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Not so very long, I wrote these words. "Welcome to the factory. Please dust off your shoes and open your mind, and we'll get down to business. Burning Man? Isn't it a little ... you know ... 20th century? As if we were so deeply into the 21st. But some still ask, so why not answer?" Looking back, I feel a little foolish for having written them. I spoke as if I could be an an "us" in a Burning Man context, when subsequent events have shown that can only be a "them". Consider these hate-filled delights to be found on the Burning Man forum, one which began when somebody tried to start a Jewish cultural themed camp, and another that started in when somebody did nothing more than try to create a place for Muslims to gather on the Playa. Surely a "radically inclusive" event like Burning Man would have no problem with either? In fact, both were greeted with pure, raw hatred from those who clutched at straws to defend their own bigotry. How can this make one feel the need to attack? "Last year was my first Burn and I saw a bunch of Jewish, Christian, and Pagan events on the schedule. and some of the response was, at first, encouraging "I'd love to hear the call to prayer floating out across the playa at least once. (what is that called specifically in Arabic? I can't recall). I've lived in Shiraz and Taif and it was a consistent part of the aural landscape I loved even though I'm nowhere near being a Muslim myself." - AntiM but that's certainly not where the discussion ended up "We're trying to pick and choose, to hold hands with muslims who are our friends, while constantly looking over our shoulders for those who aren't. I'm sure the bullet ridden corpses of the men, women and children that would have been murdered in this holocaust that "Lurker" advocates would be deeply touched by the crocodile tears shed on their behalf. 100,000,000 Al Quaeda supporters is what this remarkable person claimed to have seen on the news footage, as if one could even squeeze a mere hundred into a shot and still be able to make out what anybody was doing. I'm reminded of a moment when, as a great many of us protested the first Gulf War, we encountered a group of nine - count them, nine - prowar people. Our own numbers were large enough that a thick line stretched from Lake down to Balbo. Comparing the spectacle with what one could see during public festivals held in Grant Park, one could quickly find a reliable lower estimate on the number of marchers. It couldn't have been less than 100,000, so many as to shut down traffic in the Loop for about fifteen minutes. One had, on the antiwar side, a crowd half the size of Oakland. On the prowar side, one had a group small enough that were they Jewish, they couldn't have formed a minyan. What do you suppose the generally prowar local media did? They waited until 3 am to shoot the last stragglers from the march, shooting them across the darkened Federal Plaza. The pro-war crowd it shot at 9 am, bringing the camera up close to them and shooting them from below, creating the illusion of a crowd surging over the camerman, when, in fact, every single prowar person was in the same frame, the edges of that frame chosen so as to cut through the largeish frat boys standing on either side of the small group. The pictures were then shown together on the news without comment about when they were shot, leaving the impression that they were shot simultaneously. Subtle dishonesty being inadequate in the eyes of some on the editorial staff, the report then simply lied outright, and said that the two crowds were of comparable size. Being selective about what one shows can be a very effective way to give people the illusions they need to rationalize what they've already chosen to believe, because as dishonest as one can witness the media being when one sees them working firsthand, some people are more than willing participant in their own deception. They are willing to see what they don't see, extrapolating from a hint to a conclusion and then treating the conclusion as an observation, when it suits them. As a viewer, one can't see the emptiness laying just off the edge of that screen, but one can see that one has only seen nine people. The fact that one has lied to oneself about what one has seen does not lift one to a higher moral plane than that occupied by the reporter who provided one with the desired illusion, the one that suited one's prejudices. The prejudices we encountered that winter were those of simple pride and greed. The war could reasonably be seen as a self-esteem building exercise for a nation that got to swagger, while somebody else got to bleed, and the swaggering kept oil cheaper, keeping a few exaggerated economic expectations satisfied. That was bad, but what we see in moments like the ones Lurker offered us is worse. What the media does not show us, according to some reports, is the sight of muslim clerics going out and trying to calm the crowds of unruly twentysomethings during the cartoon riots. "They all hate us and are waiting to kill us in our beds" sells papers. "The Islamic world has loudmouthed, dimwitted young men in large enough numbers to hold demonstrations that leave their elders shaking their heads in saddened disbelief" does not. It isn't as dramatic and drama sells. The media's motivation for emphasizing less than the whole truth becomes clear, but once again, they couldn't mislead without the complicity of the mislead. How can one possibly believe that one has viewed and taken in the actions of even a million people, much less a hundred million? We've all been to baseball games in stadiums that hold barely a twentieth of that number. With maybe a third of that smaller crowd in our field of vision at any time, we've all seen what dots our fellow spectators become. From experience, we all know that one can't even bring 20,000 people into any kind of focus, such a crowd fading into an indistinct blur for even the most cleareyed, so if one mistakenly believes that one has seen millions of people on the screen, one's mistake is not an innocent one. It is prejudice in action. Think about what the people of the Islamic World must achieve, in order to avoid being the targets of genocide on Lurker's terms. It is not enough that the vast majority of them live in peace with hatred toward none, as the vast majority of the well over half a billion muslims do, quite gladly. Out of that vast number, they must make certain that no crowd of even a few hundred ranting lunatics can be found. This is an impossible standard that nobody could meet and nobody does - fanatics are to be found everywhere. To condition an offer of peace on the achievement of the impossible is to demand a slaughter, and this is exactly what Lurker can be found doing. Notice that on a board where a reasoned rebuttal of the misguided common knowledge about STD transmission (wearing a condom supposedly eliminating the possibility of contracting AIDS) brought threats of censorship, showing that ePlaya is certainly no radical free speech forum, the moderator's stance toward rhetoric worthy of a nazi was one of live and let live. Do I condemn that community because one lunatic like Lurker could be found? No, to do that would be to apply Lurker's unreasonable standards, albeit without Lurker's bloodthirst. I condemn the community because for all of the hate and bile one can see it spew out over mere freethinking, barely anybody in the community had any difficulty with what Lurker was posting. What criticism could be found of it was mostly of the toothless "can't we all get along" variety, and while Lurker might have been alone in his call for slaughter, he certainly wasn't alone in his call for anti-Muslim paranoia and the marginalization of Muslim burners. Judaism fares only slightly better in this crowd, and one should point out that Israel is a US ally. As Turkey has been for longer than even many of the middleaged have been alive, as Morocco has been for centuries, as are ... but why confuse the hateful with facts, when delusion does so much to bring them together? The intolerance that the Jewish burners would be greeted with was expressed early on by dvdburner, who could be found writing Either way, it's gonna be trouble. why cant everyone leave the ethnicities behind and just be burners. This I can see will get nastier than the "why is burningman so white" thread. "Tolerance" a la Lou Dobbs - "we'll accept you as long as you agree to be just like us, or at least fake it well enough that we can't notice the difference". Some were looking for a fight and they didn't need much of a pretext. A semantic dispute the camp founder raised with the practice of referring to West Bank and Gazan Arabs as Palestinians was responded to with a twisting of a calm and friendly poster's words into a denial of the right of said people to exist, in the same place where the above mentioned call for a genoicide that would take out the Gazans and West Bank Arabs would later be accepted. No love or concern for Muslims there, except when it proves to be a tidy excuse for raining hatred down upon a Jew. The quote that the massed attack came in response to? Read for yourself. "There is no such thing as palestinians today. There are Israelis, there are Jordanians, and there are arabs. In other words, there is the whole trust terriory that had a Jewish and an Ara population and was partitioned to create a Jewish state (Israel) and an Arab state (Jordan), and there is a latter day political movement among Arabs who ended up on the Jewish side of the line who desire self-governance and wish to create a state of their own. The proposed new state and the old trust territory may end up carrying the same name, but they are not one and the same - in the sense of the latter, the Israelis are Palestinians, so to use the same name for both is to create confusion. To raise this issue is not to preach hatred, but one would never guess this from the pages of venom and Israel bashing that gratuitously follow. no need to be insulting madmatt......the simple fact is Israel under it's war criminal Prime Minister has been responsible for tremendous Palestinian suffering and death .......In previous posts I asked the question why not call the camp by some other non-politically charged name......You have to be living in a state of denial to not expect that any time Israel is mentioned, Palestine is mentioned and vice versa. The response of the organizer to deny the name "Palestine" speaks volumes about her understanding, degree of compassion and tollerance. Once again, I refer both Jews and anyone else to ..." - cowboyangel What began this? Take a look at how little was needed Jewish? Israeli? Come join our Camp! "Spaghetti and Falafel in the same week AND they'd discuss Kabbalah? The horror! They must be stopped!" - and they largely were. EPlaya trollfests can be amazingly effective at scaring away prospective camp members, possibly because of the association of the place with the Black Rock LLC and definitely because of the way in which rumors which begin there begin the pursue the one rumored about more quickly than one can say "cyberstalking". Prospective members just don't want to deal with it. There is, indeed a hate filled cultural presence in the world today, one which would leave no room for individual thought and has no room for tolerance of differing ways of life, but it isn't Islam. Nor is it Judaism. It is the postmodern corporate American cultural mainstream, and at moments like these, one sees it for what it is. Burning Man, for all of its counterultural posturing, is just more of the same, distilled into a noxious brew. I probably don't have to tell you which genetic pools my DNA draws from, but suffice it to say that were those I witnessed anything other slacker castoffs of a society that can do better than them, I'd be really worried. I would be worried to see such pure bile behind the public consciousness. As it is, I look first at how truly braindead most of the burners I've run into seem to be, and conclude that they have little to offer me. I take a look at how they would treat my father's people and my mother's people both, had they any real influence, and conclude that I have no reason to want to offer them anything, and that is why the galleries are gone. The art I do, however amateurish it may be, is a part of me, and in every way, I want to distance myself from these people and their event. However powerless and pathetic these people may be, they would look for feeble excuses to marginalize me and my family because of one side of our heritage, and respect those who would call for our slaughter outright because of the other. To help to promote an event that has come to be about this would be stupid, and I don't believe in being stupid. I will still do the things that I enjoy doing, but I will not do them as "Curmudgeon" nor shall I do them on a page whose very url speaks to support for an event and a subculture that don't stand for what I naively thought they did. It has been my good fortune in life to see real friendship, real community and real culture, and they are always waiting for me in places I know well. The new Burning Man offers none of the three, nor anything of value in their place, so I will knock the dust off my sandals, gather my belongings and say goodbye to false friends. |
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If you'd like, you may now go to the homepage for the Stop! at Burning Man list, unless you'd rather return to your ring. Curmudgeon's Pictureshop is the home of the Burning Man Ring at Ringsurf. |
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