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Stuck In Traffic Issue 24
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Stuck In Traffic
"Current Events, Cultural Phenomena, True Stories"
Issue #24 - March, 1997
Contents:
David Lynch Crosses The Road
In his new movie, Lost Highway, David Lynch crosses a boundary that
he's only flirted with in all his past works.
Recycling Paralysis
How the government and environmentatlists have conspired against me.
Life Aint What It Ewes To Be?
Time to pull the wool from over our eyes about the whole cloning issue because
it doens't invalidate any of our fundamental principles.
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Cultural Phenomena
David Lynch Crosses The Road
Question: Why did David Lynch cross the Lost Highway? Answer: To
get to The Other Side.
David Lynch is back. And with his new movie, Lost Highway, he's
more David Lynch than ever before.
Over the years Lynch has developed a reputation for pulling and
picking at those tiny stray threads in the fabric of society and
managing to unravel far more than anyone would have guessed. Even
his early works like Eraserhead and The Elephant Man, Lynch has
been preoccupied finding the bizarre hidden in the absolutely
normal. But it was perhaps his 1986 film, Blue Velvet, that Lynch
perfected this uncanny ability. Starting with a perfectly normal
suburban setting in a small town, Lynch introduces a single loose
thread, a human ear found on the side of the road, and proceeds to
pick at it until he has exposed an intricate web of murder, sex,
and mystery.
Lynch mastered this new form of story telling so well that it was
developed into a wildly popular TV show, Twin Peaks, in which a
murder investigation served as a thin excuse for Lynch to explore
this theme over and over again in each episode. Who is BOB? Why
are the owls always watching? Why does the one-armed man write
poems about walking "with fire"? Over and over again, we get
fleeting glimpses of mystery, but we never quite get to figure it
all out.
But it's not just a matter of uncovering crime or mayhem that
Lynch seems to be fascinated by. When David Lynch digs, he digs
into our psyches. The hidden mysteries that he's so good at
unraveling always seem to point to the dark side of ourselves.
The part we'd just as soon not get to know too well. The side of
ourselves that we hope the Rotary Club never finds out about. Is
the murderer in Twin Peaks a supernatural ghost? Is the murderer
a demon in our psyche? Is there a difference?
Up to this point in his career, David Lynch has always brought us
tantalizingly close to showing us the other side of normal. With
Lost Highway, he finally crosses over to the other side and in
some sense the whole movie is a struggle to get _back_ to reality.
Lost Highway's opening credits show a driver's seat view of
driving very fast down a long stretch of desert highway at night.
The camera's attention is focused on the blur of yellow lines
marking the lanes as the speed by. But if you notice very
carefully, there are not one, but two sets of highway lane lines
flying by under the car. What's going on? Blurred double vision?
Two cars seeing the same thing? If so, how can they be driving in
exactly the same spot?
This serves as a theme throughout the movie. Over and over again,
we get hints at double lives, double identities, multiple
personalities, multiple aliases.
The film starts out in a fairly standard way, we're introduced to
Fred Madison, a successful jazz musician played by Bill Pullman
and his wife Renee', played by Patricia Arquette. They live in a
trendy yet disturbingly dark house in what is apparently Los
Angeles. From the moment we lay eyes on both of them, you know
there's trouble in the marriage. Fred knows, and we know, that
Renee' is hiding something from her husband, but what? Is she
having an affair? Maybe, but the expression in her eyes doesn't
seem to be that of betrayal. Whatever she's hiding, it's more
than just infidelity.
In addition to being stressed about his marriage, Fred has to deal
with the fact that he and his wife are being stalked by someone.
First, someone leaves a message for Fred on the front door
intercom, simply saying, "Dick Laurent is dead." It's unclear if
Fred knows who Dick Laurent is or who's leaving the message.
Unsettling. But the big trouble starts when someone starts
leaving video tapes on the front porch showing the inside of the
Madison's house and pictures of him and his wife sleeping in bed.
The stress from these events and his crumbling marriage cause
Frank to start imagining things, like seeing the face of a Mystery
Man (Robert Blake) on his wife's face instead of hers. But it
soon becomes more than just a bad case of nerves when the Mystery
Man show up at a party that the Madison's are attending and
proceeds to demonstrate to Fred an unnatural ability to be in two
places at once.
Clearly, the movie has crossed over to the supernatural. But just
barely. It's _possible_ that the mystery man is has just
concocted an elaborate parlor trick. You keep thinking that if
you just knew a little bit more about who the Mystery Man is, what
Renee' is hiding, who the stalker is, you might make sense of it
all and the movie will be just a mystery movie instead of a horror
movie. But make no mistake about it, Lost Highway is a horror
movie.
But it's not like the stereotypical horror movie. With the
exception of one scene, there's no gratuitous gore or violence.
It's the bad dream variety of horror movie. A nightmare. And
like the most disturbing dreams, you get the feeling it's trying
to tell you something, but you can't quite figure it out. The
movies end leaves you with that terrible feeling you get when you
wake up from a bad dream with too many questions unanswered and
wishing you had endured the bad dream just a little bit longer so
that it might have made sense, somehow.
This movie is not for people who insist that all the plot threads
be neatly sewn up at the end. After seeing Lost Highway, there's
going to be more loose ends than when you started. Sorry. Deal
with it or don't go see the movie.
But if you can deal with unanswered questions, if you can deal
with bad dreams, if you can deal with staring into the face of the
devil himself, go see Lost Highway. From its opening credits
until the very last frame, David Lynch proves that he is a master
at making you _want_ to explore the horror.
====================================
True Story
Recycling Paralysis
As usual, I blame the government.
It all started innocently enough. It was late February and I
finally got started on my Spring Cleaning (for 1994 that is.) The
impetus was doing my yearly homage to the IRS. For once, I
thought I'd not wait until the last second to do my taxes, be a
good citizen, and all that stuff. So early one rainy Sunday
morning, after ingesting enough caffeine to have some reasonable
hope of being able to add and subtract, I started fumbling around
my office, looking for all my tax forms. That's when the trouble
began, and if it hadn't been for the government's insistence on
taxes, I'd have never gotten into the mess I managed to create.
Now, my finances are not too complicated. I've got the usual
checking and savings account. A W-2 form that reports my salary.
Some company stock, a small mutual fund, and the home mortgage.
So it's usually not to difficult to gather up all the paperwork
needed to do my taxes and the government is oh so friendly about
sending my tax forms every year.
I keep all my financial papers in a gray file box. With each sort
of paper in it's own folder. But somewhere around June of last
year my file box filled up. You would think that there's always
room for one more piece of paper, and I had been operating under
this assumption for quite sometime. But then about June, the
assumption proved to be false. Nothing else was going into the
file box until something came out.
Inconvenient. So instead I began to stack all my financial papers
on top of the file box, perhaps subconsciously hoping that the
contents of my file box would somehow settle or further condense,
or maybe decompose enough to allow me to file more papers in it.
No such luck I'm afraid.
So for eight months, papers had been piling up precariously on top
of my file box and when I began digging through them to find all
the stuff I needed to do my taxes, they spilled off the file box,
behind the desk, and onto the floor. "Time to do something about
that file box," I said to myself, "gotta get this stuff
straightened out before I can do my taxes." Mistake number one.
Faced with the stark reality that no more papers were going into
the file box until some came out raised an interesting challenge.
I had dealt with this challenge once before, several years ago.
And I had a vague recollection that I started storing the really
old papers in a cardboard box in the back of the closet in my
office. Maybe, just maybe, there was some more room in that box
to which I could add some of the papers from my file box of
current financial papers.
The problem is that in my office closet, there were no less than
12 cardboard boxes, all labeled ambiguously at best. There was
nothing to do except start hauling them out one by one, opening
them up and looking inside.
Nothing new about this phenomena; Pandora had the same problem.
Every time I opened a box, stuff leaped out and spread itself all
over my office. Ancient issues of my favorite magazines found
there way onto my already over crowded desk to be reread and
reviewed. Ancient issues of my not so favorite magazines piled up
on the floor, as did all my old college text books. Ancient
extension cords and telephone wires and various cable converters
snaked their way across the floor. Printer ribbons from long lost
printers appeared out of nowhere. Various seemingly important
computer parts escaped showed up, rasing interesting questions
about the state of my computer.
For the record, I did in fact find the box I was looking for. It
did in fact have some spare capacity to hold more old papers. But
by the time I found it, all this was irrelevant. There was no
room in my office to do any work. There was no place in my office
to lay anything down without fear of losing it forever.
"Time to do a little Spring Cleaning," I said to myself, "better
get rid of some of this stuff and get the rest organized." Mistake
number two.
Sort first, ask questions later has always been my basic strategy
to cleaning. But sorting takes a lot of room, so I began hauling
everything out of the office into various other rooms in the
house. All my important financial records and stuff like that
went to the kitchen table, since that's the traditional place that
I do my taxes. Magazines, newspapers, and other clippings were
piled up on the living room coffee table since that's where all
the current editions of such things pile up. Fiction books went
to the bedroom's bedside table so that they could be reconsidered
for future nighttime reading. Nonfiction books and all hardware
went to the guest bedroom because, well just because there was no
place else in the house to pile them.
At this point, I wasn't yet panicked. I knew that I had a
somewhat serious problem on my hands, but I figured that if I just
got rid of a few of the nonessentials, I'd be able to put it all
back together again. So the fireplace hearth was designated as
the trash pile/recycling pile. You know, "ashes to ashes, dust to
dust." I dunno, it seemed appropriate somehow, or maybe just
wishful thinking.
So I spent an entire Sunday wandering from room to room in my
house, working on a little bit here and a little bit there. And
slowly but surely my trash pile began to accumulate papers, and
books, and broken appliances and odd scraps of metal, and even a
broken chair or two. I was encouraged. This was going to be
good. Eventually I would be glad I had done this. Or so I
thought. But while the various sections in my house were showing
signs of promise, I didn't notice until it was too late that my
trash/recycling pile was developing a critical mass. Spontaneous
combustion was beginning to look like a possibility. And as I
contemplated this new development in front of the fireplace, I
couldn't help notice the clock above the hearth. 4:30pm.
Now I have no idea how I knew this. I suspect a supernatural
influence. But somehow I just knew that the town dump closed at
5:00pm. "Better get this stuff loaded in the car and head out to
the dump," I told myself, "or I'm gonna be living with this trash
for a while." Mistake number three, but who's counting?
The car I drive, an Acura Integra, as much as I enjoy it, is not
designed for hauling. It's designed to be a reasonably priced
sports car. The trunk room is limited and you can't get anything
very large into the doors. Nonetheless, I managed to get about 8
garbage bags of trash (about half of what I had accumulated so
far), a couple of boxes of books, and the broken chair into my
car.
At 4:50pm I arrived at the dump. After proving that I was a
resident of my Town, the gatekeeper let me enter the dump drop off
area. Now, dumps aren't what they used to be. For one thing, you
never actually get to see the dump. Instead you are allowed into
sort of a dump staging area where you unload all your stuff from
your car into various huge tractor trailer sized dumpsters. And
everything has to be sorted just right to make maximum use of
recycling.
I've never been that enthusiastic about recycling. Not that I
disapprove of it or anything, but I just can't get excited about
it. So whenever I see one of those public service announcements
on TV, trying to inform me about how to recycle, my eyes tend to
glaze over and I switch the channels. I have know idea what "chip
board" is. I only vaguely understand the difference between
glossy paper and recyclable paper. So I was a little intimidated
by the dump's drop off area. There was a dumpster for yard waste.
There were dumpsters for glass. (Segregated into clear, brown,
and green glass.) There was a dumpster for scrap lumber and a
dumpster for scrap metal. There was a dumpster for plastic. And
thank goodness there was an old-fashioned dumpster for just
regular trash like stuff. It was reassuring somehow.
The easy stuff went first. Trash bags into the trash dumpster. I
confess that there might have been some recyclable paper in those
trash bags. But I was concerned about this broken chair I was
trying to get rid of. It didn't exactly qualify as "trash"
because it wasn't in a trash bag. And it was neither lumber nor
scrap metal. It was combination of all three. Recycling
paralysis had struck. I wanted to do the right thing, but had no
idea.
Time to consult the dump attendant. Nice guy. Really. I have no
complaints about him. I rolled the chair over to his guard
station by the entrance. And asked him what I could do about this
chair. He looked it over, quite carefully and then gave me his
analysis. "I better take care of it" he said, rolling his eyes.
I have no idea what ever happened to that chair, but I suspect
that Superfund money was used to dispose of it properly.
In any event, all I had left to deal with were the books. Stacks
and stacks of ancient paperback books. Which dumpster should the
books go in? Not being bagged up in trash bags, I couldn't dump
them in the trash dumpster without flagrantly violating the rules
in front of God and everybody else. My next best hope seemed to
be the paper recycling bin. But when I peered inside, it didn't
seem to contain any books, just loose paper. And there was this
big sign that said, "No Telephone Books!" Stumped again. I didn't
know what to do.
About that time, the attendant walked over to my car. Apparently
he wanted to help me out so he could close up for the night. So I
asked him, "Can these books be recycled?" And in a voice that
approached the smugness only found in National Park Rangers, he
informed me that paperback book covers were not recyclable. "Can
they be thrown in the trash?" I asked timidly. "You're going to
throw away _books_?"
No. No. Of course not. I was just curious. It was only a
hypothetical question. In any event, I left the dump and headed
back home, with two boxes of books still in tow, like a modern day
albatross around my neck. When I got home, I briefly considered
the possibility of storing these boxes of books in my garage. But
the fact of the matter is that I'm afraid, very afraid, of what
might be in my garage. I've gotten to the point that I walk
straight from the car to the door without casting my eyes to far
to either side. Somethings are simply best left undisturbed.
So here I sit, in a house full of chaos, amid a pile of garbage
bags and books I can't seem to get rid of, thoroughly paralyzed
with a fear of recycling, dreading the day I'm going to have to
explain in Tax Court why my taxes were never filed.
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Current Events
Life Aint What It Ewes To Be?
When scientists announced that they had successfully cloned a ewe,
it sent shockwaves through the world media. "Dolly," as the
female sheep was dubbed, was an instant star and appeared on just
about every newscast worldwide.
If Dolly had been just another breeding program designed to help
Scottish herders to raise hardier sheep that produced more wool,
the story wouldn't have been circulated beyond the the front cover
of husbandry trade journals. The reason that Dolly's story struck
such a nerve around the world is that no one could offer any
reason that cloning couldn't be accomplished with humans.
All the scientists involved in the Dolly project were quick to
issue statements that it would be exceedingly difficult to do the
same thing with human DNA. But somehow they failed to convince
the world. Whether because journalists simply didn't want to hear
this because it ruined the sensationalism of the story, or whether
there really isn't a reason that humans can't be cloned, only time
will tell.
For better or worse, the world events triggered by the Dolly
announcement have marched forward unabated with the assumption
that the same process could eventually apply to humans.
Journalists have incited much hand-wringing over the whole issue,
injecting horror stories of people being cloned for their organs,
of growing people in vats of chemicals, of creating unhuman humans
in a Frankensteinish fashion. As a result people are
overwhelmingly opposed to cloning at present.
President Clinton, never missing an opportunity to take a
non-controversial stand, issued an executive order banning all
cloning research in the U.S. for three months so that
"bioethicists" can evaluate the implications.
But the announcement of Dolly's unique parentage doesn't actually
cover any new ground that hasn't already been well tilled by
ethicists. The scientific accomplishment of Dolly's conception is
remarkable from a scientific view only.
First, we should note for the record that the term cloning has
been somewhat abused in the whole incident. As is often the case,
the scientific usage of the word "cloning" doesn't quite match up
with the popular definition of cloning. By "cloning." In
scientific terms, cloning simply means reproducing a plant or
animal from a single parent so that the conceived animal has the
same DNA as the parent animal. This much was accomplished by
Dolly's producers. However, Dolly was brought to term by a host
mother, much in the same way that other artificially conceived
animals, including humans are. So despite the public's perception
that cloning means growing animals in a laboratory somewhere, like
something you'd see on The X-Files, the fact of the matter is that
cloning, in terms of what Dolly's producers have done, is nothing
more than another means of artificial conception. Journalists
have done little or nothing to disabuse people of this
misconception.
Also, journalists are quick to instill an assumption among the
populace that Dolly's birth and growth into a mature sheep are
proof enough cloning can be accomplished and that there aren't any
physical side effects at stake. Perhaps Dolly's producers are a
little bit guilty of creating this assumption, since they have
after all announced Dolly as a success. However, one data point
does not establish a trend. Until many sheep are cloned and
studied over long periods of time, we won't know for sure what, if
any, real problems might arise from artificial concetption by
cloning.
But assuming that artificial conception by cloning is inherently
no more risky than any other type of conception, artificial or
natural, what of it? Should it be banned?
Society has had this debate already, not too long ago, when "test
tube babies" were being debated. And even though there was an
initial negative reaction among the general population when the
news first became generally known, in a short period of time,
people began to realize that there really isn't an ethical problem
with the idea of test tube babies. Likewise, there ought not to
be any ethical obstacles to artificial conception via cloning.
Perhaps there will be legal issues that arise. Certainly,
artificial conception via cloning brings a whole new meaning to
the term, "single parent family." But legal rights and
responsibilities are easily sorted out once the ethical principles
are established.
The reason that artificial conception by cloning doesn't pose any
new ethical problems for society is because it follows in the same
foot steps as other artificial methods of conception. And all
artificial conception methods fall under the same basic principle.
Fortunately, it's a principle with a long established track
record. It's a principle that has virtually universal support
across all religions, all races, and all cultures.
The guiding principle behind all artificial conceptions is that a
person's worth and value is always judged by their character and
morals as demonstrated by the actions they take. We never judge
the worth or value of a person based on genetic factors such as
the color of their skin, or the color of their eyes. Nor do we
judge a person's worht by factors that might, even indirectly be
genetically based. For example, even _if_ it had been proven that
IQ is somewhat genetically determined, we would not devalue those
who were genetically predisposed to having lower IQs.
Not only do find it unacceptale to judge an individual based on
their genetic similarity to others, i.e., the race to which they
belong. Most cultures on the planet rightfully refuse to judge a
person's value or worthines based on the individual's parentage.
Regardless of whether your parent was Hitler or Einstein, society
accepts that you should be judged independently of your parents
fame or infamy.
By the same principle that causes us not to judge others because
of their inherent genetic differences, we should also not judge
others by the their inherent genetic sameness. Even if we can
someday predict predispostions based on genetics, we should judge
people's value by what they do and what values they uphold, not by
their genetic predisposition.
And today we don't judge a child by the number of people raising
him or her. While we may believe that a two parent household is
better than a single parent household, we don't devalue the child
because there is only one parent in the house. Likewise, we ought
not to devalue a child just because he or she has only one
person's DNA, though we may disapprove of the "parent" for having
conceived in that fashion.
Whether we like it or not, the ability to artificially conceive a
child is not outside the realm of possibility in the near future.
It would be foolish to think that it will never be attempted. For
better or worse, the idea of cloning is already with us to stay.
Fortunately, we humans are remarkably resilient to change and the
moral values we use to guide us are equally resilient. And the
sweet irony of the whole situation is that the further science
advances our capabilities in the field of artificial reproduction,
the more we will come to realize that being human is not so much a
physical phenomena as it is a spiritual one.
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About Stuck In Traffic
Stuck In Traffic is a monthly magazine dedicated to evaluating
current events, examining cultural phenomena, and sharing true
stories.
Why "Stuck In Traffic"?
Because getting stuck in traffic is good for you. It's an
opportunity to think, ponder, and reflect on all things, from the
personal to the global. As Robert Pirsig wrote in _Zen and the
Art of Motorcycle Maintenance_, "Let's consider a reevaluation of
the situation in which we assume that the stuckness now occurring,
the zero of consciousness, isn't the worst of all possible
situations, but the best possible situation you could be in.
After all, it's exactly this stuckness that Zen Buddhists go to so
much trouble to induce...."
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Submissions to Stuck In Traffic are always welcome. If you have
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Contact Information:
All queries, submissions, subscription requests, comments, and
hate-mail about Stuck In Traffic should be sent to Calvin Stacy
Powers preferably via E-mail (powers@interpath.com) or by mail
(2012 Talloway Drive, Cary, NC USA 27511).
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Stuck In Traffic is published and copyrighted by Calvin Stacy
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