COLUMN: The Norm is the Malady
More than 2 billion people worldwide didn’t go to Burning Man this year, making it a smashing failure. Millions went to great lengths to avoid reading about it or seeing it on television as well. I and the 30,000 others who did attend, represent an insignificant subset of the world population. Should you even care? Yes and no. Naked people, yes; drugs, yes; high cost, yes: you bring everything, yes: advertising, no: sponsorship, no; politics, no; water, no; and vegetation no.
Less freakish than the California gubernatorial election and less dangerous than West Nile Virus, it is still John Ashcroft’s nightmare. Burning Man continues to defy definition that the organizers can’t even decide if it should be called an “event” or a “festival.” Though it is getting to be a little expensive, it is still cheaper than three therapy sessions and the ensuing prescriptions which should prompt the question – isn’t the price of being normal getting a bit excessive when normal is having a Home Depot and a Lowes two blocks from each other and having an elections system where getting them most votes only gets you runner up?
Burning Man is a normal city about the size of Logan that is built and destroyed within the span of about two weeks. Embrace the impermanence of art. It is the dustiest dance club you have ever been to, the hottest, driest parade ever, an art museum without windows, walls or velvet ropes.
Somehow, we still associate any sort of counter culture with the hippies, drugs, sex and nudity while fundamentalism, repression, banal advertising and SUVs that double as military vehicles are normal? Burning Man is a result of forced normality more than of moral decay. It is the definition of “you had to be there.” It is that sneaking feeling that you have that somewhere, somehow other people are having more fun than you. Not anything goes so much as everything goes. It is not a place where you can do whatever you want but where you can do just about anything without worrying about what the neighbors will think because the neighbors are freakier than you by a long shot.
It is all about the heretic aesthetic. It is the part of us that needs to decorate. Even the tribes that had no need for clothes had to do something to separate and express themselves whether that was putting plates in their lips, bones in their noses or cutting their hair into a mullet. Of course, free expression is never really free, but Burning Man is still one of the best attempts to give adults a playground. Adults need to play and this is one of the best places to do that without fear of someone telling you that you are not normal.
Sometimes you really do need to run off and join the circus; sometimes you need the anonymity. There are a lot of people in huge RVs with too much disposable income mixing well with dread-locked white kids who think owning a drum makes them a musician. You decide who’s normal.
Dennis Hinkamp’s column runs every Friday. Comments can be sent to dennish@ext.usu.edu