By SP Staff
Last week’s Scheer Intelligence podcast featured a headline inspired by the late comedian George Carlin. The headline serves as an excuse to revisit his 2005 HBO special “Life is Worth Losing,” where Carlin includes one of his most iconic bits critiquing America’s consumerism, education, politics and the myth of the American Dream. In order for the American Dream fantasy to work, Carlin said Americans have to be smart enough to get the jobs but just dumb enough to not question the status quo. As the iconic line goes, “It’s called the American Dream because you have to be asleep to believe it.”
“They got you by the balls!” Carlin exclaims as he lays out the total control of wealthy elites in the U.S. from local politics to big media in this short clip. Carlin continued, explaining that the American Dream also works by having a population devoid of critical thinking skills, a population willing to “passively accept all these increasingly shittier jobs with lower pay, longer hours, reduced benefits, the end of overtime and the vanishing pension that disappears as soon as you go to collect it…”
Check out last week’s Scheer Intelligence podcast featuring Robert Scheer and Alissa Quart here.