John Lennon’s Tooth and The Machinery of Fate A Blast from the Past April 2014

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

John Lennon’s Tooth and The Machinery of Fate A Blast from the Past April 2014

It is a given fact that you guys like to disturb me. I don’t know why that is. I’d take it for granted that, in fact, life disturbs me enough. Take taxes, for instance — oh, wait. Los Federales already did. They have great need of money to eat it or something. Never mind.

Perhaps in an effort to distract me from running around the house repeating RAH’s dictum that you should be wary of strong drink: it might make you shoot at tax collectors and MISS, one of you told me about this dentist in … Alberta? Who bought one of John Lennon’s teeth (who even sells that?) and who plans to “clone John Lennon.”

Okay, as publicity it might be okay, though – I don’t know about you – I’d be hesitant to go to a dentist – any doctor really – who is into macabre souvenirs.

But the idea…

My answer to the reprobate who told me about it was to point out that we already have plenty of broken misfits around. I think he was a little taken aback, so I had to explain.

This is not the case with every one, of course, but speaking for me and a lot of other writers I know – and Lord help us, plastic artists are WORSE – art is what happens when you break somebody, then put them under unbearable pressure. Imagine if you will living, animated, sentient coal, and you’re trying to make diamonds. You apply enormous pressure…

And sometimes you’re going to get the diamond. The misfit will reorganize, re-integrate, find an outlet, and the result is something rarer and far better than mere human coal. But this being humans, most of the time you’re just going to get coal dust or perhaps diamond chips.

The resemblance between artists and madmen has been noted through history, but it’s slightly sideways from the truth. The truth is not that artists are mad, but rather like they achieved a state supra-madness where they function fine because they have that artistic outlet.

Now, I’m not quite that way, but then as you know I’m more craftswoman than artist.

Anyway, what shocked me about that story is that artist or not, Lennon’s success; his fame; his contribution to the world of music and the performing arts, is even more dependent on chance, on just how high that pressure was turned, when.

Regardless of what you think of his solo career it came after the Beatles, and might never have been what it was without the Beatles, and besides the Beatles is arguably his greatest contribution. What I mean is, absent the Beatles, he’d never have been the John Lennon he was, for good or ill. (This is something I tried to capture in Superlamb Banana. And yes, oh my, that does need another cover. Sigh.)

And that surely isn’t expressed in his genes. Unless you think of genes as sort of a magic destiny, the sort that the fairygodmothers used to give people over their cradle.

You might, of course. It’s a new and popular theory. Everything we are and everything we achieve is supposed to be there, in our genes, ready to happen. This Calvinistic (but not religious) view of humanity of course presupposes that the future is pre-written. We are, if you will, lines of code in a program we can’t help follow.

This is very similar to the Portuguese idea of fate which, Portugal being heavily influenced by Islam, is still central to the culture. You hear even educated people say things like “We all follow our fate.”

And it annoys me. It is, if you will, part of the Widgetization of humanity.

The left is going for this in a big way, without ever admitting it’s what they’re doing, just their their assumption of culture being genetic is never admitted to be full on racism. (It is. What else would it be? White people are endlessly protean, but if you are an interesting sub-race/culture, then you have to follow a script and know your place? Straight up racism!)

They’re going for this fate and pre-ordained thing in a big way because it’s a logical follow on their idea that nothing is your fault. If everything is scripted, its’ wrong to hold crimes against criminals. It also fits right in with the number of extreme left people who are radical losers. You might have an IQ of 180 and be living in a trashy apartment and raiding trash cans for garbage, but it was all planned, and it’s not your fault. Oh, yeah, and you can’t escape, so making the effort to actually integrate into society? Not possible. It will only fail.

Of course this destroys human freedom.

I’ve said of this before, that even if it were true (and if it were, we couldn’t prove it, barring proving the entire universe is a computer program) it would be evil to believe it. It would rob all existence of meaning and all humans of individuality. However, what we know seems to show it’s not true. I mean, maybe someone scripted me to have my particular life so far, in which case you have to wonder if they were sane (sorry) but I, like all of us, can see the errors, the failures, the slips – and what might have been. And it was not forbidden to me.

Of course, the jokers who believe this bilge then say that you don’t really think: you just follow a script, and then rationalize your actions.

While a lot of people do this, and a lot of us do it at times in minor stuff — like we forget we were going to make a cake and when we’re halfway through making a soufflé, we do the cat thing “I meant to do that” — I beg to differ. Major decisions are usually weighed by everyone but the very infantile, and the ones who believe that they can’t help themselves.

Again this is the widgetization of people. It’s making people things who would all act the same way given certain genes. Yeah, some twin studies purport to show that, to an extent, but I always wonder about the ones that don’t make cute lifeline stories. Oh, sure, the tendencies are in your genes. But what you make of them is your choice.

You’re not the sum of your ancestry. You’re not a widget. You’re not the slave to the culture you were born in. The future is yours to mold.

And as for John Lennon, poor man, who the heck needs another kid with funny glasses, a lot of uncontrolled aggression and some musical talent? He left children, in the normal way of mankind. Let that be enough for his contribution, and let him rest in peace.

68 thoughts on “John Lennon’s Tooth and The Machinery of Fate A Blast from the Past April 2014”

  1. Boy, I do agree with this!

    Kids from the same environment, same raw abilities, turn out completely differently. We see it over and over again.

    And, there is a part of us that does recognize that much of our fate is dependent on how we response to pressure/pain. That’s why, in America, we root for the underdogs. We respond to something so essential and bedrock in our culture, it seeps into our very soul.

    Sylvester Stallone – birth accident left his face lopsided, he was dyslexic, he achieved early success and was up and down for years, career wise and financially.
    But he didn’t give up. In a way, he WAS Rocky, the guy who didn’t know to quit. Who took what life threw at him and kept moving forward. Who, late in life, had some recognition for his accomplishments in acting.

    And there are so many more. We Americans cherish them all.

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  2. I saw Ed Driscoll post something about “When You’ve lost the son of John and Yoko …” over at Insty about the Stonehenge attack, and I tried to post back that Sean has been almost as libertarian and the good Professor Glenn for some years (probably all that hanging around with Led Claypool) but Disqus is being stupid.

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    2. Even if this guy successfully cloned John Lennon, the clone wouldn’t *be* John Lennon, just a guy with Lennon’s genome.

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        1. The Boys from Brazil plays with this, with Dr. Fauci – er, Mengele – attempting to have the clones raised in a Hitler-like manner.

          Magical clone creation is more like reincarnation enabled or improved by tech.

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          1. Book I read about a bazillion years ago, “Joshua, Son of None”, was based on the premise that a scientist cloned a popular, but un-named assassinated politician (*cough* JFK *cough*) and make a concerted effort to raise him so that his life duplicates that of the original.

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            1. CJ Cherryh did the same thing in her, “Cyteen,” novels, including the geneticist/biologists trying to duplicate the personality of a dead researcher shooting the clone full of hormones to simulate her emotional state at various stress points in the original’s life.

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            2. And the clone is elected President but gets assassinated when/before he takes the Oath of Office.

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        1. I wish. I wish we’d tried to get in. That guest list….I’ve been wanting to shake John Ringo’s hand for years for what he did to downtown Jacksonville in the Black Tide Rising series. (I grew up there. And we had to go down periodically to meet the lawyer (slowly) handling Dad’s probate. Downtown Jax now gives me the creeps).

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            1. Jason Cordova posted a picture of the “United We Stand,” panel and there you were.

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        2. I am. Having a lot of fun. Sorry to have walked in and out of the space panel so many times with the baby. I so wanted to hear more of what you, Les, Joelle, and all had to say. Alas, I thought she was calming down but she was getting cranky instead. We just got her to finally go to sleep now.

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  3. Of course, there’s the idea of karma and reincarnation (held by some Asian Indian religions).

    You’re born poor because your former life and IMO it would follow that “helping the poor” is worthless as the helper is “going against what the person deserves”.

    At “best”, by helping them you would “increase” their punishment in the next life.

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    1. IIRC, the starting circumstances of your life are determined by the need to balance your karma from your previous lives. But what comes afterwards is not.

      IIRC, both Hinduism and Buddhism believe in karma as part of the reincarnation cycle. But only Hinduism has a caste system, which actively restricts you after birth.

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      1. If I believed in reincarnation I cou,d see Hillary Clinton being the reincarnation of Jezebel.

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        1. Jezebel wasn’t a bad person. Now, if Hillary’s a reincarnation of a historical woman, I’d be looking at Erzsebet Bathory or someone like that.

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          2. Made me look up Erzsebet Bathory. One thing this blog is good for (among others)-

            History Lessons!

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          3. She had a man judicially murdered so his garden could be confiscated and given to her husband.

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      2. I wonder how that jives with the Hindu Nationalist idea that Christianity shouldn’t be allowed because “It is an attempt to escape your karma.”

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        2. Karma revolves around the idea of “balancing” the personal books, so to speak, between good and evil. Only when your good and evil is completely balanced can your soul escape the cycle of reincarnation. Being born into good circumstances means that you were particularly good in your previous life, and the karmic cycle is balancing your karma. Conversely, if you were particularly evil, you might be reborn as a slug. And the corrolary to that is that being too good can be just as personally problematic as being too bad, since the goal is to balance the good and bad attached to your spirit. Your caste is part of this, since it enforces the judgement of the karmic cycle on your birth. In an extreme case you might be reborn as the god Vishnu in order to counterbalance some great amount of good acts in your previous life. But that’s not the goal. The goal is to balance the books and stop being reborn.

          Further, it seems to me (as a non-Hindu) that the belief system encourages negative attitudes by the upper castes toward the lower castes. “You’re there because you were bad in your previous life. Also, I don’t want to be too charitable, unless I feel the need to counterbalance something bad I did earlier this week.”

          Christianity rejects all of that by saying, “All good, all the time.”. Life isn’t about balancing the good and evil. It’s about being good to others. It also tells the lower castes that they don’t need to put up with the crap that Hinduism heaps on them. We are all equal before our Father. We aren’t Brahmin or Untouchables.

          Thus, Christianity is quite possibly the single biggest threat to Hinduism.

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  4. If you cloned Stephen Hawking, and then treated his ALS so he wouldn’t become crippled and paralyzed, would he still be the same genius theoretical physicist? If not, if his condition had to be left untreated to get the desired results, how wrong would that be? Does the clone get a say? What if he’s not interested in theoretical physics?

    Would Lois Bujold’s ‘Durona Group’ even be possible? Multiple clones of a medical genius all grow up to be medical geniuses? What if some of them wind up obsessed with music, or art, or robotics? I know, on Jackson’s Whole it would be “Back to medical school!”

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    1. Brin’s “Glory Season” was about a society that’s very heavily into cloning (children born during a certain part of the year are always a clone of the mother). Most of the various (matriarchal) families specialize in a particular industry. But the protagonist meets one family where the sisters all strongly dislike each other, and all go into different professions (and do well in those professions).

      Also, while the protagonist isn’t a clone daughter, she is an identical twin, which is a form of (accidental) human cloning that exists in real life.

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      1. And that alone, the fact that identical twins are clones in every meaning of the term, should put paid to the idea of identical genomes producing identical individuals. No identical twins I’ve know were even very close to identical in personality or interests. Sometimes similar, of course; but then, so were myself and my best friend in high school.

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    2. I think it was implied that after they could move off of Jackson’s Whole, they’d have more options (and probably wouldn’t be into the whole “clone yourself some staff” deal so strongly either.)

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    1. We don’t need another commie; we don’t need another bum, with that kind of horrors, we’re about done!
      though actually the whole point is clones aren’t replicas. Genetics arent destiny.

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      1. Having never seen Mad Max, I heard that first sentence to the tune of Pink Floyd’s “We don’t need no education”. And it worked pretty well, though the “we’re about done” would have needed another syllable or two if it was intended to scan to the Pink Floyd song.

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  7. People who are enthusiastic about cloning humans really ought to read up on current veterinary results.

    A quote from the below “Cloning in horses results in a low blastocyst development rate (3%–10%), but viability after transfer is among the highest reported; ~30% of transferred embryos produce live foals, and postnatal survival is high (>85%). In one report, 50% of live-born cloned foals had some health issues”

    https://www.merckvetmanual.com/management-and-nutrition/cloning-of-domestic-animals/status-of-cloning-of-domestic-animals?_gl=1*177i0d0*_up*MQ..&gclid=EAIaIQobChMIy5XXt6nthgMVn1N_AB2KLwbTEAAYBSAAEgLTCPD_BwE&gclsrc=aw.ds

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      2. I’m all for cloning extinct animals, for coolness factors if nothing else. And please don’t bring up the whole movie franchise that says that’s a bad idea. We cannot clone Dinos, and everyone in that was being ridiculously willfully stupid for obvious plot reasons.

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        1. The AU of the Tuesday Next series has successfully cloned dodos as pets. They love marshmallows, and are not dangerous. :)

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        1. And in fact in fruits where the plants reproduce sexually (i.e. 95% +) its the ONLY way to guarantee you get the same flavor, color and size/shape of fruit. Most fruit we buy was made from grafted trees. If you plant the seed from say a Macoun apple you eat and wait 10+ years the fruit will likely be very different in flavor even if the Macoun self pollinated because the genes reshuffle in the pollen making process (meiosis). The apple will likely be very tart and very sour called a spitling. Johnny Appleseed wasn’t bringing apples to eat or even turn into sweet or mild cider. Spitlings have one purpose in life making hard cider.

          This feature of fruit crops makes some very weak to various pests. The classic is the Banana. The Gros Michel cultivar was the standard at the turn of the 20th century. However a disease (Panama disease, fungal I think) spread through the crops and because of that the ongoing crop was nearly wiped out. The problem was “solved” by switching to a different cultivar the Cavendish which was resistant to the disease. Rumors were that the disease had motated and was affecting other members of the Banana family including the Cavendish. This would be bad as bananas are a big cash crop AND their plantain cousins are a major starch source in Africa and parts of asia. The Hit 1920’s song “Yes we have no bananas” was likely inspired by the original shortage.

          Clones whether plant, microbe or animal have some real issues. There is a reason that sexual reproduction exists.

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            1. Thank you. I know my dad had 3 apple trees so this was likely why. There aren’t though distinctly male or female forms (like say Figs) if I remember right.

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  8. Of course this destroys human freedom.

    Sapolsky, “Determined” — in bookstores now. (hoicch, spit!)

    Or for an oldie-but-baddie that ‘says the soft part out loud’ right on the label in classic (70s?) style, try (ur-behaviorist!) B.F. Skinner’s “Beyond Freedom and Dignity” — if you can still find a copy. (IIRC he’s a ‘radical’ behaviorist, not only saying the causes of behavior are outside the scope of the work, but also saying positively-positivistically there’s no there there, it’s all mere mechanism for us, all the way down.)

    N.B. — I haven’t read more than bits and pieces of either book, not so masochistic as all that. (I’d rather read something like “A City on Mars” that ‘only’ tells us we ought to put off all space colonization for a few generations at least and maybe forever. Because scary and Reasons.)

    So, of course this destroys human freedom; except (if you Believe) it’s only smashing our merry illusions of human free will and choice.

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  10. The tooth.

    The whole tooth and nothing but….

    (opens anticarp umbrella and scampers away making Burgess Meredith “The Penguin” wauh wauh noises….

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  11. Bernie Taupin and Elton John’s “Empty Garden” still makes me sad after all these years. So does the beach house scene in “Yesterday”. Loved “Yesterday” as a great alt-history comedy.

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  12. (singing, Palpatine/Sidious voice) But where are the clones? There ought to be clones…… Send in the clones….

    Don’t bother, ….. there heeeeeeeeeeeere………

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  14. Let’s drive the lefties crazy and Clone the Founding Fathers, and since they are experts on the constitution, they must be listed too, right? 😎

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  16. }}} You’re not the sum of your ancestry. You’re not a widget. You’re not the slave to the culture you were born in

    If this were even vaguely true, that someone had to be a slave to their culture, then clearly no one would have decided that Slavery was unacceptable and should not be allowed by society, and it would not have come to be abolished by the West.

    Allowing slavery is the norm throughout history.

    The West flies in the face of this, so clearly, it is possible to violate one’s innate cultural bias, and, IMNSHO, for the better, in order for such a radical concept to become the norm of any actual culture.

    Duh and Q.E.D.

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    1. P.S., the same is also true for equal rights for women — for women to be subject to men in most regards (yes, I amply concur, this is a greatly simplified notion of the role of women in all human societies), the cultures consistently associate women with being sufficiently weak that they cannot be fully self-responsible, and that they must be protected by males for the benefit of the species. As our technical prowess has developed to the point where women can do much the same work as men (i.e., it is not simply dependent on pure physical strength, which women will never be able to match with men, as a group, no matter how they try, no matter how much caterwauling the ardent feminist of today wants to wail), it has become practical for women to do most anything men do (and even in some cases better).

      But the notion that, freed of the physical limits, women CAN be self-responsible is itself a violation of historical cultural norms. And, if humans were mere slaves to our cultural learning, then obviously the idea of self-responsible women would never have gained popularity, much less become the norm in the West.

      Again, “Duh and Q.E.D.”…

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