Lyrics Pyramid of the Hopeless - George Carlin

Pyramid of the Hopeless

But say what you want about American folks.
Yeah.
You can say what you want about Americans.
You can call them smart.
Dumb.
Ignorant, innocent, naive, gullible, easily led.
Whatever you want.
You’re gonna have to deal with them.
You’re gonna have to deal with them because you’re in the television business now.
You got the All-Suicide Channel on cable TV.
You need these people as viewers.
You need people looking in. You got to worry about your ratings.
You’re going to have to be thinking about sweeps months.
Most folks know what sweeps months are now.
Those are the more important ratings months of the year when they put on all their biggest attractions and their hottest stars trying to pump the ratings up a little bit, get the local stations to adjust their advertising rates.
You’re going to have to compete with the mentality of network television.
And I think on an All- Suicide Channel.
During sweeps months, you’re going to have to go with mass suicides.
Big public events where hundreds of people kill themselves all at the same time right on live TV.
Now, I’ve been wrestling with a way to do this.
I’ve been trying to figure this out.
I swear to God this is the truth.
I’ve been trying to figure this part of it out for six months now.
And I only recently have it so I’m going to tell you about it.
Now, we’re going to have to get lots and lots of people to kill themselves on demand.
How are we going to do this?
That’s the question.
How are we going to get large numbers of people to commit suicide at a time and place of our choosing?
And I mean large numbers, because don’t forget besides sweeps, we’re going to have to be thinking about 24-hour a day programming.
So to make this work.
We need organization.
You need a system.
You can’t just sit around the studio all day long and wait for people to drop by and commit suicide.
What we have to do is build up a large pool of hopeless people.
Suicide volunteers.
People with no hope.
People whom society has given up on.
Fate has given up on or who have given up on themselves.
Rock bottom.
Dead end.
Totally fucked-up people with no hope and no reason to live.
Now we got our share of them.
Folks.
Think of it as a pyramid.
That will give you a visual fix on it.
Think of it as a pyramid.
The pyramid of the hopeless.
We are going to start building this pyramid at the very base, naturally.
And the bottom layer is going to be homeless people.
God knows we’ve got plenty of them.
Nobody gives a fuck about them.
Nobody’s got a plan.
Nobody’s got any money.
Nobody’s got a program.
Nobody gives a fuck about homeless people.
We don’t know how many we have even.
We know 500.000 of them are veterans.
Because we’re so good to the veterans in this country.
And we know about a 1.400.000 of them are children.
There, so we got a million and a half children.
And then God knows how many more we got.
Totally fucking hopeless – [fart sound] – in the pyramid they go!
Now, the next group we are going to put in here, these are the people in prison with these long sentences they’ve been given.
Many of them deserved.
I’ll grant you that.
I’m sure half the people in prison are in there for things they really did.
That’s not a bad average.
One out of two.
But nobody gives a shit about these people.
Nobody’s going to hire them if they do get out.
They’re never going to get out.
Rehabilitation doesn’t work.
And the judges give them these fucking draconian sentences.
40. 50. 60. 70. 80. 100 year sentences.
Life term.
Double life.
One guy about a month ago was given three consecutive life terms.
Plus two death penalties.
How the fuck do you serve that?
Even David Copperfield can’t do that shit.
In order to do that.
You’d have to be a Hindu.
Then you got the people on death row.
They ain’t going anywhere – [fart sound] – In the fucking pyramid they go!
Now, the next layer, this group is self-selected.
Self-selected and a bit controversial to some ears, I guess.
These are the people who claim to be depressed, okay?
Apparently in this land of plenty, this richest nation in the history world we’re so proud of saying that.
Some supermarkets have a hundred thousand items in them.
We have 19 million Americans claiming to be depressed.
And some of them take medicine for it.
Sometimes the medicine makes one of them commit suicide and that depresses the shit out of the rest of them.
Then you have these people who only think they’re depressed.
They think they’re depressed because they saw the commercial on TV and the doctor looked like a good guy, the music sounded kind of peppy and what the fuck, some of these pills will probably just pick me right up.
Totally fucking hopeless mindset – [fart sound] – In the fucking pyramid!
Up at the very top we are gonna put the people who are truly sick.
The terminally ill.
Unfortunately, no hope for a lot of them.
Hundreds of thousands of them.
There’s no cure for what they have.
Some of them say there is no cure because nobody’s looking for one.
There ain’t enough people sick with it so there ain’t no money in the fucking cure.
Then there’s people who’ve got… there’s a cure, but they don’t have the money for it.
There are the other ones there’s a cure but they’re too far gone.
There’s other ones there’s a cure but there is no social means to get to it.
So these people ain’t going anywhere.
They should be allowed to commit suicide.
Boom.
In the fucking pyramid they go.
Now, think of what you got here, folks.
Think of yourself as the executive vice president of programming at the All-Suicide Channel.
Think of what you have to work with in the pyramid of the hopeless.
You have homeless.
Imprisoned, condemned, depressed and terminally ill people.
And I’m going to bet you anything.
In this depraved culture of ours.
Bet you anything, with the reality show mentality we have on the All-Suicide Channel.
You could get 500 of these hopeless people to hold hands and jump into the Grand Canyon.
I’ll fucking bet you.
I’ll fucking bet you you can get that done in this country, write this down.
I’ll bet you.
For money, for money, for money.
You got to give them something.
You know, you got to… Oh, Shit, they’re Americans, they’re for sale.
Give them a little something.
Americans will do anything but you got to give them a toaster, don’t you?
Give them a little prize of some kind.
Everybody wants a gizmo.
Give them a gizmo.
Give them a cell phone.
Give them a laptop.
Give them a cell phone that takes a picture of a laptop.
Give them a laptop that takes a picture of a cell phone.
Give them one of them three-wheeled vehicles.
Give them an all-terrain vehicle.
Give them one of them riding lawnmowers.
Give them a snowblower.
Give them an outdoor barbecuer or a jet-ski.
Give them one of those things they buy for themselves when they are trying to take their minds off how badly they’re getting fucked by the system.
I know what you do.
Just before these people jump, you give them a hat with a camera in it.
And you tell them it’s jump cam.
Tell them you’ll send the video home to the family.
T-Shirt.
Who don’t want a T-shirt?
Everybody does.
Give them a nice T-shirt.
“I committed suicide and all I got was this stupid, fucking T-shirt!”
All right.
Now… If you want to really raise the profile of this promotion, get some of those evangelical Christians to volunteer for it and you call it, “Jump for Jesus”.
“Jump for Jesus”.
They would bite.
They would go for it.
Hey, you got to be fair.
Got to be fair about these Christians.
They come in for a lot of abuse these days.
So you do have to be fair.
All a Christian really wants out of life is to die.
And go see Jesus.
Give them a helping hand.
Do the Christian thing.
Tell them it’s a shortcut to heaven.
Mention the word martyr.
It works on the Muslims.
It works on the Catholics.
It might work for these folks, you never know.
Hey, hey, I know.
Give them a little encouragement.
“Go on you fanatical fuck, he’s down there.
He’s down there.
He’s down there.
He’s at the bottom of the canyon.
Look for the man with the glowing head.”
Oh, you could have a lot of fun with a channel like that.
But you know something, folks, maybe you don’t want to be on cable.
Maybe you don’t want to be on cable.
It is a limited audience.
You might want to widen out and get more people looking in and you’re going to have to go to the broadcast networks.
One of the big broadcast networks.
And I don’t know about you, but when I think about suicide and broadcast network television.
I’m thinking FOX.
Huh?
I’m telling you FOX.
If the people at FOX ain’t sitting around having meetings on an idea like this.
They ain’t doing their god damn jobs over there.
So you put this thing on FOX, get Budweiser to sponsor it.
Budweiser and a whole bunch of car companies so people can be thinking about drinking and driving at the same time.
Ain’t that fun?
Isn’t it fun to watch the sporting events on American television?
“Drink this!
Drive that!
Fuck you!”
They don’t care.
They don’t give a shit about you.
And then every now and then they qualify the whole message.
“Drink responsibly.”
[long fart sound] So you put this thing on FOX.
And if you do, if you do or on any broadcast network, you’re gonna have to bring in that younger audience.
Everybody knows that.
That’s what the advertisers are looking for is these 18 to 24 year olds.
You’re going to have to get young people interested in this.
You know how you get young people interested in suicide?
You don’t call it suicide.
You call it “Extreme Living”.