God, No! (27 page)

The next day I heard that one of the nonfamous, nongroovy nonscientists, Sharon Begley, had used me as an example of someone who lets his emotions make him believe things that are wrong. Okay. People who aren’t used to public speaking get excited and go off half-cocked. Hell, I’m used to public speaking and I go off half-cocked even when I’m not excited. I live half-cocked. Cut her some slack.

Later I was asked about some
Newsweek
blog she wrote. Reading it bugged me more than hearing about it. She ends with: “But here was
Penn, a great friend to the skeptic community, basically saying, don’t bother me with scientific evidence, I’m going to make up my mind about global warming based on my disdain for Al Gore . . . Which just goes to show, not even the most hard-nosed empiricists and skeptics are immune from the power of emotion to make us believe stupid things.” Here is Penn, a great friend to your ass, basically saying, fuck you in the neck, Sharon.

Is there no ignorance allowed on this one subject? I took my children to see
WALL-E.
This wonderful family entertainment opens with the given that mankind destroyed Earth. You can’t turn on the TV without seeing us hating ourselves for what we’ve done to the planet and preaching the end of the world. Maybe they’re right, but is there no room for “maybe”? There’s a lot of evidence, but GW contains a lot of complicated points that are moral and practical and cannot be answered by evidence.

To be fair (and it’s always important to be fair when one is being mean-spirited, obscene, sanctimonious, and self-righteous), “I don’t know” can be a very bad answer when it is disingenuous. You can’t answer “I don’t know if that happened” to the attempted genocide of the Jews in World War II. But the climate of the whole world is much more complicated. I’m not a scientist, and I haven’t dedicated my life to studying weather. I’m trying to learn what I can, using the tools I have, and while I’m working on it, isn’t it okay to say “I don’t know”?

I mean, at least in front of a bunch of friendly skeptics?

I wrote a version of the above, in more L.A.
Times
language, for the L.A.
Times
right after it happened. The business with Sharon the cunt really bummed me. “Climate change” was a magic subject in Sharon’s world. Was it a taboo in the skeptics’ world, where I’d talked onstage about fucking Jesus, son of Mary, in all his holes and gotten a laugh, even from Christian skeptics? (Yup, there’s such a thing as a Christian skeptic—ESP is too weird for them, but they’re fine with zombie saviors.)

A year went by, and Penn & Teller were at the next TAM with The Amazing Randi, doing another Q & A, and we got asked the same fucking question. This is what I said this time:

“I tried saying before that I didn’t know. And when you say you don’t know, that’s a jive answer, because if someone says ‘Did the holocaust happen?’ and you answer ‘I don’t know,’ that’s absolutely a lie. And I tried to say it about global warming. I tried honestly to say that I don’t know without saying there isn’t evidence there. I really sincerely don’t know! It certainly seems like the evidence that—But you shouldn’t be listening to me, I’m the least-qualified person to talk about this. This is why we haven’t done a
Bullshit!
show about global warming—because we want to do stuff that we think there’s a very good chance that we’re correct about. And there is almost no chance we’d be correct about global warming.

“The only thing I’m trying to say is, if there is global warming, which there probably is, that doesn’t necessarily mean we caused it.

“And if we caused it, which we probably did, it doesn’t necessarily mean that we can stop it. Randi and I can take a tractor trailer to the top of a hill and put it in neutral, and we can start pushing it, but as it goes down the hill, we can’t necessarily stop it just because we started it.

“So if people can stop it, which they probably can, that doesn’t mean that the way to stop it is by stopping carbon emissions—which it probably is.

“And if it is happening, and we did start it, and we can stop it, and the way to do that is with carbon emissions, it does not necessarily mean that the answer is socialism.

“But it may very well be. I don’t know, and I mean I really, deeply don’t know. Not some skinhead Nazi ‘I don’t know about the holocaust’ thing, but just really,
I don’t fuckin’ know!
”

I should talk about global warming only during commercial breaks.

“(Tropical) Heat Wave”

—James White and the Blacks

The Bible’s Tenth Commandment

Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s house; thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife, or male or female slave, or ox, or donkey, or anything that belongs to thy neighbor.

“I just want to believe in god.”

“I just want to believe I’m Bob Dylan, but it’ll be healthier for both of us if we just live in this world the way it is.”

ONE ATHEIST’S TENTH SUGGESTION

Don’t waste too much time wishing, hoping, and being envious; it’ll make you bugnutty. (Man oh man, that MILF at my child’s school sure looks hot, but I have work to do.)

You Could Be Bruce Springsteen

Y
ou could never be Bob Dylan. You have no chance of that. You won’t be Eddie Van Halen; you’ll never practice enough. Even if you could write as well as Eminem, you don’t have a thick enough skin to be him. Yeah, you can play bass as well as Sid Vicious ever did, right now, but you’ll never be in that right of a place at that right of a time. You’re already as good a musician as Ozzy or Courtney, but it’s harder to be Ozzy and Courtney than it is to learn to do something. You’ll never have the attitude required to be famous with no skill and no talent. You couldn’t live with yourself if you stooped to doing impressions of people who really are talented, so that option is out the window. You’re too old and/or not good enough looking to be in a boy or girl band. But, you know, you really could be Bruce Springsteen. You could be the Boss. Put on “Born in the USA” and give that a listen. It’s a record you would have wanted to make. It sounds pretty good when you sing along, doesn’t it? You could have done that. Anyone could be Bruce Springsteen.

It’s not that Springsteen is incompetent. Not at all. He’s not a hack. He’s not sloppy. He’s not a follower. Everything he does, he does well. He’s a superstar and a major talent. And he’s a superstar who’s one of us. The goofy thing is that it doesn’t matter very much who the “us” is
in that sentence. Springsteen is one of the people, no matter who the people are.

If the greatest art conceals the art, Springsteen is a great artist. Sit around with your rock snob friends and talk about great guitar players, great singers, and great songwriters. Hendrix, Pete, Eddie, Prince, Page, Zappa, Clapton, Richards, and Carlos are some of the guitar names you’ll throw around. Elvis, Lennon, Roy, Elvis, Freddie, and Fogerty are some of the singer names. Dylan, Prince, the Glimmer Twins, and Beck are some of your great songwriters. (There are no women on the list, because we’re talking about “rock snobs,” which is a boys’ club. Yeah, lots of women should be on that list, but they’re not; rock snobs, right now in this culture, are heterosexual men loving other men.) These lists were off the top of my head. I don’t pretend they’re up to date, complete, or even close to accurate—there are lots more in every category, and there’s lots of room for argument—but the point is that Bruce isn’t on any of those lists. However, if you’re not talking to snobs—if you’re talking to people who would put Elton and Billy Joel on that list—Bruce is near the top of all three of those lists. If you’re talking to “the people,” they’ll pick Bruce right away.

When you go to see Dylan, you want to hang on his every word. You want to study how he stands, where he’s looking, and how he breathes. Even when Bob touches your heart directly, there’s still a lot of mystery. We’re always studying Dylan; we want to learn as much as possible about who Dylan is. Dylan falls in love and gets his heart broken just like you, but Dylan isn’t really just like you. Even when you mumble “right on” under your breath, even when you know exactly what the hell he’s talking about, he’s still Dylan and you’re still just you.

You never get that feeling with Bruce. He’s always talking about “us.” Always. Even his personal little tape-recorded albums, done in the middle of the night in his house alone, are about us. He’s even antisocial like everyone else. Going to see Dylan is like going to the most wonderful freak show ever devised. You’re going to see “someone very special.” He makes no attempt to reach you. You come to him; he doesn’t reach out to you. Bob doesn’t make you sing along. Bob doesn’t
ask you how you’re feeling. You’re there to see him, and his major job is to be Dylan, and he does that perfectly.

Going to see Bruce is going to a pep rally. When you go to see Bruce, you’re going to hang out with all your peeps. He’s a cheerleader for all our lives. I grew up in a dying factory town. I had friends come back from Vietnam. I had friends not come back from Vietnam. Bruce lets you sing along. If he had time, he’d get everyone onstage to sing into the mic with him. He’s not on display; he’s inclusive. He looks at everyone in the crowd. A Springsteen show is about us.

I remember seeing Elvis Costello for the first time and being bothered that people around me were singing along. These were private thoughts that Elvis and I shared. What right did these people have to sing them out loud? But with Bruce, it’s “tramps like us” who were born to run. “We were born to run,” not “I was born to run.”

As brilliant as Dylan is, you can disagree with him and still love him and want to see him. “Hurricane” probably did it, and not everyone must get stoned. But do you ever really disagree with Springsteen? What’s to disagree with? Where’s he pushing the envelope? What creepy ideas does he have? He’s not Eminem, dressing up like bin Laden and saying nasty things about sweet little girls with records out. Bruce has the same opinions you have. Yeah, he supposedly angered a few cops with “American Skin (41 Shots),” but I was at that show at Madison Square Garden, and as far as I can tell, the press was making it all up. People weren’t walking out in disgust. They were walking out for hot dogs during a new song they didn’t recognize. They just wanted to be fortified for the hits that would be coming up in the encore. It’s a long show; you need provisions. How far out on a limb is it to say that maybe cops don’t have to shoot the wrong guy forty-one times?

I remember a Springsteen line from one of the early bootlegs: “There’s something about a pretty girl on a hot summer night that gets this boy excited.” What?! What a creep, huh? Man, what kind of nut would get excited by a pretty girl on a hot summer night? That puts him out there with Ozzy, Trent, and Marilyn, huh?

I saw an ad for
Greetings from Asbury Park, NJ
when I was in high
school in January of 1973. The ad was just the lyrics to “Blinded by the Light.” That was enough for me. I bought the album the day it came out. I’ve been a Springsteen fan as long as possible without living in Jersey in 1970. I saw him live before anyone you know. I saw Bruce open for In Cold Blood and It’s a Beautiful Day on May 6, 1973, in Amherst, Massachusetts. His hair was short and he was wearing a leather jacket and no bell-bottoms. Some of the hippies in the crowd (it was all hippies; it was an outdoor concert with It’s a Beautiful Day) taunted him by yelling “Sha Na Na.” The spotlight operators didn’t know who to put the spot on. They seemed to think it was Garry Tallent, the bass player, and the E Street Band. This story should end with his blowing away the whole outdoor festival, but he didn’t. He did okay. He did fine. He did his job. I left right after Bruce because I wasn’t a hippie who wanted to see those other bands. I had hair down to my shoulders, and I’d never been to Jersey, but he was singing for me.

I wore out the
Greetings
record. I loved Bruce as kinda Bob Dylan, and I liked the next album, where he was kinda Van Morrison.
The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle
is Springsteen’s best album. I guess that’s one thing that makes Springsteen different from everyone else. Everyone’s second album sucks—even the Clash’s second album isn’t that good—but Springsteen’s second album is the best in his career. I like it even more than any real Van Morrison record. It’s amazing, it rocks, it swings, and it touches my heart. It kills me. And if you haven’t heard it, you’d love it too. Anyone would like this album. That’s Springsteen’s style. You feel like you own his music.