that temple on the hill

“American roads are our commons, Let it be that they be looked over by Washington, the state, the city, or some god forsaken Home Owner‘s Association — DAMN IT ALL. It might as well be a memorial highway, with my name on it. And I’ll drive as such.”

This is my imagination of whatever is going on in that brain in a box flying down asphalt at the speed of a small aeroplane. Pigeon mentality. Well, pigeon in a missile. The road is a second home, and in many cases we spend as much time in it. It is not an equalizing plain, but in fact an arena of yore, some bizarre daily social event where anything could happen. Especially in the farm states, one can be on as early as 14, as the case was in my native Kansas. When you hand that 14 year old those keys, you’re sending them out to that sphere of violence where with a single move they can wipe out an entire family. Or two.

The freedom of the road is to pass through, a particular type of freedom. Never satisfied until it stretches out far into the land. Towns and people pass, becoming blurry backdrops to whatever journey the day has set upon you. In it’s constant movement it induces a breathlessness in the driver, a constant scanning for the next segment of existence. A shortened roadkill version of reality. A way of life. Driving in America is like breathing, eating, sleeping, having sex, sometimes two at once... One can never know what exactly happens there. Everyone has a reason to be on the road, and some simply don’t have anything to lose. The point is that this is no place for civil society to take sprout, not much common courtesy. But asphalt is some bedrock of reality Americans can agree upon.

We like to think of it as quintessentially American, but with many things that cloud the national consciousness – the french, Michelin and all, pioneered the apple pie and root-beer of driving: the road-trip, and it’s psychosexual consequences. Ballard wrote Crash when the car was reaching it’s total dominance in America. But we take for granted how we got there. Driving is a temporary thing, easily displaced in time and space. Voids absent of much except the sound of rushing and whirring engines. It seems more dystopian at night, when great swaths of concrete and asphalt lay fallow, creating a landscape of commercializable inhumanity that swallows up trees, neighborhoods and dreams.

Many deem the freeway as a tool of federal destruction, carving through protest-free bulldoze areas. But they are simply a different set of prerogatives scarring the landscape akin to each state’s whims. Long past are tollways, built for profit and purpose. “Interstates” instead are intensely political maps. I had discovered that Kansas City, the central trucking hub of the Midwest, had no direct interstate to Chicago, the largest rail transshipment hub in America. Likewise when i-94 cut through the upper west side of saint paul, it segment not only Rondo, but the historically working class Saint Anthony Park South. Its not only an active practice of destruction, but empausement. The inbetween has no identity. The people on Summit and Grand resisted, and thus no highway carved up Highland park. But this itself is a distortion.

After David Lynch's death I have looked closer into how his works, especially Twin Peaks, relate with the history of the Pacific Northwest. There has been a discourse about how Lynch's works show the allure and the bleakness of Cascadia. I wanted to investigate what exactly motivated that atmosphere. And with that I reformulated it's history with the perspective of it's role in antebellum politics.

Oregon begins not in Champoeg, but in La Villa. After the Mexican-American war, the territory came into sharp focus. It's admittance into the Union was a preview of it's future. The void of the American government, with the Hudson Bay Company being the only acting authority meant American settlers were left to build a unique form of direct democracy through "wolf meetings". Through these meetings they would establish the Organic Laws of Oregon.

Burnett, a upstart Missouri lawyer that had moved to Oregon, was inspired by a Black exclusion law passed there in 1825. He hurridly pushed for a similar law, arguing that their lack of suffrage in the 1843 Oregon organic laws justified their exclusion from the state. They had been permanently "placed in a degraded and subordinate political and social position, which continually reminds them of their inferiority" and had to be excluded for their own good.In truth Burnett and his fellow Missourians were afraid of Cockstock affair repeating itself - a conflict between free Blacks and Natives that spilled over to overtures of war, as stated in the preamble to the 1849 exclusion law: "Situated as the people of Oregon are,in the midst of an Indian population, it would be highly dangerous to allow free negroes and mulattoes to reside in the Territory or to intermix with the Indians, instilling in their minds feelings of hostility against the white race."

With it's impending statehood Lincoln comes into view. Thomas Ewing requested him to replace the democratic Joseph Lane - a veteran of the Mexican-American war and Indiana senator. Lincoln declined, with the excuse of his wife refusing to move to Oregon in fear of Native conflicts, likely a reference to the Cockstock Affair (which Lane had brutally suppressed). Between the Democratic landscape of Oregon, the remoteness of Cascadia, and later Lincoln's objection to their view of radical self-government, Lincoln reluctantly rejected the offer.

After this disillusionment, it took the Kansas-Nebraska act to rope him back into the conflict that would define his political career. Lincoln took lessons from his encounter with Oregon. He found a flaw in the democratic reasoning that the Champoeg government espoused. In his Peoria speech, he criticizes the absolute, holy view of sovereignty:

"it enables the first FEW, to deprive the succeeding MANY, of a free exercise of the right of self-government. The first few may get slavery IN, and the subsequent many cannot easily get it OUT."

This is nothing but a direct repudiation of the principles of the Oregon provisional government. This process of exclusion and selection created a conflicted identity - one that contrasts itself with outsiders within and out. This dynamic plays out Twin Peaks, where Lynch wanted to distill a cthonic view of small-town America where these dynamics play out in violent and spectacular fashion, encapsulating the American experience.

"The Norwegians are leaving. The Norwegians are leaving. The Norwegians are gone."

Throughout Twin Peaks Dale Cooper is revealed a secret world through his dreams, one that mines and copies some distorted reality. One that hints at the plutonic currents underneath the town. These dreams deeply parallels 紅樓夢 (The Dream of the Red Chamber). Cooper's red room is a direct reference, where a dream reveals to the protagonist the major events like the novel. And both follow the degradation of a dynasty, in Lynch's case its the Horne's.

This influence reflects a buried conflict within the work, a conflict made of constructed identities. Laura Palmer's double-life manifests physically as a doppelganger, an apparation of the double character of Twin Peaks. One as both a place of open congregation, but also one of stark seperation.

"Once there were brook trouts in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery."

Cascadia is the utopia that the American rabble profess to valour, that lighthouse on a hill. But it is everything that they despise in themselves, a sickening reflection of their values. It generates a particular archetype inherently longhoused by white utopia. a locked in syndrome. a psychodynamic geology concentrating refuse-biomass into critical excess. their bodies themselves become a part of the geotechnics, minds molding into magma (“the dregs of an anointment"). As its mosaic light shines upon us like divine inspiration, crystal fractionalization rapidly differenciates into the buzzing struggling of uncountable locust flows torn asunder in Puget Sünde.

Truth and Fiction of the Champoeg Meeting https://www.jstor.org/stable/20610484?seq=14

James Saules,Peter Burnett,and the Oregon Black Exclusion Law of June 1844 https://sci-hub.ru/https://www.jstor.org/stable/40491550

The organic and other general laws of Oregon : together with the national Constitution, and other public acts and statutes 1843-1872 ARTICLE II - § 6. No negro, chinaman, or mulatto' shall have the right of suffrage https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.35112104797594&seq=7

Lincoln and Oregon Country Politics in the Civil War Era - Richard W. Etulain https://archive.org/details/lincolnoregoncou0000etul

LINCOLN AND THE GOVERNORSHIP OF OREGON https://sci-hub.ru/https://www.jstor.org/stable/1886372

Peoria Speech https://www.nps.gov/liho/learn/historyculture/peoriaspeech.htm

Inside Twin Peaks PBS Special 10/6/90 - 4:54 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3WqCtow2DrY

Truman had a progressive romantic view of breaking up the railways cartels. During Truman’s youth, Jay Gould’s takeover of the Missouri Pacific firmly established himself and his cohort as “robber barons” worthy of scorn and contempt in Missouri local politics. However Truman carried over the local rivalry with the brotherhoods from his days in the Pendergast political machine. He time Pendergast's boy made him view the railway unions as insular and exclusionary institutions who worked behind the scenes with management, an extension of the stranglehold national railways had over America which could not be controlled or checked by local or state politics. Thus when the brotherhoods striked in 1946, he struck them down harshly, even threatening to draft striking workers.

So even though FDR first established the American relationship with Saudi Arabia, Truman deepened it on deliberately ambiguous terms. In a December 1947 State Department cable, the he brushed off any formal protectorate commitment while still signaling strategic backing to Ibn Saud, exploiting the vacuum left by Britain's lapsing guarantee under the Treaty of Jeddah. The ambiguity was strategic rather than accidental: Ibn Saud needed to feel protected while Congress and the British needed plausible deniability. The Golden Gimmick of 1950 then completed this arrangement economically — allowing Aramco to reclassify royalty payments to the Saudi government as foreign tax credits, effectively subsidizing Saudi revenue through the US Treasury rather than the oil price itself. Together, these maneuvers marked a sharp departure from Roosevelt's studied neutrality on the Arab-Israeli question. Truman was simultaneously extracting economic concessions from Arab states and aggressively recognizing Israeli statehood — a contradiction he resolved not through diplomacy but through oil, keeping the price cheap enough that Arab rulers could afford to complain without defecting.

Gulf oil alone doesn't explain cheap American gasoline. Saudi imports functioned as a ceiling, absorbing postwar demand from European and Asian reconstruction without forcing the US to choose between exporting domestic supply and feeding the middle-class consumer at home. But the TRC prorationing system provided the floor. By holding Texas wells at sometimes 20-30% of capacity and setting monthly allowables to demand forecasts rather than geological limits, the Commission prevented cheap Gulf imports from crashing domestic prices and wiping out the Texas independents whose congressional delegations Truman needed to hold together. The oil depletion allowance — 27.5% of gross income shielded from taxation — was the political price of that cooperation. What resulted wasn't oil abundance so much as a managed price band: stable enough for long-term infrastructure investment, cheap enough for middle-class access. So even though Eisenhower's 1956 Interstate Highway Act is the visible monument, the automobile culture it formalized had already been made economically accessible years earlier by this dual architecture — one half negotiated in Riyadh, the other administered in Austin. The other forces were real: freight deregulation, FHA mortgage subsidization of suburban sprawl, GM and Ford's systematic lobbying against rail investment. But freight deregulation only reshapes logistics if trucking is cheaper than rail, and that calculation runs on fuel costs. Suburban development only scales if the commute is affordable. Every automobile-centric pressure on the railways assumed cheap petrochemicals as a fixed condition — and that condition was manufactured, not given.

This allowed Truman to forever break the stranglehold of the railways, trying to resolve conflicting ideas of America as both an aristocratic and romantic vision of the roadway à la Theodore Roosevelt and Eisenhower. And a populist Jacksonian-bent distrusting any man, any institution, capital or labor, that positioned itself what belonged to him by divine right. It all smelled like Pendergast. And thus he clear-cutted it all into modern sun-belt consumer America.

america is the land of scammers, reprobates, and thieves There's a clip of the creator of Boondocks floating around, and this is exactly his black conservatism: "Who cares about black people if all they do is make a fool of themselves". And that's the killer. Hate is fixable. Apathy is what is left after, a barren plain without feeling America is that plain

. . . but being absolutely certain that no matter which way I went I would come to a place where people were just as high and wild as I was: No doubt at all about that. . . .

There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda. . . . You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning. . . .

And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting—on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. . . .

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