[MD] Barbarians & Hippies

[david buchanan]

Platt, Arlo, Marsha, Smith and all MOQers:

Smith asked:
"...anyone here willing to own up to ever being a hippie?"

Marsha replied:
In the 70s I was a know-it-all, little Republican. Now I am striving to 
become a hippie. (I've always been a late bloomer.)

dmb says:
Gasp! Marsha was a know-it-all Republican!?! It wasn't even fashionable to 
be a Republican then! I'm shocked and tickled by the revelation. For 
whatever its worth, you've come a long way. I was a frat boy at a Republican 
college just as the "Reagan revolution" got under way. This would have been 
a much more pleasant experience except for the fact that I hate frat boys, 
Republicans and Reagan. I grew up expecting to live in a hippy free-love 
world. But by the time it was my turn to have fun the hippies had been 
replaced by preppies and yuppies, the war on drugs was raised to the level 
of an actual military operation and HIV arrived on the scene, which meant 
love was very far from free. It would cost you your life.

Platt asked Arlo about a return of the hippies:
Would it entail... having group sex and adopting the drug culture of its 
predecessor? ...Would the women parade around in T-shirts and no bras saying 
"Make love not war?"

dmb says:
One can only hope.

Arlo replied seriously:
Again. Pirsig. "The Hippie rejection of social and intellectual patterns 
left just two directions to go: toward biological quality and toward Dynamic 
Quality. The revolutionaries of the sixties thought that since both are 
anti-social, and since both are anti-intellectual, why then they must both 
be the same. That was the mistake."
Whatever the movement, it is away from social and intellectual patterns, 
towards DQ. I would guess those who cling vehemently to social patterns 
would find this frightening, even to the point of ridicule. Just like the 
priests likely ridiculed the Brujo, and the Victorians ridiculed the 
Bohemians...

dmb says:
Right. The hippies were contrarians. I would only add some specifics and 
maybe even try to put it in terms the hippies themselves would use. They 
were in conflict with society, with "the system" or "the establishment" 
because they saw that it was perpetrating violence in Vietnam and racism 
here at home. The neo-Victorians would have us believe that the only reason 
anybody ever attended a civil rights march or a war protest was to get high 
and/or get laid. But there were actually some very serious people involved 
in that movement. They were serious about peace, rights and freedom. They 
wanted the culture to be more beautiful and less cruel in all sorts of ways. 
As Elvis might ask, what's so funny about that?

Arlo continued:
...But, whatever, your description certainly sounds more vibrant that 
uptight, sexually repressed men in ties and women in ankle lengths dresses 
and corsets, concerned with appearance over substance, patting their 
virtuous backs and parading saying "make war not love". Eh?

dmb says:
I don't have a comment here. I just wanted the "make war not love" joke to 
be posted here again.

Platt asked Arlo:
I mean, could you give us some idea of what we might expect from turning the 
clock back to the 60's to abstract what was right?

Arlo replied:
Pirsig said that the hippie movement was "moral". It lost its way when it 
confused bq and DQ. But since its origins were "moral" (in its movement away 
from social and intellectual patterns), I would think that would be a good 
starting pointing for looking at the way forward. Pirsig had said, "The end 
of the twentieth century in America seems to be an intellectual, social, and 
economic rust-belt, a whole society that has given up on Dynamic improvement 
and is slowly trying to slip back to Victorianism, the last static 
ratchet-latch."  ...You are interested in furthering the slip back to 
Victorianism, I am interested in how we can get back towards Dynamic 
improvement.

dmb says:
Right. I think there are tens of millions of Americans who, like Platt, "are 
interested in furthering the slip back to Victorianism". If you can manage 
to see through the layers of irony and obfuscation, you can see that the so 
called "moral majority" and "family values" "christian conservatives" who 
think they are part of a "return to values" are actually part of "the 
collapse of values", as Pirsig puts it. Reagan or maybe the eleder Bush was 
in office when he described the "present period" as a collaspe, but now its 
much worse. Peace, rights and freedom are taking one hell of a beating these 
days. Despite what he says about Jesus changing his heart, this dude is one 
cold bastard. There's a whole lot of lying and dying and torture and a 
general lack of heart on full display. Heckuva job.

Thanks.
dmb

P.S. If the hippy movement failed because they were confused about the 
difference between biological quality and Dynamic Quality, between pleasure 
and spirit, and the MOQ clears up that confusion, then a MOQish hippy is 
what we need, right? That's what I tried to do in FUN WITH BLASPHEMY. I 
mean, if Platt or anyone else is actually interested in some kind of answer 
to Platt's question... "I mean, could you give us some idea of what we might 
expect from turning
the clock back to the 60's to abstract what was right?"

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