It’s a two-for-one, Easter Bunny, Resurrection special. One man rises from the dead, two people take his place. By the way, are you . beginning to sense that perhaps there’s a place for the Disney corporation in all of this? Just a thought.

And while we’re at it, why don’t we honor Freud by having a day for killing parents? This is something that doesn’t happen nearly often enough as far as I’m concerned. ^ Why should the Menendez Brothers have all the fun? Get into that living room, whip out the shotgun, and launch your parents into the great beyond so they can be with their loving God. Do the folks a favor. What kind of an ungrateful child are you? By the way, if you’re wondering why parents aren’t already covered in the Seven Dead Relatives

CARL
GEORGE

Festival, it’s because parents are special people, and they ^ deserve special treatment.

Here would be another handy event: Kill-a-Neighbor-Day. A perfect way to settle old scores and perhaps, at the same time, upgrade the neighborhood. And just to provide
^ you a little flexibility, for our purposes a neighbor will be considered anyone who lives in your zip code.
j. You know, now that I think of it, it would probably make
sense to simply have Wild-Card Day. One day a year when everyone can just go out and kill whomever the fuck they want. Many of us have long lists of specific, worthy targets who don’t fall into any of the established categories. Retail clerks, landlords, teachers, salesmen, telephone solicitors;
^! the asshole Connecticut people in the blue Volvo station wagon; the arrogant yuppie prick at the laundromat who acted so superior about his natural fibers; and how about that snotty blonde bitch on the “Six O’Clock News”? The one who keeps braying, “Thank God, no one was hurt,” every time someone so much as backs into a lamppost.
” Now, let me quickly point out that my Legal Murder Once a Month plan has three strict rules: First, it isn’t cumulative. You can’t save up all your murders for a year and then go waltzing into McDonald’s and spoil everyone’s Egg McMuffin.
K You get one murder a month, that’s it. Use it or lose it.