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If any readers are having those September, back-to-work blues perhaps I might offer them a sure-fire palliative? Just go online and watch videos of this year’s Burning Man.
For anyone who doesn’t know, Burning Man is a week-long festival of music and “self-expression” which takes place in the Nevada desert. It is especially popular among libertarians and Silicon Valley types. It is a place where people pay huge sums of money to take drugs and imagine that they have had some unique insight into the world. Often they come away believing that if only all of life could be like this, the world would be cleaner and kindlier. Naturally each year they leave behind a toxic wasteland which requires hundreds of workers to tidy up after them. But I digress.
Some of those at the Burning Man festival called on the government to declare a state of emergency
Last week there was particularly extreme flooding at the festival site. Two months’ worth of rain fell in just twenty-four hours. All of which reduced the desert Nirvana to something more closely resembling Verdun. No sooner had festival-goers started to arrive than the deluge came. Attendees were ordered to “shelter in place” and “preserve resources.” With tens of thousands more people still due to arrive, the camp’s gates were locked.
Even in a good year Burning Man has its difficulties. Thanks to the fact that the nearest city is almost 100 miles away and that temperatures frequently reach more than 100°F, the festival suggests what attendees should bring. The list includes lip balm, toilet paper, fire extinguishers and a “poop bucket” in case rain makes the portapotties overflow. Indeed, the website proposes a five-gallon bucket with lid and liners for such an eventuality.
And here we might break off for a moment. Because I would regard this advice alone to be some kind of warning sign.
I like to think that I am a pleasant enough house-guest. Often when going to stay with friends I ask if there is anything I can bring that my hosts don’t have in their neck of the woods. When visiting friends in Scotland, for example, I might offer to take with me some fresh fruits or vegetables. When visiting friends in Norfolk, it might be someone not related to them. But if ever my hosts suggested I should bring my own poop bucket, I would find a way to escape the event: call in sick, cite a spot of “the old trouble” or remind them that getting out of London is always so difficult.
Because whatever your idea of fun might be, it cannot possibly include a scenario in which you carry a bucket of your own stools. Even the most ardent readers’ letters will not persuade me otherwise. On this matter I am strict.
Yet the people at Burning Man clearly adhere to a different standard. The talented comedian Chris Rock was one of the early attendees this year and pointed out that from the very start there was no one who could either clean or empty the portable toilets. One TikTokker showed himself trudging ankle-deep through the mud to a portapotty only to find more mud inside it than outside. As the gates were closed it soon became impossible to get generators or supplies to the festival-goers. Rock reportedly plodded through more than five miles of mud until he managed to wave down a car that rescued him. Not everyone was so lucky.
There is probably a German word for it. Scatenfreude, perhaps. But as viewers of the documentary Fyre will know, there really are few pastimes so satisfying as contemplating an event which we were not invited to and which costs lots of money to attend, only for it to turn into an eye-watering disaster.
The 2017 Fyre Festival was meant to be the greatest, most luxurious and exclusive party of the century. It turned out to be a fraudulent and incompetent catastrophe, with attendees put up in refugee tents as they realized they had been had and planned their escape routes.
Of course it is even better if there is video of such an event — and there are plenty of videos of this year’s Burning Man. While the CEO said that there was no need to panic, others called on the government to declare a state of emergency. With 70,000 people still stuck at the site the Federal Emergency Management Agency rejected reports that it had been deployed to the festival. Online rumors circulated that there had been outbreaks of both Ebola and cannibalism.
Both were strongly denied. The organizers pointed out that there hadn’t been an outbreak of Ebola in the US since 2014. Even so, these are not the sort of denials that a festival PR department enjoys having to put out. Any more than it is pleasant to have to deny the breakdown of all norms right up to the point of cannibalism. At the time of writing a plan known as “Exodus” has been put in place to depopulate the area.
Gloating and envy are ugly, ignoble instincts which should probably be resisted. Nonetheless, they might be justified by reiterating that Burning Man is always full of people who seem to think they have found some great new awareness of the human condition and who labor under the delusion that the festival is an inspiring example of what the whole world could be like.
While sitting behind deeply protected, carefully patrolled borders they dream of a borderless world. For a few days they imagine living in a beautifully curated agrarian idyll and dream of extending the limits of consciousness and understanding. Only for the mudslide of reality to make its inexorable entrance.
This article was originally published in The Spectator‘s UK magazine. Subscribe to the World edition here.
