Petition to Change the 2008 Theme
Posted: Wed Sep 26, 2007 3:09 pm
I wrote the following and just uploaded it as a petition at [url]http://www.thepetitionsite.com/1/change ... ican-dream [/url]. I'm hoping that if a huge number of participants sign it, with their Playa name or otherwise, the Burning Man organizers will change the 2008 theme. Please circulate the URL!
A Petition to Change the 2008 Theme, and Honor the American Dream
Themes for Burning Man set a tone and ignite the imaginations of some of the most wonderful artists and participants found anywhere in the world. We come to the Playa to celebrate, embracing the theme to create melodies (or at least syncopated anarchy) -- a coordinated dance unreasonably shared by compassionate hooligans hell-bent on radical self-expression. A great theme inspires.
We still enjoy the remnants of 2002, the Floating World. The fish in El-Wire, the Ark of the Nereids, sea creatures breaching the dust, seahorses as mobile lanterns at night. We still grieve the passing of La Contessa, and treasure the first day we saw her bow cut a course through the deep Playa. Great themes raise our expectations, jar our skeptism, and fabricate ideas from dust.
The idea of the American Dream was forged as the United States became an industrial power in the 1920s and 1930s, finally at par with England and Germany, great powers then impoverished by the Great War. In the 1930s the American Dream took shape as the self evident truths of long-dead founders began to flourish. Our democratic melting pot of cultures created a stronger nation that overseas aristocracies and oligarchies. We decided to protect the least strong among us against laissez faire capitalism, and suddenly both the arts and our businesses flourished. Our grandparents dreamt the American Dream, hoping that the morning would find the vestiges of the Great Depression gone. But today we wake up to find the American Dream co-opted by corporate marketing and feverish consumerism, instigating a well-deserved back-lash from our former allies, now tired of relentless cultural imperialism, and of our nation creating disproportionate waste in the process.
For many, Burning Man embodies a place where we can be free of today’s bad acid-trip version of the American Dream. We arrive, and passing the gated threshold, can leave behind our money, our materialism, our seclusion and disconnection from neighbors, our apathy, moralism, sexual confusion and introversion, and the corporate branding of our lives. Our loudest complaints? When entrails of the current American Dream leak onto the Playa: corporations hoping to show their wares, men hoping to film Burner Girls Gone Wild, attendees trying to keep up with the Jones’ RV. We rejoice that we can leave nationalism behind for a week. Burner dreams are not divided by borders.
Reclaiming the American Dream should be imperative to all of us who live in America. But that will take a while. And until them, this theme will generate mostly a dense, dark, negative response. It already has. As a great theme can get our voyagers to raise sails and set a barring for the next burn, this year’s theme will quash good intentions, hopes, and enthusiasm that we might have salvaged after trying to figure out how to make “greenâ€
A Petition to Change the 2008 Theme, and Honor the American Dream
Themes for Burning Man set a tone and ignite the imaginations of some of the most wonderful artists and participants found anywhere in the world. We come to the Playa to celebrate, embracing the theme to create melodies (or at least syncopated anarchy) -- a coordinated dance unreasonably shared by compassionate hooligans hell-bent on radical self-expression. A great theme inspires.
We still enjoy the remnants of 2002, the Floating World. The fish in El-Wire, the Ark of the Nereids, sea creatures breaching the dust, seahorses as mobile lanterns at night. We still grieve the passing of La Contessa, and treasure the first day we saw her bow cut a course through the deep Playa. Great themes raise our expectations, jar our skeptism, and fabricate ideas from dust.
The idea of the American Dream was forged as the United States became an industrial power in the 1920s and 1930s, finally at par with England and Germany, great powers then impoverished by the Great War. In the 1930s the American Dream took shape as the self evident truths of long-dead founders began to flourish. Our democratic melting pot of cultures created a stronger nation that overseas aristocracies and oligarchies. We decided to protect the least strong among us against laissez faire capitalism, and suddenly both the arts and our businesses flourished. Our grandparents dreamt the American Dream, hoping that the morning would find the vestiges of the Great Depression gone. But today we wake up to find the American Dream co-opted by corporate marketing and feverish consumerism, instigating a well-deserved back-lash from our former allies, now tired of relentless cultural imperialism, and of our nation creating disproportionate waste in the process.
For many, Burning Man embodies a place where we can be free of today’s bad acid-trip version of the American Dream. We arrive, and passing the gated threshold, can leave behind our money, our materialism, our seclusion and disconnection from neighbors, our apathy, moralism, sexual confusion and introversion, and the corporate branding of our lives. Our loudest complaints? When entrails of the current American Dream leak onto the Playa: corporations hoping to show their wares, men hoping to film Burner Girls Gone Wild, attendees trying to keep up with the Jones’ RV. We rejoice that we can leave nationalism behind for a week. Burner dreams are not divided by borders.
Reclaiming the American Dream should be imperative to all of us who live in America. But that will take a while. And until them, this theme will generate mostly a dense, dark, negative response. It already has. As a great theme can get our voyagers to raise sails and set a barring for the next burn, this year’s theme will quash good intentions, hopes, and enthusiasm that we might have salvaged after trying to figure out how to make “greenâ€
the only true king is the king of icecream