Penn and Teller's BULLSHIT Show is just that

Wow. I loved Penn and Teller for years. Even went to see them with Bro Chris. Fantastic, fun, devilish. Even loved their BULLSHIT Show, wherein they have taken on everything from anti-Mexicans to professional colonicists (is that a word?).

But tonight they did a show ravaging Alcoholics Anonymous (and all 12-step groups), and they went too far. Their "cool tool" of obfuscating the issues by interviewing dorks with degrees, and making them look stupid on camera, now is obvious as just another way a couple of rich fucks can shape things to look different than they are.

Don't let their status in the entertainment world fool you anymore.

I'm a "recovered" alcoholic; haven't had a problem for over 25 years. P & T called AA a "religious group"; they interviewed a pissed-off lawyer (at one point in his career, he was told to quit drinking and join AA or get fired) to describe AA's use of the term "higher power" as only GOD, and a specific type of God, who would ruin your life if you didn't follow His ways.

BULLSHIT.

Nobody every pitched me that the higher power was God, unless I wanted it to be. AA members told me that higher power could be anything or anyone. Their definition of a higher power? "Whatever lets you admit that you are powerless over alcohol." Yes, you read that right: whatever. I chose the AA group as my higher power. And all that meant to me, was that I no longer had to worry why I was there, or what a bad person I was.

I quit drinking; I stayed in AA for over a year. Then I had had enough, and moved on. But I still don't drink.

P&T's BULLSHIT extends to them having us believe that AA teaches us we don't have a mind of our own, that without them, we are nothing. Fucking preposterous.

They showed two people, one pro AA and one anti-AA, arguing at a bar about whether or not it was a disease. And when the anti-AA gal finally said `Look, even if it is a disease, isn`t it your responsibilityÉ`, the other guy didn`t have an answer... because YEAH, and what`s your pointÉ

P&T's BULLSHIT tries to convince us that this almost-70-year old organization is strictly religious because it's headquarters are now in some church-organization building. Well, guess what? LOTS of people believe in God (I'm pretty atheistic myself), and so what? Whatever works. And it works.

P&T's BULLSHIT says that 70 years of never changing your technique is just stupid; after all, cures are improving all the time. And they use an old manual hand drill as a prop, trying to tell us that if doctors still drilled us to get out cancer, then we certainly wouldn't do that, would we? That's just redirection, my friend. Where's the logic in that argument? Look: if doctors still drilled us (and I have to look that one up... I don't think they ever drilled us for cancer), then we would still believe in it, and we would still do it, wouldn't we?

And they didn't offer us any indication that either science or medicine has any methods at all to cure addictions. More redirection.

Then they played the Big Brother card: lots of people have been ordered by the courts, by insurance companies, by employers: either get into a 12-step group and get cured, or lose (you fill in the blank: insurance, family, jobs). And they tell us that this is against our Constitutional rights (American, eh?). They forget to mention, again, two things: one, it is not our constituional right to abuse a substance so badly that we endanger our lives, our familys' lives, or our employers' well-being. Two, the damn programs work; always have worked; that's why people get ordered to go there.

Worse, P&T continue to attach this so called personal-rights thing to organized religion. So at the beginning of the show, they claim AA is a religious group... so by the end of the show, you are agreeing that we shouldn't be forced into religion against our will. Wow, obfuscation, redirection, and entrapment.

This may work for stage gags, but it doesn't work for me. Looks like these guys could use a 12-step group of their own: Bullshitters Anonymous.

'Nuff said.