Penn and Teller: Bullshit! – In the last five episodes of the 2005 Showtime series (we’re gaining on the current season) Penn and Teller take the positions of  (I) opposing gun control (which we watched two days after the massacre of 32 students at Virginia Tech), (II) laughing at ghostbusters, (III) questioning the true intentions of the Endangered Species Act, (IV) making fun of signs from heaven, and (V) demonstrating the worst of the best.

(I) While there are over 270 million guns in private hands in the USA (for the record, I’m unarmed; in 2004 36.5% of Americans had at least one gun at home, down from 46% in 1989, but 10% of Americans own 77% of all the guns in the country), which is one third of all the guns in civilian arsenals in the world (for every 100 people in the US there are 90 guns while in Yemen, the country with the second highest ratio of guns to people, there are 61 guns per 100 people – I would have thought everyone in the Middle East owned at least one gun) and 11,920 homicides, 16,869 suicides, and 856 unintentional deaths (including 150 annual accidental deaths of children) by firearms in a recent year (totaling 29,645 deaths; more than 700,000 Americans have died from domestic gun-shot wounds since the beginning of the Reagan administration – 10.08 US deaths from firearms per 100,000 people, the world’s highest rate, compared with Japan’s lowest rate of 0.05 per 100,000 or 0.31 per 100,000 in England/Wales –  which is a greater number than have died in all the US military conflicts of the past century), and statistics that a loved one is 43 times more likely to be killed in a home with a gun than an intruder.

The parade of hackneyed arguments come forward: guns are for personal safety; the right to bear arms is guaranteed in the Second Amendment; criminals are afraid of armed citizens but in favor of gun controls because they know how to obtain guns illegally and prefer their victims to be defenseless; the slipper-slope defense that if certain firearms are banned eventually all guns will be taken away; laws can’t prevent people from killing people; guns don’t kill people, people kill people. Penn says, “Men kill people,” so women should be armed and all guns should be pink. Why not crimson like the color of blood? Some studies indicate that states which least restrict citizens with guns (e.g. allowing concealed weapons) have lower rates of crimes against persons, these same states have the highest rates of suicide in homes with guns. The final point of this episode is, prefaced with quotes from Thomas Jefferson, that we need the government to be afraid of an armed citizenry. Yeah, right, like the Bush administration is afraid of Americans who oppose his policies because they have handguns and rifles.

(II) Penn believes poltergeists should be naked if they really exist. A group of ghostbusters in Leesburg, VA, and a trio of ghost hunters in Jefferson, TX, show off their gizmos to detect electromagnetic fields, sounds, and images of paranormal phenomena while a representative of the New England Skeptical Society and MIT’s Frank Wilczek (recipient of the 2004 Nobel prize in physics) comment on the pseudoscientists: first, the so-called anomalies have not been proven to exist; second, if an anomaly were proven to exist, a further linkage of the anomaly to a spirit would be necessary to establish scientific evidence. Penn sums up that “theory” in the parlance of the investigators (none of whom have any scientific credentials) is “shit that you make up” and that their believing that they believe that believing is all that’s necessary to make something real.

(III) Paul Watson of Sea Shepherd Conservation believes that all fishing and hunting should be banned to protect endangered species if we as stewards of the planet are to save these creatures from extinction vs Patrick Moore, formerly a co-founder of Green Peace, argues to the contrary that such doom and gloom is a complete fabrication and no mass extinctions are occurring today. R.J. Smith states that the ESA actually conceals a bureaucratic agenda for total national land-use control, bringing the federal government into conflict with private-property owners.

(IV) Here we encounter arguments over whether or not the Shroud of Turin actually retains the image of Jesus Christ’s body and blood (Fred Zugibe hangs his adult son from a cross in his garage in an effort to prove a point), various examples of pareidolia (vague or random stimuli) interpreted into meaningful imagery, such as the eyes of Jesus in a pair knots of wood in a door and the Virgin Mary’s face in a grilled-cheese sandwich, and chicanery in the tears of Jesus flowing from a crucifix above the bed of crippled Audrey Santos. The Catholic Church has taken a somewhat agnostic attitude toward such “miracles,” but some people want and need such things to be true and to be able to experience them personally. (V) Penn and Teller’s program was nominated for an Emmy in the category of Reality TV, but lost out to Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, a program I’ve not watched.

Who or what is the best? Most people pursue a level of satisfaction that is constantly out of reach, like the PDA geek featured in this episode. This constant reaching for the next best thing drives our consumerism. At a fancy restaurant, using candid cameras and an actor for the waiter again (remember the episode with the expensive bottled water taken from a garden hose?), patrons are served faux foods (dishes described as having been created by the chef with extraordinary care and ingredients, each a pièce de résistance, that are actually an amateur cook’s artfully assembled cheap concoctions), including a French cul wine, said to be from a vintage bottle valued at $1000, that’s actually from a New Jersey winery purchased for $1.99. (In French cul means bottom or arse. Hey, I’ll take a case of those.) In nearly instance the patrons agree that the hash matches the hyperbole. Obviously what’s “best” is definitely relative, and consumers can be easily manipulated into believing they are getting the best.

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

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