It seems Grover Norquist had an eye-opening Burning Man experience. He penned an op-ed for the Guardian about it:
It is a larger version of … what? Woodstock? That was a bunch of teenagers coming to watch artists perform. At Burning Man, everyone is expected to be a participant. Burners bring their art work, their art cars, their personal dress and/or undress: everyone is on stage. The story of Woodstock was thousands of young people, without the sense to bring their own food and water, being rescued by the state police and sensible bourgeois rural folks. The story of Burning Man is one of radical self-reliance.
It is more intense than … what? Not quite the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Burning Man is an arts festival in the middle of the Nevada desert. It takes hours to get there, and you must bring what you eat or wear or need: you cannot buy anything there. Burning Man is more like Brigadoon – a western ghost town that springs to life. Dust storms. Cold nights. Black Rock City is completely built and then taken apart and disappeared each year, by 65,000 people.
Burning Man is greater than I had ever imagined. I have been to large demonstrations in favor of the environment, and the trash left behind is knee-deep. At Burning Man, you are hard-pressed to find a cigarette butt on the ground. There are no trash bins. Participants carry it in, and they carry it out. I have been to the Louvre. It is a very big place with many nice paintings. I knew that. I was not disappointed. Burning Man is more like Petra, the lost city in Jordan, which I found more impressive than its advance billing or reputation…. anyone complaining about a Washington wonk like me at Burning Man is not a Burner himself: The first principle of Burning Man is “radical inclusiveness”, which pretty much rules out the nobody-here-but-us liberals “gated community” nonsense.
.
It’s Radical Inclusion, Grover. Learn your Principles if you wanna come back.
.
A community that comes together with a minimum of “rules” demands self-reliance – that everyone clean up after themselves and help thy neighbor. Some day, I want to live 52 weeks a year in a state or city that acts like this. I want to attend a national political convention that advocates the wisdom of Burning Man.
.
Grover, of course, stayed at First Camp, the original plug-n-play, where meals were provided for him and someone else cleaned up.
I was invited to speak to a group one night for an hour. Moments before I spoke, I was told that I was the last speaker in a series focusing on psychedelic drugs. My talk was on freedom. I left untouched the cup of coffee and opened soda at my side. The questions lasted two hours. We had a ball.
Indeed, there is entirely too much work involved at Burning Man for lazy people to get to the Playa, nevermind build a camp or feed yourself.
…You hear that Burning Man is full of less-than-fully-clad folks and off-label pharmaceuticals. But that’s like saying Bohemian Grove is about peeing on trees or that Chicago is Al Capone territory. Burning Man is cleaner and greener than a rally for solar power. It has more camaraderie and sense of community than a church social. And for a week in the desert, I witnessed more individual expression, alternative lifestyles and imaginative fashion than …. anywhere.
The demand for self-reliance at Burning Man toughens everyone up. There are few fools, and no malingerers. …I brought Cuban cigars. Edgy, but not as exciting as some “gifts” that would have interested the federal authorities.
IDEATE has been hailed as “Burning Man’s Future“. They started in 2012, when the camp was billed as “a place to share ideas about where Burning Man is going”. The camp had almost 300 people, and most of those were Virgins. The few Veterans ended up doing most of the heavy lifting for the camp. The IDEATE vision was to gather together a lot of different ideas, and then somehow Burning Man would change. Looking at all the Millenials in the camp – many of whom are my friends – left me wondering about BMOrg’s strategy, if this was their plan for the future. It looked very much like the rest of us doing all the work, while the young hipsters congratulated each other on how cool they were and exchanged business cards.
In this Election Year’s political influx, IDEATE is where former Presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich wanted to give his speech. I really hope someone got some video.
Looks like he showed up appropriately dressed for the new, post-shark, “we’re changing the world” Burning Man.
Former U.S. Congressman and presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich joined the parade of celebrities and quasi-celebrities who made it to the Nevada desert for Burning Man this year. But someone apparently forgot to tell him that on the playa, you’re allowed to let your freak flag fly.
Kucinich spoke yesterday at Ideate, a camp geared toward start-up founders. His business-casual look set him apart from his audience, which included a man wearing a HUG LIFE hat, several dreadlocked Caucasians, and a naked man with a pierced penis.
Despite looking like he was about to reprimand the Burners for missing curfew, Kucinich’s speech went over well. (Although it was interrupted several times by EDM-blasting art cars driving by.) His condemnation of government surveillance drew applause, as did, somewhat predictably, his calls for marijuana legalization.
“I’ve never understood people’s obsession with ‘reefer madness’ or whatever,” Kucinich said.
It’s Kucinich’s first time at Burning Man, and as is customary for first-time Burners, he also got a “playa name” given to him: Charge.
Kucinich, a yoga-practicing vegan who wants to close military bases and form a Department of Peace, is already at home ideologically at Burning Man. Now he just has to dress the part. Will someone please get Charge a banana hammock and some sequins?
Meanwhile, BMIR this afternoon had to interrupt their broadcast to bring in a professor for an emergency announcement. A Burner had previously got on the mic, and warned the rest of us about the problems with Fluoride being added to our water supply, a practice which most countries have banned. The Burner suggested putting a filter on your water supply.
Now, all manner of crazy shit gets said on BMIR, which bills itself as “the voice of The Man”. They’re playing some wicked tunes, so hat’s off to those DJs; some of it is terrible, perhaps by design. Perhaps it’s their ironic prank on us. But still, out of all the crap that gets talked, the ONE THING that needed to be corrected – by a self-proclaimed, unidentified, professor, no less – was “filter your water”?
And what was the professor’s explanation? “Putting a fluoride filter on your water, is the equivalent of placing a large sign in your kitchen saying ‘I will believe any conspiracy theory'”.
So there you go. Sounds very scientific. I wonder if they have done studies, with a group of people who have these signs drinking filtered water, and a placebo group with no sign drinking regular water. No? Well they certainly have done plenty of scientific studies the other way, which is why only 5% of the world’s population adds the toxic waste material to their water supply. The majority of the 350 million fluoride drinkers are in the US : the country with the highest per-capita healthcare costs in the world. Funny, the professor didn’t mention those studies. In fact he didn’t mention any studies…just this conspiracy sign. Which I looked for on the Internet, but no-one’s selling them.
I guess the Centers for Disease Control and the American Dental Association don’t know shit, compared to some guy at Burning Man who says he’s a professor.
Those aren’t chemtrails, it’s condensation. It’s global warming, that’s why it’s getting colder. There’s no such thing as weather modification, the United Nations is always getting world leaders to sign treaties banning imaginary patented technologies. When world scientists hold a conference on geo-engineering, they don’t go to it because there’s any scientific basis. They go because they’re all crazy conspiracy theorists.
If you want hard science, and political opinions to parrot, go to Burning Man. But don’t drink the water, because they haven’t added the fluoride to it yet.
Someone told the professor that he’d better get on the air and debunk this. And someone told BMIR to let him take the mic. WHO? That is the more important question, to me. Did the same shadowy group bring Grover Norquist (associated with the war-mongering neocons) and presidential candidates Wesley Clark (who spoke out against war) and Dennis Kucinich (who spoke out against the lies that led to war) out to the Playa?
In the Sixties, there used to be a saying: “Think for yourself and question authority”. Now, it seems, the mantra at Burning Man is “don’t think for yourself, let BMOrg provide the answers for you. Wash your own brain!”
Burning Man might be setting fire to a big statue tonight, but it seems that The Man is very much alive, well, and omni-present in Black Rock City.
