Listing the Forms of Degenerates

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All the animals come out at night -- whores, skunk pussies, buggers, queens, fairies, dopers, junkies, sick, venal. Someday a real rain will come and wash all this scum off the streets. —Travis Bickle, from Taxi Driver.

This is when a character; or group of characters; gives a list of categories of people they consider degenerates, often in the context of describing something similar about them. Due to the often judgmental tone associated with this, sometimes it's used to indicate that the character listing these is a Knight Templar; other times, a good character may use this kind of a list as part of a Good Is Not Nice characterization.

Often this has fairly specific examples earlier in the list but ends with a more general one; alternatively, this may follow an Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking pattern.

Examples of Listing the Forms of Degenerates include:

Comics

• Judge Dredd - "Bring me your perps, your muties, your psychos..."

Film

• Taxi Driver. Really, Travis Bickle does this a lot during the movie, but the quotation above is the most famous.
• Frollo's description of the feast of fools, from The Hunchback of Notre Dame.

Thieves, cutpurses, the dregs of humanity, all gathered together in one big shallow drunken stupor...

• Hedley, from Blazing Saddles:

I want rustlers, cut throats, murderers, bounty hunters, desperados, mugs, pugs, thugs, nitwits, halfwits, dimwits, vipers, snipers, con men, Indian agents, Mexican bandits, muggers, buggerers, bushwhackers, hornswogglers, horse thieves, bull dykes, train robbers, bank robbers, ass-kickers, shit-kickers and Methodists!

• From Watchmen:

"The accumulated filth of all their sex and murder will foam up about their waists and all the whores and politicians will look up and shout 'Save us!'... and I'll look down, and whisper 'No.'"

• Star Wars: "Mos Eisley spaceport. A more wretched hive of scum and villainy you will never find..."
• Edie "Grace" McClurg's line from Ferris Bueller's Day Off:

Oh, he's very popular Ed. The sportos, the motorheads, geeks, sluts, bloods, wastoids, dweebies, dickheads - they all adore him. They think he's a righteous dude.

• Joe Clark from Lean on Me does this a few times:

I've got thugs, drug dealers, and deviants of all kinds trying to get into my school.

• • Or...

I want the name of every hoodlum, drug dealer, and miscreant who's done nothing but take this place apart on my desk by noon today.

• Harry Russo in Schizophreniac: The Whore Mangler:

Top of the fucking world, Rubberneck! I'll fucking kill all you motherfuckers! Chinks, spics, blacks, cunts, fags! No holds fucking barred!

Literature

• The Long Dark Teatime Of The Soul has "the muggers and pushers and pimps and hamburger salesmen" who hang around King's Cross Station.
• Frequently used in The Bible, but an especially well-known example is 1 Corinthians 6:9-10.

Do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived; neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor homosexuals, nor thieves, nor the covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers, will inherit the kingdom of God.

Music

• From God's Away on Business by Tom Waits...

There's a leak, there's a leak in the boiler room. The poor, the lame, the blind. Who are the ones that we kept in charge? Killers, thieves, and lawyers.

• Dream On by Christian Falk is mostly this:

Thugs and badmen Punks and liars Fucked-up interns Pigs and snitches Rest your weary heads, all is well...

• In both the film and the song titled |Alices Restaurant, Arlo Guthrie presents a list of the people he met in prison: "mother rapers... father stabbers... father rapers", before reminding the audience that he was simply there for littering.

Other

• The song "No Place Like London" from Sweeney Todd...

Cast: There's a hole in the world like a great black pit/ and the vermin of the world inhabit it/ and its morals aren't worth what a pin can spit/ and it goes by the name of London./ At the top of the hole sit the previlaged few/ Making mock of the vermin in the lonely zoo...

Tabletop Games

• Burn the heretic, kill the alien, purge the unclean. (Sometimes Mutant replaces unclean).
  • From Dark Crusade, Aun'el's speech to his troops: "Soldiers of the fire caste , Kroot and Vespid allies! Today, we stand as a bulwark against the selfish, the soulless and the mad! "

Theatre

• The Mikado by Gilbert and Sullivan had the air "if someday it should happen" aka "I've Got A Little List", which lists all the kinds of people who can be executed without public protest.

Video Games

• The crystal keeper from the old Sierra quest Torin's Passage says the following line: "The Lands Below are full of nutsos! Malcontents! Psychos! Politicians!"
• The fan retranslation of Breath of Fire II has Father Halk delivering such a litany when describing "all of society's refuse" that the Church will nonetheless gladly take in. No doubt as fodder to summon their dark god.

Western Animation

• The Simpsons references the Sweeney Todd example (see "Other" folder) in the Affectionate Parody episode "A Streetcar Named Marge."

Cast: New Orleeeans... Home of pirates, drunks, and whores! New Orleeeans... Tacky, overpriced, souvenir stores!

• • • Also on The Simpsons, Mr. Burns refers to his employees as...

Jackanapes ... LOLLIGAGGERS ... NOODLEHEADS!

• • and

Goldbrickers ... LAYABOUTS ... SLUGABEDS!

Real Life

• "Your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free" might be a mildly-ironic real life example.
• George Carlin uses this in groups that gotta go routine.

Predators, degenerates, crackheads, and fruitcakes; 900 miles of fence separating them.