This is what happens when you give your own rotten teeth out as gifts.

August 21, 2013 5:54 AM

"Many Beatles fans remember where they were when they heard John Lennon was shot. I hope they also live to hear the day he was given another chance." (autoplay music)
posted by 256 (41 comments total)

What if cloned John Lennon grows up to be a derivatives trader?
posted by jquinby at 5:58 AM on August 21, 2013 [2 favorites]

Worse, what if cloned John Lennon grows up to be an arrogant bully who mistreats his friends and romantic partners systematically and brutally, for years...you know, what if he grows up to be John Lennon?
posted by kewb at 6:02 AM on August 21, 2013 [7 favorites]

When you said "autoplay music" you didn't mention it was horrifically executed punny terribleness.
posted by nevercalm at 6:14 AM on August 21, 2013 [5 favorites]

I couldn't deny you the joy of discovering it yourself.
posted by 256 at 6:14 AM on August 21, 2013 [1 favorite]

kewb: alternate universe ringo will fix it.
posted by rmd1023 at 6:22 AM on August 21, 2013 [7 favorites]

Yeah, uh, I'll take the real "abusive" John Lennon, anyday.
posted by uraniumwilly at 6:27 AM on August 21, 2013

Nono nono
posted by Meatbomb at 6:32 AM on August 21, 2013

I will get Spider Robinson on the line.

This is what happens when you give your own rotten teeth out as gifts.

Years ago I developed a cavity on the back of one of my wisdom teeth. My dentist explained that it was a considerable pain in the ass to try do a restoration way back there and asked if I would be okay with an extraction. I said, "sure" and so out it came. A year later he suggested that as the other wisdom tooth would eventually damage the gum where the missing tooth had been, he suggested that he remove that one as well. I agreed. He did so, examined the newly-orphaned molar and said, "That is a good-looking tooth... you want to hang on to that?" He handed it over and to be sure, it was a classic cartoon tooth, with the three gently curving roots. I admitted I was not totally comfortable having a piece of my head sitting in my hands, so I initially made to hand to back, but then decided to hang onto it, at least temporarily. A week later, I overhanded it into a lake where I spent many happy hours growing up, reasoning that now a tiny part of me will be there for some considerable time to come. Sort of scattering the ashes without the necessity for cremation, and scattering one's own ashes to boot.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 6:43 AM on August 21, 2013 [10 favorites]

I'm not sure why this is even an idea. Basic bioethics would seem to counsel against it. How would a cloned human - cloned from a man more famous than Jesus - ever develop his own identity, sense of self and self-worth? Most sons have a hard enough time being compared to daddy as it is.

Moreover hasn't there been a big controversy over cloning human stem cells without the consent of the donor? Cloning a complete human without the consent of the donor would seem to be even more blatantly unethical.
posted by three blind mice at 7:01 AM on August 21, 2013

Of course the result would be Anti Lennon. Black suit, square glasses, All You Need is Hate, Ono Yoko.
posted by popcassady at 7:09 AM on August 21, 2013 [6 favorites]

Oko Yono. Noko Yo-yo. Koyo No-no.
posted by Now there are two. There are two _______. at 7:12 AM on August 21, 2013

I'm not sure why this is even an idea. Basic bioethics would seem to counsel against it. How would a cloned human - cloned from a man more famous than Jesus - ever develop his own identity, sense of self and self-worth? Most sons have a hard enough time being compared to daddy as it is.

I dunno, seems to be working out OK for the Michael Jacksons.
posted by Meatbomb at 7:13 AM on August 21, 2013

This sort of thing is what makes me wish I had the discipline to be a better fiction writer. I'd find it really interesting to explore the whole nature/nurture aspect. Original!John didn't have some kind of abject, Oliver Twist childhood, of course, but it's clear that he felt he lacked some of the things that would have made him feel more secure and able to cope with adult life.

Now, if you took baby Clone!John, with whatever amount of intelligence, talent, and natural tendency is inborn, and deliberately raised him in a different way, could you end up with an adult who had Original!John's skill and sense of humor, but without the personality problems? The subjects in studies of twins who were raised apart often have similar personality traits, but their adoptive parents aren't usually making a deliberate effort to create an environment designed to foster change.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 7:15 AM on August 21, 2013

Cloning a complete human without the consent of the donor would seem to be even more blatantly unethical.

But using them to sell chocolate is just dandy!
posted by rory at 7:15 AM on August 21, 2013

Of course the result would be Anti Lennon. Black suit, square glasses, All You Need is Hate, Ono Yoko.

Ono Yoko is, of course, exactly the way the name is generally pronounced in Japan. Last names come first here.
posted by flapjax at midnite at 7:18 AM on August 21, 2013 [3 favorites]

"if I ain't dead already, wooh girl, you know the reason why"

"she said, I know what it's like to be dead"

"yes I'm lonely... wannna die"
posted by flapjax at midnite at 7:21 AM on August 21, 2013 [3 favorites]

What they don't tell you is that the Tleilaxu have programed Duncan Lennon to kill Paul, but in doing that he will recover his former memories.
posted by willnot at 7:24 AM on August 21, 2013 [4 favorites]

Oko Yono. Noko Yo-yo. Koyo No-no.

Whenever a new season of a reality show starts, I come up with nicknames for the contestants because there are too many to remember their real names. in the new season of Face Off, there's this girl with a really phony Japanese aesthetic going on. I started calling her Noko No-No. That turned out to be too cumbersone, so now I call her Yoko No-No.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 7:26 AM on August 21, 2013 [1 favorite]

When The Beatles Hit America
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 7:29 AM on August 21, 2013

I'm not sure why popular culture continues to cling to this idealized facade of a man who by all accounts was an abusive, self centered jerk.

Good songwriter, though.
posted by coachfortner at 7:40 AM on August 21, 2013 [4 favorites]

mistreats his friends and romantic partners systematically and brutally

Look, I know the whole "John Lennon Prince of Peace" thing gets pretty nauseating (and he would have been the first to say so) but wildly swinging in the opposite direction ("John Lennon; Worse than Hitler") is equally unbalanced. Yeah, John Lennon "was cruel to his woman, he beat her and kept her apart from the things that she loved" (as he himself said), and he could be an arrogant asshole and abusive to friends etc., etc. But I've never read anything to support the notion that he was "systematically" anything, let alone "systematically" brutal. I think Cynthia Lennon probably got the worst of Lennon's behavior but by her own account he mellowed dramatically over the years they were together. He was a complex and often very unhappy person, but he also had deep and abiding friendships and left behind a lot of people who had known him well who profoundly mourned his death. I think neither canonization nor glib iconoclasm is a useful approach to his legacy or his life.
posted by yoink at 7:42 AM on August 21, 2013 [15 favorites]

...Okay, this is now two current threads in which people are coming in all "oh by the way John Lennon was a jackass" - can we declare a "yes, thank you, we got the message" moratorium and ask others to give that particular hobbyhorse a rest now?
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 7:43 AM on August 21, 2013 [3 favorites]

Oko Yono. Noko Yo-yo. Koyo No-no.

Noko No-No. Yoko No-No.

Okay Yoni?
 
posted by Herodios at 7:47 AM on August 21, 2013

I think some of the reaction to Lennon -- the "glib iconoclasm" to which yoink refers -- has a lot to do with larger issues surrounding the ways in which celebrities then and now get a pass for domestic abuse in particular. But Lennon was sometimes quite systematic in his abusive behavior: the way he bullied Stu Sutcliffe seems pretty sustained, and I think it's pretty hard to classify isolating and beating a spouse as a long serious of accidental impulses rather than the established pattern of behavior associated with spousal abuse.

Lennon was a complex person -- who isn't? -- and a deeply troubled one, but neither those features nor his talent are excuses, really. I greatly enjoy the music he created and performed, but I have to work pretty hard at separating the artist from the art. The whole idea of cloning Lennon strikes me as a project for people who identify Lennon with his art so much that they don't much care about the rest of the person: the troubles, the desires, or the flaws. I can see how focusing solely on the man's flaws is unfair and a bit derailing, though, and will move on from it as of now.

I think it's fair to say that cloning dead people without established consent seems wrong, not only as a violation of the person and dignity of the deceased, but also for the way the cloned individual ends up a curiosity, a living experiment, also bereft of the dignity of a person. In these comments, we have people excited about the chance to use the clone as the human subject of an experiment in nature vs. nature, but by definition the clone would not get a chance to provide anything like informed consent. Others seem mostly happy that we might get more John Lennon creations, as if the generation of the clone were more like a cultural manufacturing project than, you know, the gestation, birth, and life of a human being.

It's a nice thought experiment, and I imagine almost everyone really intends it that way; but in conducting it, we have to bracket a whole lot of ethical considerations to achieve a pop-culture flight of fancy. It's fun, but only fleetingly.
posted by kewb at 8:12 AM on August 21, 2013 [1 favorite]

Yeah, John Lennon "was cruel to his woman, he beat her and kept her apart from the things that she loved" (as he himself said),

Actually, that was a Paul-penned number. Lennon added one line to it ("it can't get no worse") but otherwise those are Macca's lyrics.
posted by flapjax at midnite at 8:18 AM on August 21, 2013 [2 favorites]

...Okay, this is now two current threads in which people are coming in all "oh by the way John Lennon was a jackass" - can we declare a "yes, thank you, we got the message" moratorium and ask others to give that particular hobbyhorse a rest now?

Maybe we can start a Paul Simon thread so someone can reveal that Simon stole a song from Los Lobos. A MeFi standard!
posted by BurntHombre at 8:23 AM on August 21, 2013 [4 favorites]

Actually, that was a Paul-penned number.

oh yeah, of course--I've always assumed the reference was to John, though.
posted by yoink at 8:52 AM on August 21, 2013

Somehow it reminds me of Gregory Benford's Doing Lennon (PDF).
posted by a person of few words at 9:09 AM on August 21, 2013

the way he bullied Stu Sutcliffe seems pretty sustained

That really doesn't jibe with anything I've read about their relationship, other than perhaps Pauline Sutcliffe's pretty fanciful and not particularly credible account (though even her account isn't exactly one of systematic abuse). The people who actually knew Lennon and Sutcliffe and hung out with them (including Astrid Kirchherr, who was in love with Stu) didn't see their friendship in that way.
posted by yoink at 9:10 AM on August 21, 2013 [2 favorites]

Paul McCartney in Many Years From Now (Barry Miles, quoting another source, I believe):

The 'angry young man' and all that was John and I filling in the verses about schoolteachers. We shared a lot of feelings against teachers who had punished you too much or who hadn't understood you or who had just been bastard generally.

John Lennon, Playboy inteview:

It is a diary form of writing. All that "I used to be cruel to my woman, I beat her and kept her apart from the things that she loved" was me. I used to be cruel to my woman, and physically -- any woman. I was a hitter. I couldn't express myself and I hit. I fought men and I hit women.

That is why I am always on about peace, you see. It is the most violent people who go for love and peace. Everything's the opposite. But I sincerely believe in love and peace. I am [a] violent man who has learned not to be violent and regrets his violence. I will have to be a lot older before I can face in public how I treated women as a youngster.

McCartney, Many Years From Now:

I was just sitting there doing 'Getting better all the time' and John just said in his laconic way, 'It couldn't get no worse,' and I thought, Oh, brilliant! This is exactly why I love writing with John... It was one of the ways we'd write. I'd have the song quite mapped out and he'd come in with a counter-melody, so it was a simple ordinary song.

John Lennon, Rolling Stone interview:

Throughout my career I've selected to work with only two people: Paul McCartney and Yoko Ono. That ain't bad picking.

posted by Herodios at 9:12 AM on August 21, 2013 [9 favorites]

I'm not sure why popular culture continues to cling to this idealized facade of a man who by all accounts was an abusive, self centered jerk.

Wow, I don't even like the Beatles or John Lennon and that seems like a very poorly articulated hit piece. I mean ...

The man who sang “imagine no possessions” lived a millionaire’s life in a posh New York hotel. The man who sang “imagine no religion” was obsessed with every spiritual and New Age fad that came his way

There's no logic there. ... is this from like some embittered Nixon supporter or something?
posted by mrgrimm at 9:12 AM on August 21, 2013 [3 favorites]

Throughout my career I've selected to work with only two people: Paul McCartney and Yoko Ono. That ain't bad picking.

Once upon a time there were two balloons ... called Jock and Yono.
posted by mrgrimm at 9:18 AM on August 21, 2013

Whenever a new season of a reality show starts, I come up with nicknames for the contestants because there are too many to remember their real names. in the new season of Face Off, there's this girl with a really phony Japanese aesthetic going on. I started calling her Noko No-No. That turned out to be too cumbersome, so now I call her Yoko No-No.

If anyone's interested in completing the derail with me, I finished the list after last night's episode.

1. Babycakes or Babydoll, who talks in a baby voice that sounds put-on
2. Beard Boy, who has a very boyish face, but with a beard (probably grew the latter to hide the former)
3. Blondie, who has pale blonde hair (Pale blonde everything, really. Well, everything that shows.)
4. Blue Fairy or Mexican Dentist, who was formerly a dentist in Mexico, and sometimes has blue- and purple-dyed hair
5. Chuckles, who has big, curly, bright-orange-dyed hair and clownish makeup, clothes, and personality
6. Daddy’s Boy, who frequently references his dead father
7. Eddie, who just really looks like an “Eddie” (he started out as “The Tooth Fairy," but you can’t really see his crooked teeth in everyday filming)
8. John Malkobitch or Non-Malkobitch, who vaguely resembles John Malkovich (the voice, too)
9. JourneyMan, who looks like he would have fit right in with the band Journey, circa 1983
10. Mama’s Boy, who frequently references his dead mother
11. MirBlanda, who seems fairly bland in both looks and personality
12. Peter Gayvison, who resembles a gay version of fifth Doctor Who actor Peter Davison
13. Sadolfo, who seems to have a glum personality and is easily discouraged (I was all for Eeyoro, but then my sister remembered that his real name is Adolfo and it all fell together)
14. Tex or GlamTex, who always wears cowboy hats; some are spangled and coordinate with fancy Western shirts
15. That Other Guy, who has few distinguishing characteristics
16. Yoko No-No, who maintains a phony-looking artsy Japanese aesthetic

Now back to our regularly scheduled discussion of extracted teeth, bioethics, alternate universes, and whether John Lennon was all good or all bad. Let me know when we get around to dental puns.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 9:30 AM on August 21, 2013 [1 favorite]

whether John Lennon was all good or all bad

No one is arguing the "all good" line--including Lennon himself.

As for the cloning thing; it suffers from the same "I am apparently incapable of realizing that human clones exist and have been well studied for centuries" problem that afflicts pretty much every sci-fi story about clones. We already pretty much know the answer to the question "what would happen if we cloned John Lennon"--which is that we'd have a situation in which a famous person also happened to have an identical twin. So we also know that identical twins are not identical people. There are identical twins who go in for the same line of work and have the same rate of success in it, but it's not so common as to mean that this is a predictable or probable outcome for a Lennon clone.
posted by yoink at 9:48 AM on August 21, 2013 [3 favorites]

Maybe we can start a Paul Simon thread so someone can reveal that Simon stole a song from Los Lobos. A MeFi standard!

Fine, we'll pencil it in right after the next regularly scheduled "Eric Clapton is a racist" thread.

Now back to our regularly scheduled discussion of extracted teeth, bioethics, alternate universes, and whether John Lennon was all good or all bad. Let me know when we get around to dental puns.

Kind of a non-starter, really. Identical twins have the same DNA and all, grow up coevally, and are usually raised in the same family, community, culture. They often turn out to be very different people.

What would make anyone think a clone of John Lennon "born" three quarters of century later in very different circumstances would be anything like the historical John Lennon?

Or, upon preview, what Yoink said.
 
posted by Herodios at 9:51 AM on August 21, 2013

One thing about cloning, is that we still kind of suck at it. We can't really get the correct epigenetic markers set, we can't reset telomeres, and there's the whole issue with the differences between the donor egg and what the original egg was like. So, lots of problems. Plus, we don't usually try to clone from old, damaged DNA - we usually work from a very specific kind of cell taken from a living organism. That adds a non-trivial level of difficulty.

Realistically, what would you get if you tried to clone John Lennon? A whole lot of failed attempts. If you eventually succeeded, the clone would not be like John Lennon - it would be even more different than an identical twin. It would have different mitochondrial DNA, a different intrauterine environment, different parentage, and it would grow up in a different era. And it would be hideously unhealthy, with all kinds of cloning-related diseases we don't even have words for yet.

So really, the only reason you'd want to clone him is if you really hated him and wanted to watch someone who sort of looked like him suffer. Which means we might be able to get one of his exes on the project, but it's still probably not a good idea.
posted by Mitrovarr at 10:55 AM on August 21, 2013 [1 favorite]

No one is arguing the "all good" line

No, not anyone here. It briefly came up twice, though, mentioned as something that some nonspecific people out IRL are doing and that some people in the thread mentioned being annoyed by. Maybe it was nitpicky of me to comment on it, and if so, I'm truly sorry.


--There are identical twins who go in for the same line of work and have the same rate of success in it, but it's not so common as to mean that this is a predictable or probable outcome for a Lennon clone.--

--Identical twins have the same DNA and all, grow up coevally, and are usually raised in the same family, community, culture. They often turn out to be very different people.--

--What would make anyone think a clone of John Lennon "born" three quarters of century later in very different circumstances would be anything like the historical John Lennon?--


I thought I had addressed that in my original post. In the story, the clone would be brought up in an environment especially designed to encourage and develop the desired traits and behaviors and discourage the negative ones. But I'm a firm believer that a certain amount is born with us, and that a certain amount is shaped by environment. There are things my mother - and even people who haven't seen me since infancy - tell me about the way I was as a newborn that perfectly mesh with my adult personality.

The data on identical twins reared apart suggests that differences in subjects may be due to environment, while similarities may be due to genetics. But, then again, the Minnesota Study is the only one of its size, scope, and length going on, so there may not be enough corroboration out there for everybody.

Sure, you could write the same sort of story about a completely fictional Joe Schmoe, but the tooth giveaway angle, and the impression I've always had that Lennon was at least trying to turn some parts of his screwed-up life around when he died, just happened to appeal to me.

(Also, Mom and her twin are always denying the things that are alike about them, and it's freaking adorable.)
posted by The Underpants Monster at 11:34 AM on August 21, 2013

That really doesn't jibe with anything I've read about their relationship,

thankyouthankyouohthankyou.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 12:37 PM on August 21, 2013

"Last night the wife said, 'Oh boy, when you're dead, you don't take nothin' with you but your soul.' THINK."
posted by Seekerofsplendor at 1:02 PM on August 21, 2013 [1 favorite]

Christ, you know it ain't easy
You know how hard it can be.
The way things are going
They're gonna crucify me.

Like all of us, Lennon had a dark side.
He, at least, faced up to that.
Looks like its time for the rest of us.

Hey! you got to hide your love away
posted by Twang at 2:03 PM on August 21, 2013

I just wonder what Stephen King would make of all this.
posted by Trinity-Gehenna at 7:10 PM on August 21, 2013