Jay Michaelson: The Truth About Burning Man
Texa...@aol.com
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jay-michaelson/the-truth-about-burning-m_b_279464.html
September 11, 2009
Posted: September 8, 2009 12:26 PM
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The Truth About Burning Man
Read More: Adam Lambert, Adam Lambert American Idol, Baudrillard, Black Rock City, Burning Man, Burning Man Festival, Drugs,
Jay Michaelson, Religion, Spirituality, Living News
"Really?" the guy at the Alamo Rental Car place said, when I'd told him about Burning Man. "I heard it was just a lot of
naked people running around on drugs."
Coated in gypsum dust, and still high not on drugs but on the altered consciousness of radical creativity and community, I
had just tried to describe what Burning Man is, somehow. I think I'd said something like, "It's a temporary city of 50,000
people, devoted to radical self-expression. So you'll find anything you'd find in a regular city -- art museums, dance clubs,
yoga studios -- only in the middle of the desert, with no money, and with more creativity than you've ever seen."
Of the two descriptions, surely Rental Car Guy's is the more familiar. When Adam Lambert revealed that he'd gotten the idea
to go on American Idol while on mushrooms at Burning Man, America groaned. The image, I assume, was of a drugged-out weirdo
coming up with a loopy idea in the middle of wild, crazy party.
The truth, though, is that Burning Man is an ideal place for self-reflection and self-transformation, whether substance-aided
or not, and as someone who's just gotten back from his 8th Burn, Lambert's revelation didn't surprise me a bit. Friends of
mine have changed their names, their professions, and their entire lives at Burning Man. And not because they were stoned or
tripping, but because Black Rock City -- the temporary city (built and erased within a month) where the event goes on every
year, the week before Labor Day -- has a tendency to expand horizons, reveal possibilities, and question the assumptions most
of us make about how we're supposed to live our lives.
Burning Man does this, I think, because of a combination of factors. One of them is the sheer size and scope of the thing.
50,000 people. Hundreds of cars and trucks modified to look like dragons, whales, radios, and steamboats; many breathing
fire; most with dozens of revelers dancing on them. It's like "Mad Max" meets "Blade Runner" meets "The Ten Commandments,"
and it's real, it's actually happening.
And it's happening without capitalism. There's no vending at Burning Man -- it's a gift economy. Entire "theme camps" exist
just to give away spaghetti, to serve people free margaritas, to make pancakes. Yes, it does cost a lot to get in (between
$150-350), but that mostly pays for the rental of the land from the government, the porta-potties and other infrastructure,
and grants made to large-scale art projects. No one -- not the celebrity DJs who were there this year, like Armin van Buuren
and Carl Cox, and not the people who build the solar electrical grid -- gets paid. No one is making a buck.
This is incredibly liberating. It's not sustainable, but it is a temporary autonomous zone of bullshit-free living. And just
being there, just participating in the creation of an entire city devoted to what we want to do, rather than what we have to
do to make money, has the tendency to invite self-reflection like Lampert's. Who am I? What do I really want to be doing? If
people can create a twelve-ton sculpture of a bird's nest made entirely out of plumbing pipe, what are the limits on my own
creativity? "Once you are free," said Baudrillard, "you are forced to ask who you are."
The freedom is more than just freedom from conventional economic life, though. Yes, there are some naked people running
around on drugs, because the culture of Black Rock City is a very, very liberal one. (It's not free of law enforcement --
this year in particular, I heard many stories of people being busted for drugs, and for giving alcohol to minor-aged-looking
undercover cops.) Of course, how people choose to exercise that freedom is up to them. For every NPRAOD, I'd guess there are
two people wishing they had the courage to do so, one person playing the violin on a sofabed in the middle of a desert, two
people cooking pumpkin ravioli, and another person writing the name of her beloved on the wooden walls of the Temple -- this
year a three-story, Lotus-shaped construction just north of the center of the city, that was burned last Sunday night.
Of course, we don't hear about these other people, which, to me, says more about the puerility of the default world than the
sexuality of Black Rock City. It's as if radical self expression is boring, but if it means naked people on drugs, then it's
titillating, easy to condemn -- and also comprehensible. Oh, I get it.
You don't get it. You don't get what it's like to have 50,000 people circle around a wooden effigy, with 1000 people spinning
fire and 500 more playing drums, all encircled by 200 art cars -- and then all roaring in unison as the effigy is set afire.
You might think you get it, and it may scare or tempt or delight you, but I assure you, you don't get it. None of us do,
because it's not about any one thing in particular; "it" can be an orgiastic celebration, or the sad mourning of a lost loved
one. Or a warm, hippie-like community. Or a mean, Mad-Max-like apocalypse. "It" is chiefly a space in which all these things
are possible.
The temporary erasure of societal, social, and personal boundaries is, for most of us, terrifying. Such boundaries help build
the structures of society and self; they give form to human life, which is often chaotic and unpredictable. Thus they have
been the bedrock of religious and civil life for millennia, even before the Furies were imprisoned under Athens, and Moses
descended from Sinai.
But if religion creates boundaries, mysticism and spirituality efface them. In the transcendence of ordinary distinctions,
peak experiences such as those encouraged at Burning Man give a glimpse of the ultimate, the infinite. It may seem absurd to
suggest that Burning Man is a mystical event. But then, if it's just a big party, why is there a temple in the middle of it?
ArchDeaconMalli
> http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jay-michaelson/the-truth-about-burning-...
This is such fucking BULLSHIT.
'burning man" is a bunch of washed-up, white, trailer-trash satanists
from the Bay Area, making an OBVIOUS recreation of European, pre-
Christian human sacrifice rituals. Here is a wiki page describing the
human sacrifice ritual that a bunch of old-fart OTO Bay Area white
TRASH is imitating:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wicker_Man
please, get your fucking satanism and other sick disgusting OTO
rituals off my land. You are bringing misfortune and evil to my land,
and I want this stupid bay area white satanist trash in a cage where
they belong.
"burning man" is also crawling with old, white Freemason satanist DEA
agents, because they are able to sell a lot of government-funded drugs
there, like the neurotoxin "ecstasy", popularized by old, braindamaged
"pagan" and Bohemian Grove member Alexander T. 'sasha' Shulgin.
Shulgin worked for many years as a chemical weapons engineer for
lovely folks like DOW CHEMICAL and the US Defense Department. These
people have nothing to do with "peace and love" - they are sick,
vicious satanist scum, who revel in the fact that they are able to
profit from causing SEVERE AND IRREVERSIBLE BRAIN DAMAGE in other
people.
These people are all government-funded satanist freemason trash, and
it is time for them all to be buried.
CAUTION: If you go to burning man to sell drugs, watch out. Unless you
are in with the scumbag satanists at Pacifica Radio and other
government-funded operations, you will be arrested, because Pacifica
Radio and all the washed-up old satanist assholes associate with it
work for the government, and THEY HATE COMPETITION. The place is
crawling with asshole spooks, and burning man is their little gaming
preserve to poison people and make money off it.
Go to hell, and get off my land.
ArchDeaconMalli
BTW, the stupid trailer trash scumbags in the OTO ingest semen and
menstrual fluid in their sick psychotic rituals. Many of them are
associated with the Temple of Set, run by child molestor and murderer
Lt. Col. Michael Aquino. I recommend googling his name to find out
more about the mileu of SICK OLD FAT WHITE SATANIST TRASH that sponsor
and run "burning man'.
ArchDeaconMalli
I also recommend that you read this:
http://www.modernhistoryproject.org/mhp/ArticleDisplay.php?Article=AquarianConspiracy
...to find out more about the satanist history of the SCUMBAGS behind
the fake, government-sponsored "60s counterculture". It is the same
group (only now about 40 years older) who are putting on "burning man"
and other thinly-disguised re-creations of stupid satanist rituals
that their dirty freemason parents and grandparents are into. All
these people are fucking trash, and it is time to purify the land of
North America from these sick, vicious SCUM.