[under construction, come back in a few days ]

Recent events have lead me to the conclusion that the main Burning Man tribe is no place to stay, and to think that maybe the time has come for me to give up on Burning Man as a subculture, period.

COMMENT

After I published this post, Linda Loca sent me an apology and asked me to attend some of her events. You can see some of it in my October 6, 2008 update to the Googlegroups page linked to in the following post.

I'll make an effort to keep an open mind as I apply to rejoin her tribe, where such things are announced and discussed, and post here when there is news to be shared.

ORIGINAL POST

A few days ago, the moderator of the Chi-Burners, somebody calling herself "Linda Loca" or "LaLindaLoca", decided to play an absolutely adorable game in a thread entitled "Chicago Burns???" Having responded to a civil post in a confrontational and abusive manner, the moderator quietly unsubscribed me from the Tribe, creating the illusion that I had no answer to the rhetorical question she put to me, in such an accusatory tone.



In fact, I most certainly did have a response and still do, and have posted it to a page on googlegroup I help moderate, entitled "Linda Loca Represents for Burning Man", complete with screenshots and other documentation. The fun part of the story is that somebody seems to be borrowing the Burning Man brand in order to help promote a nightclub in Chicago. I thought that sort of thing was frowned on, but the local representatives would seem to feel otherwise. Keep a scorecard handy - let's see just how many of the ten principles get shredded along the way, and how badly.



There will be a link back to this blog when you're done. Shall we continue?

At this point, I hold no illusions about the likelihood of ever being allowed a fair chance at entering the full time job market. Near the beginning of my search, I'd already heard the incredible assertion that a 3.7 average (on a 4.0 scale) from a top 20 school, a master's in mathematics with the coursework for a PhD complete (ABD status, with most of the thesis written), and a bachelor's in Physics was not enough to qualify me for an entry level job in Chicago. "We expect at least a 3.9". "And for you to not notice that despite what the demographics look like in every graduate and professional school you've ever encountered, we've managed to assemble an all-Anglo-Saxon staff that's a whole lot less ambiguous in its caucasianness than you, you adorable little halfbreed, and not one of whose members is disabled, unless you count that functional illiteracy you might have picked up on when you tutored one of our vice presidents and a few of our execs last week", would be the next line one might expect at that point. I went back to school and branched out into Electrical Engineering - only to find that with the enthusiastic encouragement of our ex-frat boy C average president, that rug had been yanked out from under me and much of the profession by outsourcing.



Right now, I'm rereading my old books to refresh knowledge that has started to fade from disuse, and am wondering why I bother to do so, given the fact that all I get from Human Resources is a good stonewalling - they don't even bother to send out form rejection letters any more. Aside from the almost infinite amusement I get from encountering willfully clueless neocons who seriously believe that as somebody with cerebral palsy, I'm thrown to the head of the line by affirmative action - you'd think an under 30% employment rate among the disabled would lay that myth to rest - I've had the absolute delight of encountering the supposed advocates for the disabled, who have swallowed the Bush line that training is the cure for all ills. The word seems to be that what we, as handicapped individuals, need to do is get off the drugs and get an education. "Ummm ... you do know that I've been to graduate school, right? In multiple fields? That in fact I was the grader for one of the graduate level courses myself? And that I've actually written computer programs before? So what exactly is a ten week 'training program' that will teach me what  'CPU' means going to do for me, that the earlier preparation hasn't?"



It's like telling an unemployed college graduate to finish Junior High School, but that's how it is - discrimination issues will continue to be "addressed" with retraining. If you wonder how that's supposed to get you past some bratty little bubble gum snapping 19 year old secretary who shreds your resume before your very eyes or a stubborn refusal on management's part to hire the long term unemployed - even those who were rendered long term unemployed by a previous management fad of stubbornly refusing to hire anybody with less than 2-5 years of "relevant work experience" which was followed by the amazing discovery that there was now a shortage of junior professionals - but still no willingness to budge on the "we don't hire the long term unemployed" thing - well, then, that's just unamerican! You're supposed to be a good sport and agree that other people's decisions are your responsibility, and be properly apologetic for having dared to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.



Absolutely absurd, but it's reality, and so I have no choice but to build it into my plans. The question is, how do I do that?











Poverty, despite the impression that the movies may leave one with, is a socially isolating experience, being disabled makes it more so, and a climate that rules out spending much time outdoors during most of the year really doesn't help. Most hobbies are priced far out of your range, most events are held in out of the way locations you can't afford to travel to, and no matter how tidy and well behaved you may be, as people notice the thrift store ensemble that is your wardrobe, you will encounter social attitudes that will be something out of another century. Consider yourself fortunate if anybody deigns to speak to you, and truly blessed if they manage to keep the condescension subtle.



What do you do? The meeting part, I'm still working on, and I am feeling more than a little thwarted by my circumstances.

If you've read my Burning Man pages, you've seen a camp proposal  I made back in 2002, a links page from that era that I badly need to update, and heard my side of a few flamewars that some of the mouthier and better connected trolls had been spreading some disinformation about starting in 2001, and then time sort of seems to stop. It's 2008, hasn't anything happened since?



Yes and no. In terms of family, a lot has happened. In 2001, my oldest nephew was only a few months old. He's a little more articulate, now, and has been followed by a small flood of cousins, which is one reason why you see time stopping on some of those pages. As I looked at the large amount of backbiting that was taking place over nonissues like whether or not holding a meeting one block from Cabrini Green late at night was a good idea and listened to the little ones utter their first words, I was reminded that when I heard the crazies screaming over somebody's refusal to pack gas cans inside his RV or denial that aliens had made crop circles, that I had better places to be. I also had very young relatives who I did not want to see grow up remembering their Uncle Joseph's eternally foul mood, and so I walked out, to the immediate benefit of my spirits and in the long run, as they became older, of  that of my nieces and nephews as well.



Typical of the experiences on the much mythologized old ePlaya that drove off some of us came when a handful of burners made a valiant, but futile attempt to get things going on the silent Midwestern regional board by raising a number of topics of discussion, hoping that others would then reply. The old management and regulars responded by attacking them. "Look, practically every post there is from just a few people"; as if that weren't a halfway decent description of ePlaya in general at the time.  "Could that be because they're the only ones willing to take the time to contribute, and that maybe they ought to be thanked for that?" No, "they're obviously driving everybody else off" ... all of those people who had never taken the time to post previously, right? Some of us who were among the targets of choice that day wondered out loud why these people were acting this way, until one of us asked the rest two simple, leading questions.

1. What had we seen a few of the in-kids consuming in bulk, when we encountered them in person? Really, so compulsively that they literally did haul out their stash and smoke it out on a real street, right as a few patrol cars were approaching, putting all present at risk for arrest and prison time?
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   

   ... and ...

   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
2. What were the long term effects of heavy marijuana use?
   
   
   
   
   
              http://pennhealth.com/ency/article/000952.htm
   
   
   
   
   
   "These side effects include dry mouth, red eyes, impaired perception and motor skills, decreased short-term memory, paranoia, mood swings, and hallucinations."

Elsewhere, one could find cognitive impairment and other problems mentioned as well. It explained a lot. We cleared out, as did others a short while later, leaving the old regulars close to being alone. The old party line had been that said place would have been just flooding over with fascinating discussions if it weren't for those evil "trolls" - meaning anybody who the regulars were ganging up on - and now came their chance to prove it.



What resulted, in the short run, was as delightfully exciting as a watered down bowl of farina. The regulars had nothing to say. After what seemed like an eternity, the inevitable occured. With nobody else around to hate, the old regulars broke the tedium by turning on each other. The illusion they had hoped to create was now shattered in the eyes of all but the most willfully gullible lurkers, which was for the best. The regulars had been right when they suggested that we were part of the problem, not the solution, but not for the reasons they gave. We had served as a buffer between naturally abrasive individuals, allowing them to temporarily coexist peacefully enough for them to band together, and contributed content that helped make the forum interesting enough to read, giving an audience to those who would otherwise be far less visible.



Sometimes what one needs to do is nothing. One can't keep a community like the one we found ourselves in from going into decline, but one can slow the process - and that can be a bad thing, a very bad thing when that which was good in it is already almost entirely lost. There is such a thing as creative destruction; by standing back and not interfering as the old community self-destructs, one hastens the time when a new community will have a chance to arise. Having lurked there, I won't deny that the new ePlaya has its flaws, but it is a dramatic improvement over the old, which has been safely and (for some) conveniently obscured from public view, albeit with a few of its more memorable threads preserved on my hard drive, just in case they're needed.



I'm hoping they won't be,  having far more pleasurable ideas of how to use my time than documenting the community's more absurd moments, but if certain members of the community wish to continue working the rumor mill, sooner or later I might have to respond.

I started to post to a thread on a group that is described as being "a listserv for everyone and anyone who wants to participate in building the infrastructure of Chicago's burning community and to assist with various creative burner endeavors and projects", entitled "who is not headed to the burn?", inviting people to come and help plan for the joint Chicago - Detroit Decompression.

Yes, you read that correctly. Take a look at the map. Chicago and Detroit aren't really very close to each other, and the decompression was going to be held in Grand Junction, Michigan - which may sound like a short hop from Grant Park to a Californian, but poses a real problem for some of us who live here.

I started to craft a response explaining why I would not attend a planning meeting for a decompression that would, once again, be held in a place to which I couldn't possibly get ....

On Aug 23, 10:54 am, Devin Breen wrote:



Hey!

 

> Who's not going to the burn and will be

> attending decomp and wants to do

> DPW-related awesomeness?

I'm not going to the burn, but I can think of at least a few reasons to not sign up for the DPW awesomeness, one of them being that as a person who can't drive, I'd have no way of getting to the decompression. I'm thinking that what would be really awesome would be if some day, a Chicago event actually took place in Chicago - not Kentucky, not Wisconsin, not Wyoming or Patagonia or wherever else the 2009 decompression will happen, but actually in Chicago. Just to be totally different.



You guys do know that a lot of actual Chicagoans - and if you live in Michigan, you do not qualify, despite what a few people over on Yahoogroups seem to think - live in neighborhoods where a parking space costs as much as a small apartment, meaning that driving is not something that poor people get to do and middle class people have to think twice about, especially given the street parking situation? How many people do you know of who have so much money to toss around, that they'll get the equivalent of a second small home just to avoid taking the bus?



Is Burning just for well-to-do hipsters of the correct political orientation, or should it be a little bit more inclusive than that?

but I thought better of it. In part because I knew to expect a good trolling if I did post, the "local" Burning Man community having long been anything but inclusive or really local, for that matter, and let's face it - isolating and excluding the disabled (a mild case of cerebral palsy keeps me out of the driver's seat) is a grand American tradition, as I well should know. Which is what is happening when every single "local" event that gets held that is anything more than "let's go get some beer" gets held in another state. Wondering if the good folks in North Beach who appointed the local Chicago coordinator, as usual without asking any Chicagoans what they thought about the matter, know that Chicago is in Illinois, not Michigan?

Sigh. Oh, well. If you were surprised to notice that, after over more years have passed since I wrote about circumstances in the local community, a city several times the size of San Francisco has to pool its resources with another city much larger than the homebase of Burning Man just to scrape together a decompression, this is one of the reasons why that would be the case.

Originally posted to my blog at Tribe.net on August 25, 2008

This year's theme at Burning Man is "The American Dream", and on brief inspection, I'm finding that it seems to less than completely popular. Not that I'm surprised. Consider these passages out of a post entitled "[expletitive deleted] this theme" (profanity softened by me, not by the original author), penned on Thursday, November 1, 2007 at 11:01 am by a one post author calling himself "TheGreenMan", who doesn't seem to note the internal contradiction in his complaint. One the one hand, he writes

"I celebrate moments when I am able to meet with conservatives and bush-supporters on a human level. Sometimes you have to avoid overtly political discussions to bond in this way. It is even worthy to try to build upon shared values which bridge the philosophies of Americans living in Red and Blue states ..."

but then goes on to write

"So I think I understand what you guys were aspiring to with this year's theme. But I think it is wholly misguided.



In fact, this bit from your theme page is deeply patronizing:

'Leave ideology at home; forget the blue states and the red; let parties, factions and the issues that divide us fall away.'

I will forget nothing.



In fact, I think it is criminal to forget dark path that our government has lead us down. ..."

So, in other words, when he "avoids overtly political discussions" to "build upon shared values" with those red state people, that's "necessary", but when the LLC suggests that burners do the exact same thing at this year's Burning Man, that's "criminal"? Let's take a look at the passage that our anonymous author quotes from, out of context:

"In 2008, leave narrow and exclusive ideologies at home; forget the blue states and the red; let parties, factions and divisive issues fall away, and carefully consider your immediate experience. What has America achieved that you admire? What has it done or failed to do that fills you with dismay? What is laudable? What is ludicrous? Put blame aside, let humor thrive, and dare to contemplate a larger question: What can America, this stumbling, roused, half-conscious giant, still contribute to the world?"

Which is to say, the Burning Man LLC has most certainly not, as the author implies, told people to abandon their consciences or political convictions. They've merely asked the participants to make this event something other than a week long screaming match. One could, with grossly exaggerated cynicism, offer this as an example of Bmorg's focus on the bottom line, because one might have real difficulty picturing people paying $250 for a week of rage and hatred and coming back for more the next year, but let's - as unfashionable as this is - be reasonable. Ever seen opposing bands of protesters meet, out in the street, where everybody is well fed, well rested, well hydrated, and meeting in a relatively mild climate? Gets kind of intense, doesn't it? Now picture moving that clash to a location where the police would not come close to having the numbers needed to contain a riot, toss the already maddened rioters out in the sun, let them get really dehydrated, toss some narcotics and a whole lot of booze to the mix, and what do you get? A real mess, a terrible time, and the unanswered question of what it was that the misery was supposed to accomplish, aside from filling the med tent with the injured and getting people to despise those they disagreed with even more than they did before.



Think about the complaint heard in many cities about the permits given for political demonstrations. The protesters, some say, have confined to narrow areas away from the normal flow of traffic, allowed to speak freely only where they are unlikely to be heard. Yet this clash would occur, not a few miles from the Democratic convention in Chicago, say, but two hours out into the desert from Reno. In terms of visibility, how would that be a step upward? More and more unpleasantness, with less consciousness raising to serve as its justification, at an event which the participants aren't going to in order to be preached at, anyway - and preached at by those of only one political persuasion, if our friend has anything to say about it, it would seem:

"One of the best pieces of art I've seen at burning man was in, I think, 2002. When I was biking out on the playa, I saw in the distance a circle of ten American flags.



I was horrified and afraid, but I biked towards the installation with my heart in my throat. As an activist who had been sacrificing my livelihood and sanity to try to stop an unjust war, I was horrified. Was this what my beloved city had come to? Had the plague of flag-waving nationalism infected Burning Man, the refuge of my soul?"

Well ... what if it had? What if some neoconservative had set up a rah-rah "[vulgarity removed] France, G-d bless America and let's implement the draft so that we can REALLY step up the surge and invade everybody else" installation? As a Centrist, I might feel a little uncomfortable with some of what he had to say and I'm assuming that our friend would feel a lot uncomfortable, but wasn't Burning Man supposed to be radically inclusive? Just how radically inclusive are we being if the rules change depending on the political leanings of those who are called on to respect them - because take due note, as we soon see, our friend isn't objecting to overtly political art. Just overtly political art with whose politics he disagrees. He writes

"I flew into the midst of flew flags on my wheels and the vision changed. These were not ordinary American flags, they were the Corporate Flags that are sold by Adbusters. In place of white stars, in the blue field they carried corporate logos: the Playboy Bunny, the Nike Swoosh, ABCNBCCBS, Microsoft Windows, Pepsi, Coke, et cetera. Standing in the center of the flags was George W. Bush holding the earth in his hands, and on it were spray-painted the words "For Sale."



I cried. This art opened up bottled feelings which I felt afraid to share or express, and thus even to feel."

Not that I disagree with that view of the Bush administration, at least as far as its economic policies go - I'm not onboard with the "Second Gulf War was set up by the Oil Companies" conspiracy theory that I've heard floating around and I think that you can guess what I think of the Israel bashing that has become oh so fashionable - but listen to what he has just said and not just the spin with which he follows it.

"It gave me great relief to be able to see the truth there in front of me, without censorship."

Excuse me, but "without censorship" does not mean "my side speaks loudly and yours learns to be quiet, because we're right and you need to accept that"; it means that there is an even rhetorical playing field, and that all sides have a real chance to be heard. His concern was that at one installation, at one single installation at an event at which Liberalism has not exactly been driven underground, that a single voice of dissent with the prevailing political ideology might have be heard as more than a faint whisper. He likes seeing overly political art at Burning Man just fine, as long as it is all politics of a single flavor - his own - and then has the nerve to pose as a champion of free speech as he expresses his relief at the discovery that dissent with the local orthodoxy had remained muffled.



Again, picture being stuck out in the middle of a desert, where your survival is dependent on the concern of your fellow travellers, being preached at about this cause or that, with all of the preaching coming from one side of the poltical fence - which is what our friend seems to want to see Burning Man become this year. Doesn't that begin to sound a little cultish? Should we really get that upset with the LLC for not nudging Burning Man further in that direction?





He then tries to backpedal, as if to shield the idea he has just advanced from criticism by later pretending that he had never raised it.

"When I look at the graphic of the Burning Man's head together with the swish of the American flag, I cannot help but feel ill.



I love America. I am an American."

So much so that he feels ill at the sight of its flag.

"But the theme of this year's event needs to change.



If you want, have a camp dedicated to the theme. I think it could be constructive."

Though having an installation dedicated to it would apparently be intolerable.

"But you have no right to put this unwelcome umbrella over the whole event. It is oppressive. It is counter to the spirit of Burning Man. It is not constructive, it is divisive. It is ugly.



If Burning Man's organizers want to hold true to the ideals of America, it will be democratic about this. If (as seems to be the case from reading eplaya) a majority of concerned burners don't want this theme, then it should be changed. If the organizers are dismissive of the popular will, then they are being autocratic, and the American Dream theme they are forcing on us will become most ironic."

Except that what he's describing isn't democracy, it's socialism of a sort extreme enough, that I suspect that most socialists would back away from it. Note that the organizers don't force anybody to adopt the theme for their own work, they merely offer a suggestion, which participants are free to embrace or ignore. Some of these suggestions may be brilliant, or stupid, or somewhere in between, but they're just that - suggestions - and if those suggestions have to be withdrawn in response to a majority vote, then the members of the LLC itself will have been denied their freedom of speech, and the free use of their own property (namely, their website, where the theme is announced).

"I used to read how Mr. Larry would evade questions about who the Man is or what, specifically the event was about. Yes, there was a lot of talk about community, but there also seemed to be a general open-mindedness that didn't want to force Burning Man to be one thing. Why are you going back on this now?"

Which they did, of course, by not making Burning Man 2008 into an exclusively radically liberal political rally? Let's take a look at this passage from the theme announcement:

"Today, Americans appear to live amid the tarnished squalor of a second Gilded Age. By nearly every measure, America has become a more unequal society. A mere one percent of the population now controls a third of the nation's wealth. Education, health care and home ownership – these now escape the reach of those who thought they were the middle class. Forty years of heedless mass-consumption have turned dreams into delusions. America's awash in debt. Embroiled in a wayward war, its citizens are told to shop.



Many feel that the United States is now adrift. Its allies, once so numerous, begin to fall away and chart an independent course. Its citizens, more tellingly, have lost their faith in progress. Polls indicate they now believe their children can't expect a better future. They distrust the institutions of government, of finance, and the corrupting power of large corporations. And yet, the native traits of any culture are deep-rooted. Freedom, opportunity, inventiveness, the power to transform oneself: these values and a love of self-expression still endure.



Perhaps it's time Americans began to face themselves. Maybe it's also time that they began to listen to other countries of the world."

Not exactly the Republican party platform, now is it? What we're left with is the LLC saying, "let's talk instead of screaming" and somebody, hiding behind the mask of anonymity, complaining that this call for more openness in the dialogue is "divisive" - and night is day, and water is dry, and 2 and 2 make 7. One should at least have a little difficulty believing what one is reading.

"Please change the theme."

I'll admit that I've had some reservations about the theme as well, which I wrote about elsewhere, back in January, with some limits on my passion set by the fact that I won't be attending Burning Man this year, but soon saw possibilities in it that I had overlooked the night before, as did Stagger, over on ePlaya on Sunday November 18, 2007 at 1:36 am

"Yes, American Institutions have done horrible things....



... so turn that into art...



Day 1: Dress up as Native Americans... walk out onto the playa.. have white men slaughter you... then wrap a rope around the dead and call it a reservation. Open a casino.



Day 2: Dress up as slaves. walk out on the playa.. have white men whip you. Try to convince people that this is not a BDSM camp. Play jazz music.



Day 3: Dress up as Japanes American citizens. .. walk out on the playa. Have white men round you up and put you in a concentration camp. Explain to Thunderdoom that you confiscated their doom to house enemies of the state.



Day 4: Dress up as Hippies. walk out on the playa.. have white men shoot at you. Let 4 of you lay there and put a sign that says Kent State. See if anyone knows what the hell Kent State is...



Day 5: Dress up as soldiers.. walk out on the playa.. Attack and take the man... then retreat... then attack and take the man again... then retreat... attack and take the man again... then retreat... each time leave more bodies behind. Call it Vietnam. Don't bother with the defoliant.. you won't need it there.



Day 6: Dress up as Congress man... walk out on the Playa.. Tell everyone you meet that you are covered for life for medical expenses. Tell them they are f***ed.



Day 7: Dress up as Burners... walk out on the Playa... Enjoy the freaking burn... Pick up some moop. Smile at a stranger. Go home.



Sounds like fun to me.."

Me too. Sort of funny, even if it does play up the caucasian bashing a little more than I'd like - and Stagger makes a good point. There are over 200 years of history, very rich for satire, for the participants to play around with, if we don't get lost in our tunnel vision. I had become too focused on the visual aspects of a very narrowly defined subculture in America - the so-called mainstream - leaving me wondering out loud just how much artistic play one could get out of Formica and Plywood and that whole 1950s suburban look (gag, vomit, puke) - as if no other subculture had ever existed in the United States. Sometimes one does wonder if others know and accept that others have and have a right to do so - America is also the Cajuns and Creoles, the Ojibwa and the Hopi, the Gullah Islanders and so many others, and for once, Bmorg seems to know and respect this fact.

"Anyone embarking on this path will encounter hundreds of fellow participants – many of whom come to Black Rock City from around the world. Indeed, in order to discover the flag of any particular county amid this welter of imagery, it will be necessary to inspect the flags of many other nations. Each of these may be imagined as a dream no less radiant or precious than the rest. Each country is a source of culture and identity; yet each may also be regarded as a glimmering illusion: a sovereign artifact, an arbitrary puzzle piece, an isolated fragment on a map."

Which really gives the lie to TheGreenMan's implication that the 2008 theme is about flag waving jingoist right wing extremism, which historically preaches contempt for other cultures. It comes across as an invitation to learn more about those cultures, and to approach them with respect and open mindedness, which would be a nice change of pace, judging from a few of the discussions I've been lurking in over the last few years. Most shockingly, it invites us to consider the possibility that America is not supposed to be an exclusively Anglo-Saxon affair, with the rest of us invited to fake it as well as we can in the name of the assimilationist "melting pot", but maybe someplace a little more meaningfully diverse.



Not inclusive enough? They've never been more inclusive than they were in that statement and, I might add, a lot more inclusive than was at least one of their critics. It's an interesting theme, more so than I initially gave it credit for being, and a topic that I think I'll return to, in a bit for a few reasons, not the least of which is that our good friend TheGreenMan slipped an assumption into the discussion which really should not be left unchallenged.

If you entered my sites and groups from a webring via En Transit, its homepage at Fizwig.com or the associated Tribe.net profile, you should see a navbar for your ring below. If you don’t, that’s probably because either Webring.com has merged some more rings or because you entered my sites somewhere else; in either case, just go to the ring return page for this site and you should find that your problems are over. At least, the Webring.com related ones.

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