================================================================= 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. ==================================== 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. ==================================== 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. ==================================== 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...." Submission: Submissions to Stuck In Traffic are always welcome. If you have something on your mind or a personal story you'd like to share, please do. You don't have to be a great writer to be published here, just sincere. 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). Copyright Notice: Stuck In Traffic is published and copyrighted by Calvin Stacy Powers who reserves all rights. Individual articles are copyrighted by their respective authors. Unsigned articles are authored by Calvin Stacy Powers. Permission is granted to redistribute and republish Stuck In Traffic for noncommercial purposes as long as it is redistributed as a whole, in its entirety, including this copyright notice. For permission to republish an individual article, contact the author. E-mail Subscriptions: E-mail subscriptions to the ASCII text edition of Stuck In Traffic are free. Send your subscription request to either address listed above. Print Subscriptions: Subscriptions to the printed edition of Stuck In Traffic are available for $10/year. Make checks payable to Calvin Stacy Powers and send to the address listed above. Individual issues are available for $2. 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