Sister was never confrontational. She didn’t say crazy shit like her brother does. My friends were shocked. She left no room for debate, but my dirtball friends elbowed in some room for debate. They came up with a few variations on the Jack Bauer torture argument: “Penn has put an atomic bomb in the center of Manhattan. It will kill everyone, millions of people. If you turn him in, they can stop it from going off, and it’ll save millions of people. You’d turn him in then, right?”
It was like they had said to her, “You can flap your arms and fly under your own power, right? And then you can eat a twelve-pound bowling ball in one bite, right?”
“No, never. I would never turn in my brother. I’m on his side no matter what. There’s nothing he can do to change that. Nothing.”
I had never seen Sister push this hard in a discussion. She always sat on the sidelines; now she was in the center. Now they were hypothetically off in outer space, with me blowing up the whole world, and it could all be stopped by her dropping a dime. I was no longer listening. I was just looking at Sister and thinking. Here was a seventy-three-year-old gray-haired New England woman dressed in her Sunday clothes to be out at a Starbucks with her brother’s collection of musicians, comedians, and showgirls in jeans and tattoos, and she wasn’t budging. She couldn’t even understand that it was a question.
I can’t imagine loving Sister more. I can’t imagine it. And as much as I feel that white light/white heat diamond-bullet love for Sister, she loved me more. I might decide not to rat her out in these hypothetical games, but I would have to think about it. It wasn’t just that she couldn’t understand ratting me out; she couldn’t understand having to think about ratting me out.
Shortly after that trip to Vegas, she started getting sick. She had a few little strokes and a lot of trouble walking. She got MRSA in the hospital. I saw her a bunch more and we visited her with her little niece and nephew wearing masks. We had lots more talks and I held her hand. I looked at her.
But when I think of love, I don’t just think of her holding little Zz and singing songs Mom used to sing to us. I think of Sister not even understanding that there was a decision to be made in choosing me over the world.
I sure hope I learned something from Sister. I want Mox and Zz to feel that pure immoral love that Sister felt for me. If Moxie and Zolten Jillette make plans to set up nuclear devices all over the planet and I know about this plan and how the FBI can stop them . . . you better kiss your ass good-bye.
“Nuclear War”
—Sun Ra
Passing Down the Joy of Not Collecting Stamps
There was a book out a while ago about atheist parenting. I’m not going to tell you what it was called. They asked me to write an article for them. It was like no money, but I thought it was a good cause. I wrote the article and the editors told me it was the only article they wanted to change for content. They thought I was too negative toward religion, and they thought the word “fuck” would turn people off. I tried to explain that sometimes the word “fuck” turns people on. Who cares? I let them water down what I said, but I promised to never mention the book by name anywhere. If you still want to read it, go fuck yourself. Why would anyone want a book on atheist parenting that teaches atheist parents to be half-assed about their beliefs? I liked what I wrote, and now I have my own book, so I’ll go through the original article and make it even more negative toward religion, and I’ll write “fuck” in various forms.
Saint Ignatius Loyola, the founder of the Jesuit order, wrote, “Give me the child until he is seven and I will show you the man.” Some web pages say that might really be Francis Xavier’s quotation. Others say it was “some Jesuit” who said it, and all the careful scholarly web pages credit it to “some guy.”
Little children have to trust adults or they die. Trust has to be built in. So while you’re teaching them to eat, stay out of traffic, and not drink too much of what’s underneath the sink, you can abuse that trust and burn in the evil idea that faith is good. It’ll often stick with them longer than not drinking bleach. It seems if someone snuck the idea of faith into you at an early age, you’re more likely to do it to your own children.
If your childhood trust was not abused with faith or if somehow you kicked it in your travels down the road, your work is done. You don’t have to worry too much about your children. You don’t ever have to teach atheism. You don’t have to teach an absence of guilt for things they didn’t do. As atheist parents, you just have one more good reason to keep your children away from priests. Tell your children the truth as you see it and let the marketplace of ideas work as they grow up. An “anonymous reader” of James Randi’s Swift web page wrote, “Atheism is a religion like not collecting stamps is a hobby.” Maybe it was Francis Xavier.
You have to work hard to get children to believe nonsense (outside of their make-believe sessions). If you’re not desperately selling lies, the work is a lot easier. My children are still in preschool, but even when they were babies we were still a little bit careful of what we said. When someone sneezes we say “That’s funny,” because it is. We don’t have any friends who are Christards or into any kind of faith-based hooey, so our children will just think that “damn it” naturally follows “god” like “fucker” naturally follows “mother.”
That’s cool. That’s easy.
It’s an unfashionable belief in the atheist community, but truth just needs to be stated; it doesn’t have to be hyped. I know, I do a lot of hyping of atheism, but remember what Bob Dobbs said: “I don’t practice what I preach because I’m not the kind of person I’m preaching to.”
There is no god, and that’s the simple truth. If every trace of any single religion were wiped out and nothing were passed on, it would never be created exactly that way again. There might be some other nonsense in its place, but not that exact nonsense. If all of science were wiped out, it would still be true and someone would find a way to figure it all out again.
Without hype, Lot’s salt-heap ho would never be thought of again. Without science, Earth still goes around the sun, and someday someone would find a way to discover that again. Science is so important because it’s a way to find truth, but the truth doesn’t depend on it. Reality exists outside of humans. Religion does not. The bad guys have to try to get the children early to keep their jive alive. We good guys should try to get the truth out there, but the stakes just aren’t as high for us. Most anyone who is serious about science will lose some faith. Maybe not all their faith, but they’ll lose a hunk of it before getting that Nobel Prize. No matter how bad the polls on the general population of Americans look, the people who do science for a living aren’t being fooled. Evolution is the truth. And with truth comes a lack of panic. I don’t lose sleep over creation myths being taught in public schools. Who trusts anything from government schools? Does anyone besides me really believe that marijuana is a gateway drug? “Better to be uneducated than educated by your government,” as either I or Thomas Jefferson said. The bad guys always have to fight for their ideas to be taught. They must cheat. Government force, propaganda, and hype are the tools you desperately need when you’re wrong. Truth abides.
Doctor Richard Dawkins had a Christian education, but he kicked that way before taking his seat in the Darwin Barcalounger at Oxford. The bad guys got the Dawk until he was seven. So what? That race has been run; they fought the truth and the truth won. I went to Sunday school and the reality of the creationist myth stayed as true for me as the certainty that the Greenfield High School football team was going to win the Turkey Day game because we had P . . . E . . . P. . . PEP! PEP! PEP! Jesus Christ, doesn’t anyone but Paul Simon and me remember it was all crap we learned in high school anyway and we children always knew it?
Evolution was true before Darwin. Evolution was true in the sixteenth century when Loyola did or didn’t write that quotation. Evolution has been true as long as there has been life on earth, and it always will be true. If there is life on other planets, it’ll be
true there too. If you pick your side carefully, you don’t have to fight as hard.
All this assumes you’re an out-of-the-closet atheist parent. Truth doesn’t live in the closet. You have to make it clear to everyone, including your children, that there is no god. If you’re not doing that every chance you get, then the other side will win. They’ll win only in the short term; but we only get to live in the short term. You don’t have to fight, but you have to do your part—you have to tell the truth. You have to be honest. You don’t have to force schools to say there’s no god, but you have to say it yourself. You have to say it all the time. No one can relax in a closet.
Those of us who are out-of-the-closet atheist parents have all that extra time on Sunday mornings to love our children. We can use that time to hold them, laugh, and dance around together. Tell your children there’s no god and be done with it. Jesus Christ, your children aren’t stupid.
“I Fought the Law”
—Sonny Curtis and The Crickets
“I Fought the Law”
—The Bobby Fuller Four
“I Fought the Law”
—The Clash
Up Your Santa Claus Lane
The most important thing in the world is to tell our children the truth, but we lie to them all the time. By “we,” I don’t mean people in general, and by “our children,” I don’t mean children in general. I mean my wife and I lie to our daughter, Moxie, and our son, Zolten, right to their beautiful little smiling faces. We tell our loving little children, who must trust us with their very lives, that Disneyland is never open except when we’re already planning on taking them there. We tell them the frozen yogurt place is closed after dinner on Wednesdays, and that’s after we’ve lied that frozen yogurt is ice cream. The frozen yogurt place stretches the truth that frozen yogurt is even one wispy RCH healthier than ice cream. The frozen yogurt people may be stretching the truth, but we are lying sacks of shit to the people we care most about in our lives. It’s not preplanned lying, it’s lazy lying.
I feel weird about lying to my children every time I do it. I do it less than my wife, but only because I do less child wrangling than my wife. I try to tell them the real reason I want them to do or not do something, but the real reason is often “Because I said so.”
Maybe it is better just to lie.
Emily and I don’t lie to our children about Santa Claus.
Santa Claus is an atheist battleground. Some do, some don’t. Michael Goudeau does, and he certainly has his atheist/skeptical cred. He’s the real deal in the no-god camp. He’s won a Writers Guild award and has been nominated for a zillion Emmys (another lie we tell: “It’s an honor just to be nominated”) for writing with us on Penn & Teller: Bullshit! He was the cohost on my radio show for a couple of years, and he’s been my close friend forever. We agree on almost everything except sports (he likes them), his shitty musical taste (he has it), and Santa Claus (he lies about him). I know a lot of great dads and Goudeau is one of them.
Every Xmas time, Goudeau argues with my wife about Santa. I think the Goudeaus do the whole production—coming down the chimney, milk and cookies, reindeer, you name some winter seasonal bullshit and the Goudeaus do it. The Jillettes don’t do any of it. Not really. This year my wife bent a little and we had a “The Jillettes Don’t Celebrate Xmas Tree.” It wasn’t even a pine tree, and no angels. And not one piece of reindeer shit. I’m not sure I’m that against Santa Claus myself (it seems like a bit less of a lie than the yogurt thing), but, man, my wife sure has a hard-on for that jolly little elf.
In interviews, when I’m asked “How do you atheists celebrate Xmas?” I answer that the Jillette atheists don’t do anything. The interviewer assumes that I’m the goofy Scrooge and I’m denying our children the joy of Xmas. I am denying our children the joy of Xmas, but I’m sure doing it with my wife’s blessing, so to speak. It was her idea, but I’ll take responsibility. I agree with her. I agree with her because she’s right. I love Goudeau, but I don’t sleep with him every night. Another friend of mine, a cynical socialist (isn’t that redundant?), insisted that his daughter be force-fed Santa, so when the disillusionment hit her hard, she’d crash and throw out the baby Jesus with the Santa bathwater. This is the same guy who wanted to send his daughter to Catholic school to be sure she’d be a hard-core atheist her whole life. Socialists love that manipulation shit. It’s good that he couldn’t convince his wife to go along with him.
I love tradition and I love ritual. My mom and dad’s Jillette household celebrated Xmas with all the trimmings. We had a tree with those bubbling lights that never really worked, and we strung colored popcorn. We had a crèche on top of the TV with real straw and a wax candle Santa standing in the nativity, a bit out of place at three times the size of the wise men, wearing arctic clothing and with a waxy wick sticking out of his red hat. Monster giant Santa stood laughing at the baby Jesus standing next to an out-of-scale giant Styrofoam Frosty the Snowman, who looked higher than Keith Richards in the basement at Nellcôte. Once you’re buying virgin birth and dying for other people’s sins, a talking snowman and a fat elf in a flying sleigh is easy.
I’ve had a bone to pick with Frosty since I was a child. I begin ranting about Frosty incessantly from the first time Xmas music pops up on the radio until about Valentine’s Day, when Sam Cooke’s “Cupid” takes over my head. The song “Frosty the Snowman” makes me crazy: “There must have been some magic in that old silk hat they found, for when they placed it on his head, he began to dance around.” Correlation is not causation, you stupid Gene Autry and the Cass County Boys song–composing motherfucker! It’s this kind of sloppy thinking that is the real “reason for the season.” Oh, and the other reindeer didn’t all love Rudolph for any sort of humanitarian (reindeeratarian?) reason, they just needed him for his bioluminescent nose that one night—we know they will all go back to disrespecting him, laughing at him, shunning him, and calling him names the first moderately unfoggy Xmas Eve that rolls around.
My mom and dad lied to me about Santa. When I was very young, my dad was a jail guard and he had to work Xmas morning, so we had our celebration on Xmas Eve, and it was explained to me that Santa started his annual journey in New England, because we were so close to the North Pole. I bought it.
Many Xmas people think that only those with bitter childhood Xmas memories would deprive their children of Xmas, but I have only fond memories of Xmas with my mom and dad. Even when Mom and Dad’s Xmas tree changed to plastic, then finally to a little ceramic one my mom made at a senior center crafts class to sit on top of the TV, I still loved Xmas with my mom and dad. I liked my mom’s system of keeping the cards with the toys so I could write all my thank-yous. I liked the zillion Mounds bars that I vomited up one Xmas morning that put me off candy coconut to this day. I liked my mom and dad marveling at the shoebox-size brick of a first cell phone that Teller gave me one year. My mom and dad felt a joy in watching me open presents, a joy they said I would only understand once I had children. They were right, but I don’t get that joy from my children on December 25, and we don’t talk about Santa Claus. Our children hear about Santa Claus from their peers, but he’s less of a big deal in that circle than Dora the Explorer. And since I tore Frosty a new snowy and coal asshole, allow me to bitch that “Dora” and “explorer” don’t rhyme any more than “action” and “Jackson,” unless you’re a lobsterman in Maine. When the movie Action Jackson came out, Teller was suggesting slug lines: “Action Jackson: it’s just assonance,” and “Action Jackson: you tell him it doesn’t rhyme.” Unfortunately, Carl Weathers never consulted Teller.
“Let’s take the Christ out of Xmas” would be a fine slogan for the Winter Solstice, and American advertising has done some wonderful work toward that goal. The right-wing fucking nut jobs are correct—Xmas is becoming secularized. That’s a good thing. It’s secular to the point that the Christ part of Xmas doesn’t really piss the Jillettes off too much. I just wish that those who are secularizing Xmas
(or taking it back from the Christians—it did start out as a pagan holiday) would admit they want it secular to sell more shit to more different people. When I was in high school I had a girlfriend, Linda.† She was way smart (still is) and way sexy (still is). My parents never talked to me about sex or drugs, but her parents talked about little else. They were liberals. They listened to Bob Dylan (maybe not literally, but in my memory they were playing Blonde on Blonde all the time) and had The Joy of Sex on their coffee table, probably in Spanish (I was too embarrassed to open it). They read novels in Spanish. They took a bus from Massachusetts to Washington, DC, to protest the Vietnam war. They were totally groovy liberals who I’m sure are now fine with all the killing overseas, because Obama is in charge and he’s liberal. In high school their daughter and I had an opportunity to go to Cape Cod and stay on a houseboat together. We were so excited because we’d get a chance to sleep together. Really sleep. We’d done every sex act known to Henry Miller, but we hadn’t really slept together. We’d never heard each other snore. We were very excited. My parents were fine with my going to Cape Cod with Linda. If they hadn’t been fine, we would have had to talk about sex, and my parents sure weren’t going to do that. We were old-style New England. Her parents were okay with us going to Cape Cod, like they were liberally okay with us fucking, but made a comment that they knew we didn’t care about Cape Cod (who does?), we were just going to stay on the houseboat so we could sleep together. Linda was so fucking insulted and angry. She was outraged. How could her parents say something like that? She wanted them to say we wanted to go to Cape Cod for . . . what? For the . . . cod? She was offended that they didn’t believe we were going to Cape Cod as tourists and we would just happen to stay on a houseboat. She felt they should take us at our word. She thought they should act like they believed the lie.
God, No! Page 14