The message of the mufti – Michael Leunig – The Age – 11 Nov.06

  

 

   

In the rich panoply of life, a diversity of opinion is something to be celebrated, not shunned.

ON A RECENT JOURNEY in the far north I learned that the male green turtle does not reach sexual maturity until the age of 60. “Just like me!” I thought, as I savoured the consoling news and adopted the beautiful amphibious creature as a new soul mate.

You see, it takes a long time for a man to swim his ocean and clamber up his volcano and finally manage to turn around and look down upon the sexual landscape of his life with some measure of equanimity and grace.

Should his eyes close peacefully like a dreaming turtle for a moment, and a little smile come to his face, then so much the better; he has done well – and if the man gazes down to where he has travelled and it all seems vast and wondrous and harmonious in the glowing sunset, he had better not forget the peculiar, desperate and tangled paths upon which he has sometimes found himself during his times of exploration and adventure. Such joy, such danger and dismay. Such strange, funny, improbable behaviour.

Great tomes have been assembled on the subject of this mysterious landscape. Maps and charts have been drawn, edicts issued, laws made, and philosophers have driven themselves around the twist trying to make sense of it.

Yet somehow, as the earth gets hotter, the world of sex just seems to become more troubled and murky, and in spite of all the literature and weird devices there is still little help for the lonesome traveller at the end of the day. Basically, you have to find a travelling companion or two and meander your way into it as happily and enjoyably as you can.

At some stage well into the journey you may notice a deluge of advertisements for drugs that help men to get erections, and you may find the city adorned with photographs of naked and semi-naked young women on billboards and magazines, and on the television you may see music clips featuring a continuous throbbing smorgasbord of models and dancing girls thrusting their oiled breasts and wet lips and glistening bottoms at you and groaning and clawing and stroking frantically between their legs – the place where babies are born from – and all around you will notice images of attractive, willing, hot, horny, pre-orgasmic, aching-for-penetration women gasping into the camera for you, urging you to realise how plain, frigid and dull your wife or partner is – and still the erection drug advertisements roll in on your email device along with promises of penis enlargement and you think “what the hell is going on out there?” – and you read stories of drink spiking in nightclubs, and the glamour of raunch culture and the swinging, gang-banging footballers, the sexual abuse of children, the raping, the date raping, the digital raping, and you will see the drunken, gobbling tongue kissing of the masses in the street at night and the men’s sex clubs, peeping booths, pussy parlours and brothels popping up like toadstools galore in the city where your mother and grandmother walked you in the sunshine and fresh air in your lovely little bonnet and bunny rug. If you feel like a turtle far from the sea and conclude that your society seems to have some sort of deepening hypermanic sex madness that makes you sad and amounts to yet another vital ecosystem in trouble and decline, it is at this point that you may be finally achieving some measure of sexual maturity. Thus you are disqualified from forward-looking, positive-thinking, aspirational Australia and you become another negative, lost soul who worries that your children are growing up in a nation that is in deep psychological trouble and you will be told that it is YOU who has the sex problem.

Sometimes a religious figure, such as a mufti, makes a sermon about human nature, rape and the general sexual madness – a bit like parents do to their children in private: “Look after yourself, take responsibility – there are some dark forces and crazy people out there who will destroy you if you’re not careful.” But the mufti uses ripe, rustic language, earthy metaphors and unpleasant ideas. He is set up and set upon by a national newspaper and told to shut up and resign. The Prime Minister chimes in. The mufti is denounced.  

But while we may not agree with everything he says, we sort of understand something of what he’s trying to get at. In the great tradition that Australians are meant to admire, he’s at least having a go in difficult terrain where all sorts of silver-tongue-tied experts are refusing to travel and are remaining silent about.

Yet being “offensive” appears to be a new type of calamity or crime in Australia, and the problem is that you can commit it without having any intention of doing so. Somebody, anybody, can find you guilty and that’s it – an open-and-shut-up case – all because you spoke your peculiar, passionate mind. People seem to take as much offence as they possibly can these days – it’s almost a new type of greed, a new kind of road rage.

Personally, I like my swamis, muftis and bishops to use rip-roaring colourful language, to be full-flavoured, overproof and offensive – crucifiably so; it’s what I expect from prophets and artists, and would like to see more of it in our modern spiritual executives, who in the main have become polite, insipid and mealy-mouthed, for fear they will cause offence and ruin their prospects – it’s all very disappointing. Muftis and bishops should be like ripe camembert cheeses – a bit on the nose and not for the faint-hearted, but memorable!

For heaven’s sake, religious leaders have no business or time to waste in promoting or endorsing national values and common sense – that’s what politicians do – and anyway, people need no help whatsoever with such prissy, banal trifles. What modern humans need help with is escaping from the despair of politics, commerce and media, escaping from the drabness and oppressiveness of worldly values and seeing through suburban mentality and normal community standards so that they can find some much-needed relief for their wilting souls. Humanity hungers for the uncommon.

And I must say it (offensive and patronising as it may be) but I like my immigrants with a lot of terroir, as they say in winegrowing circles, and displaying the idiosyncratic flavours and characteristics of where they have grown up. I remember when an Italian who smelled of garlic was regarded as deeply offensive. I want my new Australians to be abundantly or even outrageously where they’re from – the full bottle. How else should they be if not themselves? Imitation Anglo-Celts? Should they be like Sandy Stone and John Howard? No, no, no! A thousand times no.

This is a health issue. We need all the variety and bold and mysterious flavours we can get, surely – the organic diversity of ideas, herbs, recipes, natural yeasts, strange music, strange words. We need that, don’t we?

The famous politician, culture warrior and pre-emptive war person Adolf Hitler had an eye for enchanting language and interesting words. He cleverly adapted the technical word “gleichschaltung” to describe an ideal state of personal, cultural, political and economic alignment.

Gleichschaltung: everything switching to the same direction, purpose and taste so that (in the present day, for instance) newspapers, shopping malls, schools, families, ideas, etc, conform in the common, proper way and all feel more or less aligned.

Fascism is the stronger word but gleichshaltung seems more appropriate to describe the thing we have come to know as the globalised, homogenised, new Australian value system. When you greet a fellow aspirational Australian, you might salute by raising your right hand with open palm and proudly shouting, ” G’day mate. Gleichschaltung!”

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