It’s a curious fork in the road. Regular Americans are becoming increasingly skeptical of authorities making the right decisions when a natural disaster strikes. But when it rained a little at the Burning Man 2023 festival, technocrat elites—perversely—had their faith in competent government response reinforced.
In 2005, as hurricane Katrina was approaching New Orleans, the city’s government didn’t use its fleet of school buses to evacuate the low income residents, sheltering them at the Superdome arena. More than 1800 residents died, most of them in flooding. Lesson learned: be self-sufficient.
One hundred and fifteen people died and 66 are still missing in this year’s Maui fire when the local authorities instructed residents to stay put and blocked off the road. Lesson learned: the government doesn’t always have the correct response. I can add many other disasters, like Uvalde and East Palestine where the government fumbled its response.
What Katrina, Maui, Palestine, Uvalde have in common is not the geographic location or race of the victims but the fact that they were the middle class and the poor.
Contrast it to the Burning Man on which people spend thousands if not tens of thousands of dollars to attend: 16% of the 2022 guests came from the households with income above $300,000. Over 40% were earning between $100,000 and $300,000. One of the Burners reveling in this year’s crowd was the former Solicitor General of the United States Neal Katyal. As a creature of the DC swamp, he’s a bit of a geographic exception among the Burners, most whom are comprised of California tech elites. We are talking about post-Obama era establishment types in their low middle age, some of them quite prominent, traveling to the desert for the rave of their lifetime. If they still call them raves.
Ideologically, Burning Man free spirits are what one expects. The outdoor event, which was cancelled during the COVID closures, now has an internal “anti-racist” task force. This year, they burned a Ukrainian-themed effigy from which swastikas fell and then acrobats cartwheeled onto the stage to juggle the swastikas. Okay, I made up the part about the acrobats. And the swastikas. But that’s the general feel of this self-indulgent spectacle.
Naturally, some plebs and rightwingers had a schadenfreude moment when the West Coast swamp got stuck in the damp dirt. This is the rare monsoon year, so it drizzled some in the Nevada desert. Because even a small bit of rain on the floor of the dried out ancient lake where the event is staged creates sticky mud, the few miles leading to the state-maintained road became impossible to cross in regular road vehicles.
This kind of challenge is what brought Burners to the desert to begin with. The professional class in attendance has no need for organized religion, but still desire ritual in their lives. That’s where Burning Man comes handy—the Neo-pagan ceremony, originally held on a San Francisco beach on the summer solstice, was long ago moved to Labor Day. It roughly coincides with the new financial and school year, perfectly fitting the emotional cum spiritual needs of post-modern urbanites.
As with all rites, it’s held in a liminal space, away from ordinary day-to-day existence. Organizers scouted a space that is not only secluded but that can’t sustain life. Playa, or the soil in the Black Rock City amphitheater is so abiotic, attendees have to wash it off with vinegar, the household liquid often used to kill greenery and small insects.
The layering of ghastly symbolism is a part of the mythos of the drug-fueled week-long apocalypse-themed party. When the pagan ritual of death and rebirth wraps up, high society pilgrims return home and get messianic about art installations they’d seen and the atmosphere—impressed with the way fellow Burners spontaneously took care of each other and their “radical self-reliance.”
By “radical self-reliance” they mean planning food and shelter for ten days in advance and cooking in the communal kitchen. Then they resume their regular activities of writing algorithms and dreaming up fifteen-minute cities.
Of course there is nothing spontaneous or magical about festival attendees getting along. In the liminal space, where traditional hierarchies are collapsed, they live under the auspices of the masters of ceremony.
The business of organizing large outdoor events has come a long way since Woodstock when hippies broke into the fenced off area without bothering to pay, and tens of thousands miraculously avoided electrocution when it rained on improperly grounded equipment.
It takes a year of hard work of the San Francisco non-profit Burning Man Project to put together the “spontaneous” art party—not to mention the involvement of local and state government agencies. Burning Man is a successfully marketed product delivered not by spontaneity, art, and communal spirit, but by the foresight of small business and limited government.
This year, alarmed by the slight rainfall, local authorities announced a shelter in place order and closed the gates and the airport, trapping the 70,000 partiers in the desert. A number of frightened souls walked out on foot, abandoning their campers in the goop. Some others rushed to drive through the wet playa and got stuck. But that was just a few people and they likely came to regret their decision.
There were early reports of theft and “a little bit” of Lords of the Flies behavior. Portapotties were overflowing, and a forty-year-old man died from unrelated causes. All of it suggests that civilization is fragile and things can get out of hand even during a meticulously organized event.
Most of the attendees followed instructions and made sure not to splash in the playa mud. After a few days of media hype and close monitoring by government agencies on all levels, the ground dried off. The namesake ‘man’ was set ablaze as planned, and Burners went home on time.
Lesson learned: when it comes to radical self-reliance, listen to the authorities.
Unlike, for instance, the residents of East Palestine, they never experienced a true environmental emergency that was discounted by the feds. Burners lived through a mild annoyance in a rare weather event and feel they earned bragging rights: for the rest of their lives they will be telling the tales of the wet playa.
I am preemptively defensive about the future whining about the “global heating” that, in the Neo-pagan imagination, brought that calamity on the festival. They will, of course, request that the government “do something” about it.
But most of all, I fear that our technocratic elites, after spending a week playacting anarchy in a setting enabled by the capitalist system, will come out with the idea that the big government knows best. Then they will use their institutional power to enable the government to regulate our lives and to replace the elements of society that work.
[Featured image via YouTube]
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