God, No! (23 page)

There are heroes everywhere, they just have to know what the deal is. On 9/11, everyone’s view of what to do in a plane hijacking changed—and it changed fast. In the first and second plane, people cooperated. They thought it was the right thing to do. It had been the right thing to do in all hijackings before that day. By plane three, in just that short time (we even have the time stamp on learning), we all changed. On plane three the good people fought back. Most people are good, so let people have any weapons they want, and the bad people will always be outnumbered. Let everyone just walk on a plane. Planes are in the air, but they’re not magic. A gunshot in a plane isn’t a lot worse than a gunshot at a Starbucks. A small hole in the side of a plane sucking people out only happens in those cool James Bond movies like
Goldfinger,
with the window popping out. It’s not real-world physics.

So let the fucking terrorists get on with weapons, and let them decide who they take out first. Let them profile to figure out who might have a gun. “Okay, there’s the guy with the MIA/POW camo hat; you take him out first; I’ll get the cowboy . . . but wait, maybe the old lady has a gun in her purse, and what about that nose-ring guy?” Profiling is bad, so make the bad guys do it, make them find every weapon in the hands of every good nut on the plane. And while they’re looking around and chatting, that cowboy might be silently profiling their terrorist asses.

That’s not even my best idea. Profiling from what people look like is bad. Profiling from what people do is fine. First, we make all security private. Let freedom ring. Let people decide with their wallets how much security they want. Let one airline do full-body scans, and let another airline do nothing. Let people decide how much risk their time and dignity is worth. Of course, it’s not just the people on the plane taking the risk; those planes can be turned into bombs and flown into buildings where they can hurt people who didn’t decide to take that risk. That’s why we scramble fighter jets. Defense is the government’s job; let them do it. If the people on Live Free and Die Easy Airlines can’t overpower the bad people themselves, then the professional jackbooted sky thugs can blow them out of the sky. It’s part of the risk of freedom.

In that free-market air travel environment, I would start my company: Penn’s Bacon and a Kiss Airlines. At PB & KA, we don’t care how you look or what you want to bring with you. All we care about is what you believe in your heart. Most terrorists nowadays come out of the Abrahamic religions. They’re part of the Mediterranean death cults. To most of these crazies, eating pig is a bad thing, and to all of these psychos, homosexuality is a way bad thing. It stops you from getting into heaven. It stops you from the glorious afterlife of a martyr, partying with virgins or raisins (depending on the translation).

So at my airline, there would be no embarrassing time-wasting scans and put-downs. No profiling. But before you get on the plane, our lovely host and hostess would offer you a piece of bacon. Nice, fresh, piping-hot, crisp, glorious bacon. If you don’t want to eat the bacon, you don’t get on the airplane without a full strip-search. Eat the swine, or bend over and take the glove.

Once you eat the delicious bacon (I bet I can get a sponsor), you’re almost done, just one more quick step. Our lovely host and hostess have their genitals bared. I’ll design the crotchless uniforms. The goods are just hanging out there all pink and naked. After you’ve swallowed the meat of the filthy infidel pig, you then drop to your knees (we’ll have kneeling pads; we’ll get them cheap from all the Catholic churches that have gone out of business in Penn’s utopia) and you just give each of the
genitals a little kiss. You don’t have to throat anyone. You don’t have to stay down there forever until she cums. Just a little peck on a pecker and a snatch. Everyone has to kiss the prick and the pussy so no one can lie about his or her gender.

I don’t know how the Koran feels about drag queens, but let’s not take that chance. The Koran probably says that rug munching is wrong, but who cares? Kiss both, get it done, it’ll be fun for all. No matter what gender you are, my airline will make you a disgusting homo in the eyes of god.

I’m a genius. It’s a really cheap fix. I might get Trojans or a dental dam company to be a sponsor. Maybe Purell will create a special product. I bet I can get our host and hostess to work for free—hell, I’d do it for free . . . free bacon and kisses on my rat, I’m so there!

Don’t give me shit about PB & KA being unsanitary. You think two hundred light little kisses on a freshly rubbered, Purelled cock and cunt is going to spread more diseases than all those athlete’s-foot-ridden stockinged feet walking across the same filthy carpet? And don’t tell me there’s nothing wrong with being gay, that it’s just not your preference. Don’t say you don’t want to act all homo just to get on an airplane. You don’t have to listen to Madonna and wear flannel, you just have to give a polite little kiss. It’s no worse than that California air kiss you have to do when you meet a press agent at the airport. I’m sure there’s a terrorist argument that if you’re licking stick and split in order to be a martyr, it’s okay. I’m thinking that anyone who’s crazy enough to kill himself for god isn’t going to want the omniscient god to see him giving a little smooch down under. But who cares? Let’s keep their psycho imams busy on that quandary for a few years, and when they decide you can still go to Allah after licking infidel weenie as long as you do it with hate in your heart, I’ll start Penn’s All-Naked Airlines, where no one takes anything on the plane. Nothing. The man next to you is your joystick and Game Boy.

“Come Fly with Me”

—Frank Sinatra

Thou shalt not commit adultery.

Doesn’t mean you can’t renegotiate.

ONE ATHEIST’S SEVENTH SUGGESTION

Keep your promises. (If you can’t be sexually exclusive to your spouse, don’t make that deal.)

Pitching Bullshit While in Mourning

O
n the morning of what Richard Dawkins called “the faith-based initiative” of September 11, 2001, I was soaking in the bathtub reading some jazz music theory book. A friend of mine, who was working as a stripper at the time, came into the bathroom naked and said, “A plane flew into the World Trade Center.” I was thinking about how likely a G was to follow a D-minor seventh chord and I said to her, “What’s that got to do with jazz?” She left the bathroom and went alone to watch the nightmare on TV. I went back to reading for a few moments. I thought about jazz for a while longer, and then what she had said started to drift through the swinging eighth notes into my consciousness. I jumped out of the tub and joined the naked stripper and the rest of the world in horror.

Teller and I didn’t happen to have any shows scheduled in the few days right after the attack, so I was just sitting around at home, dazed. Bob Dylan’s album
“Love and Theft”
(with the quotes as part of the title—I don’t know exactly what that means, but it means something heavy) was released on the day of the terrorist attack. I had started taking upright bass lessons right after my mom died on the first day of 2000, and I spent the middle weeks of that September practicing bebop
bass until my fingers bled and listening to Bob Dylan. Dylan’s album, written before we could imagine that kind of terrorism on American soil, addressed my mood and thoughts perfectly. Great poetry can do that.

When I watched the Twin Towers fall, I said aloud to my naked friend, “There go our civil liberties.” A few months later I called George Carlin and we were chatting about America’s reaction to the attack. I told him my thoughts. He excused himself, put down the phone, and went and got his journal. As the Twin Towers fell, he had written, “There go our civil rights.” I was so proud to have had a similar thought at a similar time to a genius. We were sad to be right. To react to an attack on our freedom with less freedom seems so deeply un-American. What ever happened to Yankee Doodle Dandy and “fuck you in the fucking neck”?

Teller and I had no sense of how things had changed that September. We took a couple of religious jokes out of our show right after 9/11. For those shows, immediately after, we aspired to pure showbiz magic. We
wanted
to be greasy guys in tuxes torturing women in front of Mylar to small-dick rip-off white-boy Motown music. A few weeks later, a Broadway production asked us if we’d try to help pump up ticket sales by doing the narrator part in
The Rocky Horror Show
for a week. 9/11 made me want to do everything that religious folks hated. I wanted to dress up in fishnets and wear lipstick in a mockery of procreation. Teller and I took a bit from our old Broadway show where I made out with a showgirl while we both ate fire. We decided to do it together, two men, Penn and Teller, for
The Rocky Horror Show.
I was onstage in drag. If al-Qaeda hated homos, I wanted to be flaming, making out with another guy onstage in New Jack City.

Way before that September, Mark Wolper, producer and son of a producer, had come to us and asked us to host a skeptic TV show he wanted to produce. From the moment anyone had been willing to hear a pitch from us, Teller and I had been pitching us hosting a skeptical show. Wolper set up the pitches for Thursday, September 20. When everything ground to a halt in this country, we figured our pitches were canceled. But on September 15, we started hearing the glorious sound of airplanes
flying over Vegas again. President Bush said we were supposed to go back to normal, and we figured that meant we should pitch our little show. The networks agreed, and our five pitches stayed as scheduled.

We flew from Vegas to L.A. I don’t remember which pitch was which. Wolper had some people with him, and we had some agents and suits on our side of the table, and they all had a bunch of suits on theirs. Teller, Wolper, and a few others had worked on the pitch for the show, but I was the chirp. Because I do all the talking for Penn & Teller, people seem to think I do all the talking for everyone. Maybe it’s me who thinks I do all the talking for everyone, but I was doing all the talking for these pitches. It was awkward. America had to get back to normal, but did that really include doing stupid TV shows? There had just been airplanes flown into buildings, and we were talking about doing jokes for money. The timing was right for a skeptical show; we had all seen what faith could do. It was time to stop all respect for faith. It made perfect sense to pitch a skeptical show then, but it didn’t seem that way at the time. We now know that a lot of Americans saw 9/11 as more evidence of the dangerous stupidity of religion, but at the time the media was carrying on about people going to churches, and our fucking president was talking about Islam being all about peace. It was the perfect time to pitch skepticism, but it sure didn’t feel like it.

The first few pitches, I was making apologies for our skeptic show. I peddled with my foot on the soft pedal. I said that the nut side always had passion and the science side always had facts, but although the scientists were correct, they were a little dull. I promised that we would bring the passion of the nuts to the side of truth. But I was also cynical. I argued that people might watch our show because they hated it. I claimed that many people who were watching John Edward’s necro-psycho rip-off sleaze fest weren’t believers. Some skeptics watched to argue with him or to marvel at what an amazing predatory asshole John was.

In the Beatles’ first movie,
A Hard Day’s Night,
George Harrison wanders into the wrong room and the secretary mistakes him for a boy auditioning as a sidekick to a pop TV star. The TV bigwigs think George is perfect. “Oh, you can come off it with us. You don’t have to do the old
adenoidal glottal stop and carry-on for our benefit.” When the TV folk mention their TV star by name, George responds, “Oh, you mean that posh bird who gets everything wrong?” Later in the scene he explains, “Oh, yes, the lads frequently gather round the TV set to watch her for a giggle. Once we even all sat down and wrote these letters saying how gear she was and all that rubbish . . . She’s a drag. A well-known drag. We turn the sound down on her and say rude things.”