Every Day is an Atheist Holiday!: More Magical Tales from the Author of God, No! (26 page)

Because of China’s centrally planned one-child policy, infant girls were being abandoned and the ones who won the lottery were being delivered into American families. So our fancy-ass hotel was full of American couples waiting for an adopted daughter for their family. Lots of strollers and diaper bags. The unwanted infant girls might be raised as Christians or yuppies, but it was better than being left to die in China. With the Indian women on the funeral pyres, the Egyptian women dressed like Batman, and the poor little Chinese girls, Teller and I were cracking. We just couldn’t get over how wrong all of this was. We would rant about it in our warm comfortable bus to our female Canadian boss. And these particular Canadians, these kinda PBS Canadians, dismissed us by saying we were “typical Americans.” We didn’t understand cultural differences. The same women who would rant about the sexism of
Baywatch
were telling us to try to understand why abandoning infant girls was okay. They put a Canadian flag up in the windows of our bus so that the locals wouldn’t think we were Americans. We weren’t ashamed of being Americans, but they were ashamed of us being Americans.

Our young translator had lived his life equally in Beijing and Toronto. We had a lot of time to talk on the bus. He explained that the word they were using for Caucasians was a pejorative, kind of a translation of “white devils.” I said, “So, they’re that racist?” He explained that it wasn’t racism, that it was racial pride. So, the KKK has racial pride? Nope, that was different, and an American couldn’t understand what it was like to be proud of your race without being racist. I said, “Yeah, we’re racist in the USA, there’s no doubt about that, but we’re working on it. We really are.” I proposed an experiment. I suggested that he get twenty randomly selected Caucasian Americans together and invite them all out to supper with me at a T.G.I. Friday’s, or someplace that the world thinks is just too American. I said that I would tell a story about—let’s make it really awful—driving, and I would say that a “chink” cut me off in traffic. I was willing to bet him a large amount of money, and a larger amount of pride, that someone in our randomly selected group of Americans would either take issue with that racist word right there, or would take me aside later and say they didn’t appreciate it. They’d make it a teachable moment. They would bust my ass.

I wanted to make sure that the bet included people talking to me in private later. Sacha Baron Cohen, a brilliant comedian and an amazing actor, claimed in a rare interview as himself that his Borat character illuminated the anti-Semitism of Americans because those who weren’t plants (or as some TV magicians call them, “friendlies”) didn’t bust his foreign character on his outrageous attacks. I don’t believe it proved any such thing. I think it proved how far human beings from anywhere would bend over and spread them to make someone from another country seem a little less awkward. Penn & Teller would fall for any of Sacha’s gags. Once, a couple of young Japanese women came to Vegas because, we were told, they were big Penn & Teller fans. High school–aged Japanese women are not our usual demographic, but they had a camera crew and they claimed they had won a contest or something. They interviewed us backstage and had us do a little trick for them. They gave us ornate fans and hats and said stuff that just confused the fuck out of us. We played along with everything. If they had had us say that Jesus was our lord (and they might have, I was just repeating Japanese words that we didn’t understand), we would have gone along with it, just to make it a little more comfortable. We weren’t thinking about what we were saying; we were trying to make them feel comfortable in our country. That’s all Borat documented, but it sure was funny.

So at the T.G.I. Friday’s, when the test “chink” was thrown out, I’d want our subjects to be able to take me aside in private afterward to express their concerns. Our translator agreed that Americans would bust one another. I then asked if twenty Chinese people chosen at random to go to . . . Panda Express (see, that’s a joke about Americans not knowing anything about China, it’s not a racist joke) and hearing “white devil” would object in public or private. He said no way. It was racial pride. But Americans were racist even though they were trying not to be. I was sitting next to my friend Sarah Silverman when she used the word “chink” on Conan’s show. It was a joke, and the joke, considering Sarah’s character, was not racist at all, but everyone still ripped another asshole into her very attractive ass. Our Canadian producers would probably think that that comment on Sarah’s ass is sexist, but the abandoning of infant girls in China was a cultural difference that typical Americans didn’t understand. I’ve got your cultural differences hanging ready to knock you out with my American thighs.

The trips to Egypt, China and India each took a little over two weeks. Teller and I were so uncomfortable. I’m embarrassed by us eating canned food and washing our hands every ten minutes. We were so scared of these foreign countries. The people we were working with weren’t. They had done documentaries on Ebola and had gone into hot zones to shoot. They said Penn & Teller were more of a pain in the ass than Ebola. I tried to get some women to dance topless for us in China, and I ended up uncovering some sort of Chinese-Russian prostitution slavery ring that the Canadians did their next documentary on. If there was something about other countries to not be understood, I think I’m the man to not understand it. It was an awful time for me. While I was watching all this misery, my mom was dying back home and I felt alone and cut loose in the world. I was not at my best. I was confused enough that maybe if there really was a difference between racial pride and racism, I couldn’t understand it. I couldn’t learn to say even one sentence in Mandarin and I tried.

We came back from overseas in time for my mom to die. What a treat. World travel was supposed to broaden us, give us more understanding of the world, but it didn’t feel that way. I couldn’t stop thinking about the hotel full of Americans adopting baby girls, the women dressed like Batman, the stinking poverty, and those fucking tortured bears. It felt like our country of stupid fucking situation comedies and Dunkin’ Donuts was a paradise island floating in a nightmare world.

That’s when we decided to burn the American flag. We wrote a bit for the live show in Vegas that we call “Flag” or “Flag Burning.” The idea was that we’d take the American flag down from a flagpole fold it properly, wrap it in the Bill of Rights and then burn it. Then we’d restore it. Then we’d show how the trick was done. We’d do the trick again with what we call the Chinese Bill of Rights (clear acetate with nothing on it). We’d show how the flag was switched out and it was flash paper that was burned. We’d end with vanishing the flag in another burst of fire while I recited a verse from “The Star-Spangled Banner.” We’d end with the flag magically appearing back on the flagpole. We found the only verse of “The Star-Spangled Banner” that didn’t mention god, and even though it was pretty pro-war, we used that.

When we were working on the flag burning, our crew became pretty freaked out. They had not signed up to be part of a show that burned the flag. I told them that the patter was all about the Bill of Rights and freedom, and it was going to be patriotic. I was on G. Gordon Liddy’s radio show and I told Gordon that we were going to burn a flag and he was going to cheer. He attended our show and he did cheer the flag. I’m not sure that Liddy is our best example of a patriot, but at least he thinks he is. Our crew was proud.

Then the terrorist attacks happened on September 11, 2001, and all of a sudden our burning of the flag got much
too
patriotic for our taste. The burning of the flag was ignored and all of a sudden the trick was just waving the flag. This bit that was supposed to be about our complicated reaction to being American overseas became this rah-rah-rah pro-American thing. It was getting the biggest reaction in our show, but it wasn’t the right reaction. There was too much applause and cheering. We were afraid maybe they weren’t cheering for our ideas; maybe they were just cheering for the flag. What had we become? We cut it from our show for a while.

Things calmed down and we put “Flag Burning” back in. At the time, Lawrence O’Donnell was writing for that liberal-porn show
The West Wing
. He loved our flag burning and asked to use it as the B story on an episode. We did it. We played our real selves and did the trick in their fake White House. The story was about some controversy around the president burning the flag, and we gave some of my lines from the bit to Martin Sheen, the pornographically liberal president. People seemed to love it, and then they started saying it was nice of
The West Wing
writers to let us use that bit in our live show. That’s socialism, I guess.

We’ve been doing the “Flag Burning” since the end of the last century. We’ve settled into it. People don’t just cheer for the flag anymore, and they gasp a little when we first burn the flag. Our audience seems to understand it. But I don’t know if I really understand it anymore.

It celebrates the First Amendment. It’s about the enjoyment and privilege of living in a country where we can burn the flag in protest. I get that part. Part of my patter while we perform the trick includes me saying that Teller and I consider ourselves patriotic. When we wrote that, it was true, but I don’t know if it is anymore.

One of the things I love about the USA is that it’s built on an idea. Other countries were built on everyone having the same heritage, the same ancestry, but this country was built by neophiles who wanted to get away. Wanted to live an idea. No matter how long you live in Italy, you’re not really Italian, but once you become a U.S. citizen, you’re an American. I’ve talked a lot about how the USA was the first country built on technology. The idea of freedom of the press is based on the printing press, freedom of speech and freedom of and from religion. All that is groovy, but . . .

Every Fourth of July I worry. I worry that we’re just a sports team. I worry that I’m American not because I love the ideas, but because of an accident of birth. I hate clubs. I’m not a joiner. I’ve played on the same team with Teller for my entire adult life, but I’m not a team player. I never wanted to be part of a team; I wanted to work with Teller. There’s a difference. Just like I never wanted to do a Broadway show or a Vegas show—I wanted to do our show. Venue never matters to me.

I can sit and tell you all the things I love about this country. I carry the Bill of Rights with me. It’s called the “Security Edition” and it’s the Bill of Rights printed on a piece of metal. We give them out at our show. They are designed to set off metal detectors. It turns anyone who has a “Security Edition” into a freedom-fighting performance artist. It sets off the metal detector and then you look the TSA person in the eye and say, “Here take my rights” and hand them the metal Bill of Rights
.
I’ve had a lot taken away from me, but I always replace it so I have those words with me. But I didn’t move here because I believed in the ideals of this country. I didn’t move here at all. I was born down in this dead man’s town; I was born in the USA. Born in the USA. When the real patriots broke from England, there were real philosophical reasons, but would I agree with them now? If England had won our revolutionary war, would they have freed all the slaves? We won a war that was, among many other things, a war to keep slavery. I believe in the free market, but there’s no free market here. We have government entitlements on one side, and crony capitalism on the other; it’s all just using the government to move money around. We wouldn’t know a real free market if the lowest bidder bit us in our ass. There’s no real separation of church and state. Obama brags that he prays about the decisions he makes in the White House. We have bloody wars against common nouns—drugs, poverty and terrorism.

I imagine two asshole Indian magicians coming to the USA to see the magic done for locals. I imagine them staying in five-star hotels and going to our worst slums, looking for the “Cups and Balls” in Appalachia. I don’t even know where the worst poverty in the USA is, but it’s certainly in every city. I just don’t go there. I think about some smart-ass who can’t pronounce the word “hello” after a week of practice in his bus, freaking out that we still have the death penalty and kill people who kill. I think about the culture shock of walking into a casino where we do our shows and seeing people pissing in their pants while waiting for the slot machine to pay off and get them back to even. I think about our Indian Penn & Teller pouring sanitizer over their hands and eating canned curry (I know that’s an English invention, and just makes my point even stronger). I go back and read what I wrote about Egypt, China and India, and it sure seems like it was written by an asshole. Maybe the Canadian producers were right about Americans not understanding. Maybe there is a difference between racial pride and racism, which I just can’t see. Maybe I am a white devil.

Richard Dawkins makes the argument that if religion were true, it wouldn’t be geographically determined. People tend to follow the religion they were born into. That’s not true of scientific theories. There never really were speed-of-light pockets. I hear Christians make arguments for how Christianity is true, but it’s hard not to just hear them saying that they believe it because they were born into it.

When we do our bit that turns flag burning into flag waving, what are we really celebrating? When I take my children to eat hot dogs and hamburgers and watch the fireworks, what do I teach them about the country of their birth? Is it just their birthplace, or did they just happen to be born into a really good idea.

I don’t know.

Maybe we’re just celebrating that we don’t have those fucking bears.

Listening to: “Born in the U.S.A.”
—
Bruce Springsteen