|
|
|
|
|
This is the week the festival of “radical self-expression” known as Burning Man starts, where a bunch of radical self-expressionists converge in the Nevada desert from all over the country (read: California) to express themselves radically with a bunch of other radical self-expressionists who feel exactly as they do about radical self-expression.
They’re so different from everyone else, it isn’t funny.
Move over, Austin. For one week out of the year, you’re not the weirdest game in town. But, for the love of God, please don’t write a song about it.
I can hear it now: “Here’s a little thing called Nudity And Bongos…”
Any time a group of extremely white persons from privileged backgrounds swarms lemming-like in celebration of their little selves and how special they’ve been told they are all their lives, nakedness and beatnik props abound.
The two things I most eschew. The human body and rhythm.
Words like “radical” and “underground” and “extreme” this and that and “punk” and “counterculture” and “alternative” translate into: “geared to an even more narrow cross-section of extremely white people than mainstream culture is.”
Remember that horrible “Woodstock” festival in the 1940s or 50s that just made your skin crawl watching soulless blank-eyed cookie-cutter likeminded ultra-white “hippies” standing obediently at attention in the mud and pouring rain while Joan Baez scolded them about something? How many black people were there?
Answer: however many black people there were in Sly and the Family Stone, roughly thirty or so.
How many Hispanic people?
One: Carlos Santana.
How many “working class” people whom radical progressive left-leaning artsy types love so much?
However many were on the Porta Potty crew.
It’s ironic that the word “man” is in the name of the radical event because invariably these are people who say “man” way too much.
Who can forget Arlo Guthrie at Woodstock calling the audience “man?”
Arty hepcats can’t help themselves. Remember the white boy who got famously tased a few years ago and said in protest, “Don’t tase me, bro?” Fifty thousand volts can’t jar that cat’s penchant for Negroidal colloquialisms. He was probably a guest speaker at Burning Man that year.
I envision dreadlocked whites in Viking headdresses, frog flippers, and little else holding hands and singing “glibby glop gloopy sabby sibby sooby la la la lo loooo….”
You gotta feel bad for the rattlesnakes and scorpions in that desert.
At the end of the week it’s just another insipid manifestation of KEEP AUSTIN WEIRD and OCCUPY BLAH BLAH joiner and follower in-crowd mentality.
Rugged individualists don’t need to tell you about it. Or buy as much as $420 tickets to organized events validating their oh-so-”radical” selves.
I’ll bet there are fewer rules, regulations, stipulations, restrictions, conditions and complicated variables for getting tickets to the Republican Convention.
And it’s held indoors. Shut up. And put some clothes on, man.
—SHIFT
That was an entertaining little diatribe. Favorite.
Ur racist….negroid…
He mad cause he can’t afford it. Haha.
Plus all that sand in your eyes from the wind.
You nailed it.
There’s few things that annoy me more than beta-male outsiders lamenting the conformity of mainstream culture and then all getting the same joiner/follower “alternative” haircut. Its as though the further people try to push themselves away from the mean, the more narrow their accepted in-group norms become, all in the name of individualism. And its these sheep who kill the legitimate alternative movements in the public eye, because they’re even more worthless than the regular sheep at the mall. People have only started to hate ‘hipsters’ because they’ve now been stuck with most of the losers, and that has usurped the words connotation. Then they have the nerve to cop an attitude about the whole thing. Get real.
& unroll the bottom of your fucking chinos.
What is this, an anti-cis tumblr page all of a sudden? What’s wrong with white people having things they enjoy? What’s wrong with rich white people having things they enjoy? What’s wrong with rich white people enjoying a dumb festival that infringes on your rights in exactly no way at all?
This site is all for lefty-bashing until it comes time to recognize that individual liberty and the rule of the free market allows people to wear birkenstocks and go to hippie festivals whenever they want to.
No one is saying that they should be barred from participating in the festival. They can do shrooms and bang on bongos until the cows come home.
But this is an opinion blog where people freely give their two cents, and freedom of speech [a cornerstone of 'individual liberty'] enables people like to me express that personally I’d rather place my nuts in a vice than join them. The reason being that its unbelievably hypocritical to celebrate self-expression by latently seeking approval in a sub-group circle jerk.
I was more commenting on the reasoning behind the article. I personally find burning man just as ridiculous and worthy of ridicule.
It’s more the idea that somehow the attendees being wealthy and white in and of itself invalidates the experience. As if their whiteness and not their general poor aesthetic sense is the real problem here. If the article was only making fun of how lame they are, it would be one thing, but to try and contextualize your dreadlock jokes as political is just disingenuous. Especially when the foundation of your politics is ostensibly the free-market idea that everyone pursues their own personal ends and the sum total makes everyone better off.
Obviously I support the right to put whatever you want on a blog.