==================================================================== Stuck In Traffic "Current Events, Cultural Phenomena, True Stories" Issue #28 - May 1998 Contents: ÿ The Price of Oil in Cary I learned yet another of life's lessons while shopping at my local Wal-Mart and it started with the Mayor of the town I live in. _Holy Fire_: A Review I don't usually think of this 'zine as a review 'zine. But every now and then I get so excited about a book or movie that I have to share with the readers. Such is the case with this book. God Comes To Garland The real spectacle behind God's Salvation Church has nothing to do with Flying Saucers. ÿ ===================================== True Story The Price of Oil In Cary I've learned some of the most important lessons of my life while shopping at Wal-Mart. I know that's a very politically incorrect thing to say these days, but it's true. There's a little replica of the real world within the walls of every store and all you have to do is look around to learn about the human condition. Long time readers of _Stuck In Traffic_ will recall that it was at Wal-Mart that I learned about the excesses of Marketing and got a headache while shopping for Tylenol. And it was at Wal-Mart that I learned the most about how racial harmony is truly achieved. The latest lesson I learned while shopping at Wal-Mart came from the Automotive department and, like so many world events these days, started with speculation over the price of oil. Call me lazy if you must, but I simply refuse to change the oil in my car on my own anymore. I used to try to change my own oil. But I never once got proficient at it enough to be able to do it in under 40 minutes. And I never could do it without making a mess. And then there's all that old oil that has to be taken to the appropriate recycling center. So, if time is money, I've concluded that it's simply not cost-effective for me to change my own oil. Wal-Mart is by far the cheapest place in the town of Cary to get your oil changed. If you go to one of the national chains of oil change shops, you could easily spend $26 on an oil change. And even with a coupon, you rarely get out of those places for under $20. And the national chains of oil change shops are always looking for excuses to charge you money for something extra. On the other hand, Wal-Mart will change your oil for about $16 and that includes the price of the oil and the oil filter. Occasionally you'll hear about a local garage that will do oil changes for a little less as part of a promotion of some sort. But Wal-Mart has this low price everyday. And going to Wal-Mart has the added benefit that I can shop for household stuff or do grocery shopping at the grocery store next door instead of waiting in some grungy waiting room that has a TV blaring so loud that I can't even read. The price is right. I get better use of my time. And I can always depend on them. So not too long ago, I got up early one Saturday morning and trooped off to the Wal-Mart for my oil change ritual. I dropped off the car at the Wal-Mart auto center, did my grocery shopping and by the time I got back the car was waiting for me outside So I loaded up the groceries into the trunk, headed back inside and got in line at the counter to pay. And what do you know, I found myself standing in line behind the Honorable Mayor of Cary, Koka Booth. While bursting at the seams with growth, Cary is still small enough that it's not too terribly unusual to run into elected officials during the course of every day events like getting your oil changed at the local Wal-Mart. This was by no means the first time I had seen Mayor Booth in person. When I first moved to Cary, he and I lived in the same precinct. He and I were always among the first in line on election day. And we would chat a little while waiting in line in that civic fashion that folks do on election days. I also saw him once at a the local ice cream stand. And of course I've seen him on public access TV extolling the virtues of voting for bonds to pay for parks and schools, etc. And despite his unusual name, Mayor Booth is as regular a guy as you could ever hope to meet. Nothing about him sticks out as the least bit unusual. Nothing about him is going to attract attention in a crowd. But I recognized him right away as I got in line at the Wal-Mart, even though mostly all I saw was the back of his head. But I didn't say anything to him. I'm just not much into small talk, and somehow standing in line at the check out counter didn't seem conducive to a political debate on the merits of city growth versus the merits of restricted and planned development. (Besides, he and I pretty much agree on that subject anyway.) So I was content to leave him alone in peace. But there was another man shopping in the automotive department that wasn't nearly so considerate of Mayor Booth. He rounded the corner of an aisle with a shopping cart full of spark plugs, air filters, and kids and his face lit up as soon as he saw Mayor Booth. "MAYOR BOOTH," he bellowed so loud that you would have thought that he had hijacked the PA system in the store, "GREAT TO SEE YOU!" And he rushes up to the Mayor and starts introducing himself to the mayor. Or I guess I should say reintroducing himself. Because he starts going on about didn't the mayor remember him and his son at a softball game a couple of years back and the mayor had given the whole team some sort of award or something. The kid was awestruck His father was gushing. And everyone else within shouting distance was trying to discreetly check out the scene and whispering to each other, "is that _really_ the mayor?" as if they were somehow suspicious that this might be some sort of joke on the poor fellow standing in line in front of me. And it was a kind of a joke, in a way. Because after a minute or two, Mr. Enthusiastic shuffled off with his cart load of kids and Mayor Booth was left there, standing in line, with a room full of people still staring at him, whispering at him, pointing fingers at him. Whereas he had formerly been Mr. Anonymous just going about his chores, now he was a public spectacle. I caught him looking around a little and when he looked behind him, at me and the rest of the people in line behind me, I got a glimpse of his face. He looked like an animal trapped in headlights of an on rushing car. Frozen out of shock and fear. I wanted to say something like, "Man, that must suck to have to deal with that kind of stuff everyday." But I didn't. But as he was looking around sizing up the situation, I swear there was a visible transformation of his appearance and demeanor. I got an up close and personal look at his ability to morph from Mr. Everyman to Mr. Mayor right before my eyes. I'm not sure how to explain it. But it seemed like all of a sudden he got more animated in his movements and body gestures. His eyes lit up as if some sort of switch had been turned on in the back of his head. He started making good old fashioned eye-contact with everyone he could. Now, cynical folks may say, "Well, he was putting on a show. He wasn't being sincere. It was obvious that he was not being his usual self." But that doesn't bother me a bit. Of course he was. Elected officials have to play the _role_ of an elected official. That's what people expect of them. Who in the world doesn't act a little bit differently when they are the center of attention? So I wasn't too surprised by this radical change in his personality, but it was sort of shocking to see the transformation right in front of me. About that time, it was his turn with the cashier, and the young lady behind the automotive check out counter began ringing up his bill with all the nervousness of someone in trying to do their normal job in the presence of a big celebrity. She was all thumbs. But finally she managed to get the cash register to spit out a bill and she told The Mayor his total for the oil change. A debate ensued. Seems that the price was significantly higher than what the Mayor had expected to have to pay and he demanded an explanation. "Demanded" I say only in the sense that he simply refused to let the matter drop. He never raised his voice. He never acted upset. But he also kept asking questions about the bill and asking the poor little girl at the register if she agreed that something seemed to be wrong with his bill. Now the price of an oil change has not changed at the Wal-Mart for the entire time that I have been going there, so I was naturally curious to hear the outcome of this debate. The price did seem a little high to me, by 3 or 4 dollars. Curioser and curioser. By now, everyone in line knew that there was some kind of hold up. And lets be honest, every single one of us was watching the mini-drama unfold to see how The Mayor of Cary was going to handle this apparently blatant overcharge. How was he going to handle this? Was he going to lose his cool with the check out girl? Would he let the matter drop and just pay it? Was he going to use his mighty powers of Mayor to kick Wal-Mart's ass? More debating ensued for several minutes and then an uneasy stalemate was reached. Neither the Mayor nor the check out girl were saying anything new. The Mayor repeatedly pointed out the advertised price for the oil change that was clearly posted on the wall and how there was an extra, cryptic charge on his bill that made the total higher than it was supposed to be. The poor check out girl could only defend herself by saying over and over that that's what the computer had rung up for his bill and she couldn't explain it but that it must be right if the cash register said it was. The Mayor was very calm and cool and collected. He never once implied that the girl was trying to cheat him or that there was any sort of malicious activity in progress. But there was one thing about him that I noticed. While not actually raising his voice, he was speaking just a little bit louder than necessary. There is no doubt in my mind whatsoever that the Mayor was putting on a show for the rest of us in line. He was role playing. The poor check out girl, on the other hand, was looking very nervous and scared. Finally, FINALLY, she had the bright idea that maybe she ought to call a supervisor to come deal with the situation. And she did. So while we are waiting for the supervisor, Mayor Booth keeps talking about how the bill doesn't seem right to him and he doesn't understand this one cryptic charge on the bill for the extra couple of dollars. He goes on about this for another few minutes until the Supervisor arrives. By this time, of course, everyone within earshot knows exactly who The Mayor is and everyone knows exactly what the situation is. Again, there is absolutely no doubt in my mind that The Mayor was deliberately repeating the situation so that everyone knew what the score was. Frankly, it was wearing thin. It had now been a good 7 or 8 minutes since The Incident had begun. The Supervisor took about 30 seconds to decipher the bill. Seems that the advertised price for the oil change only buys you 4 quarts of oil. The Mayor's mini-van took more oil than 4 quarts of oil and so the cash register had added an extra charge for the extra oil. The supervisor even pointed out the not-so-fine print on the sign above the register that mentioned this fact. Whew. "Well, that explains that," I thought to myself. But no. There was more. The Mayor of Cary and the Supervisor proceeded to debate the price of oil. The Mayor wanted to know exactly how much more oil above the 4 quarts did they have to put in to the minivan. The mayor wanted to know how much they charged for a quart of oil? Did they charge retail prices or wholesale prices for the oil? There were many questions. The Supervisor, not having done the actual work couldn't answer these questions. The Mayor kept asking them in that not loud but loud enough anyway voice of his. Well, there was nothing else to do except consult the mechanics in the garage. So the Mayor of Cary, The Supervisor, and the poor check out girl all marched off in a single file line to the garage for more Investigations. It was very quiet in the check out line all of a sudden. And without a show to watch, it also got very boring very quickly. We fidgeted. We stared at each other in line. Finally, to break the nervous silence more than anything else, I turned to the couple waiting behind me in line and said to them, "Ya know, if it were any other time except now, I'd be very proud to have a penny pincher for a Mayor." And as soon as those words came out of my mouth, I realized that I had once again learned an important life lesson in my neighborhood Wal-Mart. I realized that. everyone, in every democracy on the planet, feels exactly the same way. ===================================== Cultural Phenomena _Holy Fire_: A Review Without a doubt, Bruce Sterling has to be classified as one of the key figures in the cyberpunk genre of science fiction. But first with _Heavy Weather_ and now with his latest novel, _Holy Fire_, Bruce Sterling has evolved his storytelling into a form that, if not outright mainstream, at least appeals to a much broader spectrum of science fiction fan. _Holy Fire_ reads like a traditional cyberpunk tale in the sense that there are multiple threads of the plot interweaving with each other and seen through the eyes of a single character. The story jumps from one locale to the next as can only be done in a truly Global Village setting. Like all the best cyberpunk, there are a wide variety of exotic and sometimes scary people along the way. Like the best cyberpunk novels, the protagonist in Holy Fire is living by her wits, improvising, making things up as she goes along, not so much with a plan as a goal. But in Holy Fire, the rogue Artificial Intelligence programs are no longer the key characters. Most of the software in _Holy Fire_ is well domesticated and even (somewhat literally) house trained. Unlike the traditional cyberpunk novel, cyberspace is not the primary stage in which the players interact. Cyberspace is there, but it is treated rather matter-of-factly by the characters in the story, much the way we take our phones for granted. But the thing that radically breaks _Holy Fire_ out of the cyberpunk mold is the protagonist, Mia and her quest to relive her lost life and to capture something elusively referred to as the Holy Fire. Mia is a 94 year old woman, living in the late 21st century where the world has just emerged from decades of plagues and other biological disasters. The world Mia lives in has become thoroughly democratized and totally focused on the preservation and the elongation of life. Since the government in Mia's world is strictly democratic and the population is aging more and more due to the improvements in medical technology, the elderly population have become the majority and the dominant voting bloc. This leads to self-perpetuating feedback loop in which global policy continues to be focused more and more on life extension technologies and young people become second class citizens. Mia is a "medical economist" and as such spends her life evaluating the cost/benefit ratios of various life extension technologies. So we see first hand through her eyes the obsession that her world has on preserving the body. Early in the story, Mia attends the deathbed of one of her ex-husbands for whom she feels neither remorse nor love. In fact we find that she's very uncomfortable and even borderline disgusted at having to deal with bonds of past romances lost long ago. It is clear that in this world after you live to a certain age, people's attitudes about personal relationships changes dramatically. Their society refers to it as becoming "post-human". And it becomes clear to Mia through a chance encounter with a couple of "kids" in their early twenties, that the post-human condition isn't all it's cracked up to be. While she can't quite articulate it, Mia realizes that she can no longer live in the medically obsessed world she helped create. So she signs up for the riskiest life extension treatment there is and walks out of it with the body of a 20 year old only to realize that her world is not going to let her live the life of a 20 year old just because she has the body of one. Instead they are going to treat her like a lab rat. So Mia not only has to escape the clutches of her medical keepers, she has to fumble her way across Europe, trying to discover for herself what in life is worth living for. And along the way she finds a whole subculture, a lost generation of young people struggling to answer the same question in a world where all the power, success, and money is tied up in the hands of the gerontocracy. Bruce Sterling explores that question from the viewpoint of many different characters in his book and with varying degrees of success they all reach more or less the same conclusion: That a long life, without the Holy Fire is no life at all. So while the story telling technique in _Holy Fire_ is the tried and true cyberpunk format, the theme in _Holy Fire_ is as universal and ancient as it gets. ===================================== Current Events God Comes To Garland Just in case you were wondering, God did _not_ appear on Channel 18 on March 25th to announce his return to earth. He did _not_, in fact, descend from the heavens in a cloud-like UFO to the backyard of a suburban house in Garland, Texas. And, as near as anyone can tell, God did not take over the body of Mr. Hon-Ming Chen, leader of the God's Salvation Church who owned the house. It seems that Mr Chen is a little confused about the prophecies that God is sending him in visions. . Indeed, one might even dare to think Mr. Chen a bit touched, out of sorts, disoriented, delusional, loony, or stark raving mad. God's Salvation Church, aka "Chen Tao" aka "True Way", was founded in Taiwan sometime in the 1950's by Mr. Chen a former sociology professor and apparently dropped his profession after he started receiving messages from God in 1992. The Church moved to San Dimas, Californis soon after because they believe that the United States will be spared the upcoming nuclear war that will be started in 1999. In the frenzy that followed the Heaven's Gate suicide, the Church was exposed and they quickly dropped "God Saves The Earth Flying Saucer Foundation" from the many names that they used for their Church. They also determined that God would be coming to Garland, Texas, so they left San Dimas and bought 21 houses in a Garland neighborhood. As the March 25th deadline for God's arrival neared, the Garland neighborhood was swamped with news reporters from around the globe and there was a frenzy of comparisons to the Heaven's Gate cult and dire warniings about "possible mass suicide attempts" even though the members of God's Salvation Church do not believe in suicide. In fact they quite ardently believe that killing one's self is the same thing a killing God. And if God's Salvation Church is in fact a cult, as they have been described to be by nearly anyone with access to publishing media, they seem to manage to be a cult without any particularly bad habits. In fact, by all media accounts they seem to live and coexist quite peacably with their neighbors. The media frenzy about God's Salvation Church originally broke out when the Taiwanese mother of a 16 year old girl claimed that the church had kidnapped her. But when the authorities investigated the matter they discovered that a more proper interpretation of events was that the girl had run away from home and gone to San Dimas because her father, who was a church member, had recently died of cancer there. She was apparently staying with her uncle. And while it is true that the members look quite comical in their white robes and white cowboy hats, neighbors in the Garland neighborhood have steadfastly refused to say that they felt intimidated by the cult. Amused, yes. Intimidated, no. Although Mr. Charles Amyx, who lives next door to Mr. Chen, was reported to have expressed concern over the fact that his homeowner's insurance didn't cover "acts of God," and was therefore somewhat concerned about being so close to where "the Godplane" was going to land. While God's Salvation Church managed to coexist somewhat peacfully with their suburban middle class neighbors, the media circus that converged on the scene as the March 25th deadline drew near did not. There were so many news vans and reporters in the neighborhood that residents could not get to their houses. The police had to set up roadblocks at the neighborhood entrances and let only residents and a limited number of reporters in at a time. Residents complained that their carefully cultivated lawns had been destroyed by inconsiderate reporters trying to get to Mr. Chen's house. Personally, I'd like to complain that the so-called journalists even considered this event to be news. If ever there was a case of going after the titilation instead of the news, this is it. Here we have a bunch of harmless eccentrics finding God in their own crazy way, living a peaceful life, mostly getting along with their neighbors. And our news media can't leave them alone for fear of missing the next big mass suicide. If it were any other religion, we'd call it persecution. As a society, we talk and talk about the importance of valuing diversity. We talk and talk about the strength we garner from incorporating all sorts of people, views, and cultures into our melting-pot society. Yet we seem to be unable to tolerate harmless religious eccentrics. We seem to be unable to stop drooling at the thought of mass suicide. We seem to be unable to truly let other people think and believe differently. We seem to pretty damn narrow minded when it comes to religion. Everyone has to find God in their own way, even the members of God's Salvation Church. And if we find their religious practices amusing and comical, then we should keep it to ourselves. Or at very least we should not openly tease them about their beliefs. And after all, if, as the the church members believe, Jesus has been reborn and is a 27-30 year old man currently living in Vancouver, British Columbia, well, we'll all feel more than a little bit ashamed of ourselves won't we? ===================================== 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...." Submissions: 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@ibm.net) or by mail (2012 Talloway Drive, Cary, NC USA 27511). Copyright Notic: 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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