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Last night on Penn & Teller's "Bullshit," Showtime's fantastic show that debunks scams and misguided conventional wisdom, the comical magician/skeptics addressed the topic of sainthood, taking chunks out of the exagerrated mythos surrounding the Dalai Lama, Mother Teresa and Mahatma Ghandi.

For Mother Teresa's portion, they predictably featured the sainted nun's go-to nemesis, the brilliant Christopher Hitchens. At one point in the interview, they showed outtakes of him chain smoking and downing glasses of scotch, with the narration (paraphrased), "And after another cigarette, and another scotch and another cigarette and another scotch, Mr. Hitchens was finally ready to answer our question." Now, I'm not one to automatically chuckle at a man's incredibly high-functioning alcoholism, but it was hysterical. And Hitchens was typically overflowing with dry, machine-gunned vituperation for his habited bete noir.

Bonus factoids: apparently, the Dalai Lama presided over a rather exploitive caste system prior to his flight from Tibet, a system that employed torture as a means of administrative punishment. Of course, the subsequent rule of the Chinese was much worse. The CIA also funneled over a million dollars to the Dalai Lama in order to fund anti-Chinese resistance forces, which isn't something that I would condemn, yet sits interestingly at odds with his one-size-fits-all pacifism.

BTW, I saw the Dalai Lama speak at a commencement ceremony a few years back, and it was sort of like listening to Yoda deliver a 45-minute lecture on the power of "love," "love," and, well, "love." No backward syntax or telekinesis, but otherwise, if I closed my eyes, it was almost as if I was sitting on the swamp planet of Dagobah.

Posted by Bill at May 24, 2005 08:13 AM | TrackBack (0)

Comments

Posted by: rbj at May 24, 2005 12:31 PM