[MD] Hippies (and Humour) in the Middle East

[Arlo Bensinger]

[Ian wrote]
Which of course brings us to the quality of comedy and satire - and the 
other raging news-story. The taboo of "blasphemous cartoons" in religious 
fundamentalism.

[Arlo]
Fareed Zakaria writes in this week's Newsweek, "For decades, the dictators 
who ruled (and rule) the Middle East destroyed all political opposition 
groups. They were particularly aggressive in co-opting or exterminating 
liberal, secular, forward-looking groups because those were seen as most 
threatening. They were often less harsh toward Muslim groups, partly 
because the Islamists were seen as less political. And, of course, you 
cannot ban the mosque in an Islamic country. Rulers like Anwar Sadat and 
Jordan's King Hussein often used Islamic groups to discredit the secular 
opposition. Decades of repression, incompetence and stagnation ensured that 
citizens got increasingly unhappy with their regimes. And the only 
organized, untainted alternative was the Islamic movement. ... Remember 
that in the 1970s, even the United States thought that conservative Islamic 
groups were allies against left-wing revolutionary ones, which is why we 
funded the mujahedin in Afghanistan."

It's that last sentence that harkens so much to "you reap what you sow". 
Out of desire to completely exterminate any conceivable "Marxist" threat, 
we supported hard-right groups would suppress, vilify and finally destroy 
ANY "liberal" or secular resistance to Islam. When they were our allies 
against the Great Red Threat, we funded and supported them, blind to what 
would emerge in a "hippie-less" vacuum. With all their hippies, and 
potential hippies, killed, jailed or worse, the political imbalance was 
ripe for militant right-wing theocratic groups and rulers to seize power. 
With no "love fests" or "love ins" to support their Israeli brothers, with 
no "Tehranstocks" to promote love and universal brotherhood, with no Abdul 
Dylans or Mahmoud Lennons to sing of peace, of love, of "tripping rather 
than killing"...

Pirsig writes, "From World War II until the seventies the intellectuals 
continued to dominate, but with an increasing challenge-call it the "Hippie 
revolution" -which failed. And from the early seventies on there has been a 
slow confused mindless drift back to a kind of pseudo­Victorian moral 
posture accompanied by an unprecedented and unexplained growth in crime. Of 
these periods, the last two seem the most misunderstood. The Hippies have 
been interpreted as frivolous spoiled children, and the period following 
their departure as a "return to values," whatever that means. The 
Metaphysics of Quality, however, says that's backward: the Hippie 
revolution was the moral movement. The present period is the collapse of 
values. The Hippie revolution of the eighties was a moral revolution 
against both society and intellectuality."

In the Sixties, our Hippie movement took a wrong turn, as Pirsig notes, it 
confused biological quality with Dynamic Quality. But make no mistake, a 
return to Victorianism is not the answer, recapturing that Hippie 
contrarianism and directing towards DQ is. Being a contrarian, Pirsig 
writes, ".. sometimes it's Dynamic, where your whole being senses that the 
static situation is an enemy of life itself. That's what drives the really 
creative people-the artists, composers, revolutionaries and the like-the 
feeling that if they don't break out of this jailhouse somebody has built 
around them, they're going to die. But they're not being contrary in a way 
that is just decadent. They're way too energetic and aggressive to be 
decadent. They're fighting for some kind of Dynamic freedom from the static 
patterns. But the Dynamic freedom they're fighting for is a kind of 
morality too. And it's a highly important part of the overall moral 
process. It's often confused with degeneracy but it's actually a form of 
moral regeneration. Without its continual refreshment static patterns would 
simply die of old age."

With the same sentiment, Joseph Campbell writes, "As Professor Arnold J. 
Toynbee indicates in his six-volume study of the laws of the rise and 
disintegration of civilizations, schism in the soul, schism in the body 
social, will not be revolved by any scheme of return to the good old days 
(archaism), or by programs guaranteed to render an ideal projected future 
(futurism), or even by the most realistic, hardheaded work to weld together 
again the deteriorating elements. Only birth can conquer death -- the 
birth, not of the old thing again, but of something new. Within the soul, 
within the body social, there must be -- if we are to experience long 
survival -- a continuous "recurrence of birth" (palingenesia) to nullify 
the unremitting recurrences of death. For it is by means of our own 
victories, if we are not regenerated, that the work of Nemesis is wrought: 
doom breaks from the shell of our very virtue. Peace then is a snare; war 
is a snare; change is a snare; permanence is a snare. When our day is come 
for our victory of death, death closes in; there is nothing we can do, 
except be crucified -- and resurrected; dismembered totally, and then reborn."

Hippies, contrarians, those who reject both social and intellectual 
patterns, and pursue Dynamic Quality. These are the people whom 
reinvigorate society, who return from the mountain like Pirsig, or 
Zarathrustra, or Moses, or Buddha (nice grouping, eh?) with a message that 
will dismember and resurrect society. The Brujo was a contrarian, the 
Bohemians were contrarians, the Hippies were contrarians.

Well, the answer is clear. The Middle East needs hippies ... once they get 
these, can a sense of humour, and an animated "South Kandovan" be far behind?

Arlo