Penn and Teller: Bullshit! – In the next four episodes of the 2005 Showtime series: “Holier Than Thou” questions the saintliness of Mother Teresa, Mahatma Gandhi, the Dalai Lama, and Clay Aiken; “College” shows us BSU and the University of Diversity as campuses where political correctness has become a means to restrict freedom of speech; “Big Brother” watches us with surveillance cameras, GPS-tracking devices, and the USA PATRIOT Act; and “Hair” presents people making money on the public’s vanity. (I) Pope John Paul II blessed and pushed forward the process in the Catholic Church to make Mother Teresa a saint, and now he himself is being considered for sainthood, awaiting the determination of whether or not a nun was miraculously healed of cancer by his intervention through her prayers.

Writer Christopher Hitchens (his articles often appear in The Atlantic and Vogue magazines) wrote a book that accused Mother Teresa (her actual name was Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu from a family of Albanian descent) of being a fraud, a fanatic, and a fundamentalist: she pulled off the con job of the 20^th century. For example, after campaigning to defeat a law allowing divorce in Ireland, she gave her approval to her friend Princess Diana’s divorce. The millions of dollars she collected from wealthy donors, such as the infamous Charles Keating of the SandL collapse and the brutal Duvaliers of Haiti, went to her Missions of Charity (“nuns on the dole”), not to help the poor and dying of India and elsewhere, who in their misery provided her with a cult of suffering – such as in her Home for the Dying in Calcutta with its Spartan conditions – over which she was obsessed as the path to salvation.

Mahatma (which means sage or saint) Gandhi while in South Africa, during an era when racism was the norm, incited Indians to attack blacks. In India this fakir often lay with naked young women to discipline his sexual urges. Before the Chinese forced the Dalai Lama with his “greeting-card philosophy” to flee Tibet, he had lived a privileged life with pampered priests in a palace while impoverished peasants toiled for his benefit. Celebrity supporters who donated generously to him, such as Richard Gere and Steven Seagal, his Holiness anointed and blessed. While he may have been the lesser of two evils compared with the Chinese (who along with much violence also introduced education and employment to the region), he wasn’t helping to raise the living standards of his fellow Tibetans. He also cooperated with the CIA. As for American Idol’s Clay Aiken, did you even know that some people revere him as a saint?

(II) Everybody needs a chance to go to college – right? College students often seem to be “sitting in classrooms between parties,” says Penn Jillette. Campus life is “a beer commercial run by politeness police.” Autodidacts such as Bill Gates (and Don Imus) dropped out of college. Noam Chomsky makes an appearance for the left-wingers who demand speech codes to restrict speech. Real freedom of thought and expression has become dangerous. The lesson here is that offenders of political correctness must be silenced because “people have a right to never be offended.”

(III) Even former congressman Bob Barr, who helped write the USA PATRIOT Act – the full title is the “Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001” – which no one in Congress actually read through before passing it, admitted with regret that this Act tilted the balance of power to government. Obviously we have terrorists using our public libraries as sanctuaries. Its vague language such as “and for other purposes” opened up wide new opportunities for the federal government to spy on its own citizens without their knowledge and create databases of information about them. There are those who insist that there is no such thing as a right to privacy. Show where there’s a Constitutional guarantee. To prove it, private eyes can find out just about anything they need to know about a subject. “So we lose a little freedom,” says PJ, but we know – don’t we? – that the agents of government “always act with our best interests in mind.” (Just ask Jose Padilla.)

“What happens in Las Vegas stays in the FBI,” PJ paraphrases Sin City’s slogan. Surveillance cameras are becoming ubiquitous at traffic intersections, in buildings, and elsewhere in major cities. New York City has at least 8,000 of them; London can see almost anything anywhere in public with its one and a half million electric eyeballs. I think these watchful lenses may actually do more good than harm. (Videotapes aided in the identification and capture of suicide bombers in London.) Unlike Penn and Teller I’m in favor (as I’ve said previously) of the installation of GPS devices in every vehicle to record not just location but also speed. If you’ve got nothing to hide, you’ve got nothing to be afraid of – right? Well, except for the government not always being “of the people, by the people, and for the people.” Though I’m aware of the possible abuses, I also think a DNA database of every person could do more good than harm, along with national ID cards or chips.

(IV) Hair represents sex and power. Also independence and individuality. “Let my freak flag fly” sang David Crosby. Then from the musical Hair:

Gimme head with hair
Long beautiful hair
Shining, gleaming,
Streaming, flaxen, waxen

Give me down to there hair
Shoulder length or longer
Here baby, there mama
Everywhere daddy daddy

Hair, hair, hair, hair, hair, hair, hair
Flow it, show it
Long as God can grow it
My hair

Speaking of waxing, some people want to remove all of their body hair from below their neck. In scenes showing men and women having Brazilian depilation that even Borat would have censored, Penn and Teller’s cameras record hair ripped by the roots from genital areas. That has got to hurt, and it obviously does. (See in the movie The 40 Year Old Virgin when Steve Carell has strips of his shaggy chest hair deracinated from his flesh.) Men who fear appearing in public bald may try the comb over, hair transplantation, scalp treatments (including juice of monkey glands), or a toupee (aka a wig, a rug, a hair technology system). Arlo Guthrie makes an appearance in his long gray locks.

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Copyright © 2007 Patrick Ivers. All rights reserved.
Reproduced with the permission of the copyright holder.

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